Talking Point: Do You Feel Like You're Still Waiting For 'Next-Gen' To Arrive?

It's getting close to three years since Xbox Series X|S first landed back in 2020, and we've been pretty happy with how the consoles have performed so far. Seeing so many games support 60 & 120FPS has been fantastic, and generally speaking, the whole experience of using an Xbox is a lot snappier and smoother than it was during the Xbox One era.

But, do Xbox Series X and S feel 'next-gen' to you yet?

Earlier today, Digital Foundry dropped its Remnant 2 console analysis and it got us thinking about how few current-gen-only games we've actually gotten so far this generation - never mind ones that genuinely feel 'next-gen' in nature. Yes, that should be about to change with the likes of Starfield and Forza Motorsport among other third party releases this year, but so far we're still very much in 'cross-gen' territory it feels like.

Going back to that Remnant 2 analysis; DF talks about the game being an Unreal Engine 5 showcase in some ways, and again, that reminded us how little of the engine we've seen so far. The Matrix Awakens experience is nearly two years old at this point, and aside from a huge overhaul to Fortnite, we really haven't seen UE5 put through its paces on current-gen consoles yet.

Thankfully, that looks like it's close to changing as well. A fair few of Xbox's internal teams are now fully utilising Unreal Engine 5, and the toolset definitely looks like it'll become a dominant game engine in the back half of this generation. We just expected to see more of it in action over the last two or three years.

Oh well, as long as it (and other engines) does showcase the power of Xbox Series X|S in the coming years we'll be good, right? Phil Spencer & co. have hinted that we likely won't be seeing any major Xbox Series upgrades anytime soon, so we should be with Microsoft's two current-gen consoles for a good while longer. Hopefully, they can show what they're really made of in the next few years.

Do you feel like you're still 'waiting' for next-gen to properly arrive? Or do you feel like games are already taking advantage of the new Xbox consoles well enough?

Let us know what you think of the current generation so far down in the comments section below.