It might not seem like it, but it's already been two full weeks since the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S officially launched back on November 10th, and hopefully by now you've been able to get one if you wanted one.
Both systems are still very much in their launch phases, with few games released so far beyond the initial selection and a variety of "known issues" still to be addressed, but the general reception to the Xbox Series X in particular seems to have been very positive so far on the whole, and we're really enjoying it here at Pure Xbox.
But how about you? What have your experiences been like with the Xbox Series X|S over the past couple of weeks, and are you happy with the purchase you made? Let us know down in the poll and comments section below.
Comments (44)
I like it a lot, I just wish it had a properly next-gen exclusive to show off its power. Spider-Man MM on PS5 is great like that.
I'm more than happy with my XSX I'm only unhappy with the time I have for gaming :/ Game Pass is proving to be too much of a temptation for me.
Alright, who voted for hate it? I mean really? Unless you received a DOA unit and are feeling butthurt about it, but what's to 'hate'?
Facepalm at the trolls.
The XSX has proven to be a fairly impressive machine from my perspective.
The complaints I have are mostly fairly minor:
Balanced against those minor issues is a great system that does most things really well.
That being said, I am not using it much compared to my PS5 at the moment. This for two main reasons:
That being said, I am a huge fan of playing bc games so I suspect over time I will gravitate more in that direction but since this is the time of year when many new games launch I am less focused on bc right now.
@evan23 this is the same for me strangely. I think the only additional complaints I have is that the quick resume seems to decide when it wants to work for some games. I find some online games stop games like Valhalla and Ori from being quick resumable. Forgo Horizon 4 seems to be the best quick resume example for me so far but this will be ironed out I'm sure.
The console itself is great and I'm enjoying it. Just need Activision and MS to iron out which of them is making my consoles power down when playing Cold War...
After so much fun with Xbox one x tv connection issues. Not turning the tv over to the channel and not linking with HDR correctly sometime.
To see these return on the series x is not great.
HDMI does turn over tv channel now but not every time and I still get hdr drop out sometimes depending how you start the game.
I’m positive it’s a certain hdmi connection or chip they use as the one x had this issue.
Also my PS4 and PS5 and Switch have never had none of the above issues at all.
@Dezzy70 What is HDR drop-out? I am not sure I have seen that on the X1X or the XSX.
I snagged both an XSX & XSS. Arriving today, excited to give it a go!
Very similar to @evan23
Generally love it, though would have liked some new next-gen content to really show it off and keep me playing. (Ori WoW and Forza Horizon 4 look simply amazing though).
Also been playing the PS5 more for the same reasons (and Genshin Impact, it's brilliant and i'm hopelessly addicted)
My main complaints are also relatively minor and all software related so could be fixed. Hardware is simply brilliant
@evan23 @Dezzy70 I had an issue like that with the first one s I bought... the Xbox would power on but the hdmi output wouldn’t work properly. I ended up having to take it to the Microsoft store where they gave me a new unit and said the hard drive was faulty (I started having more issues). Sucked because I’d only had it for barely over a. month.
@gollumb82 Same here, my only complaint is not having more time for playing this wonderful Series X console.
Overall I'm very very happy. I never had an iteration of the Xbox One. So this all feels very new to me and GamePass is brilliant.
Honestly, if I had an Xbox One prior to this and was already experiencing GamePass, I may have felt like I easily could have waited on the Series X/S.
@themightyant I forgot about ALLM. One of the annoying things for me with ALLM is that it turns it on when you use a media app like netflix. While it isn't the end of the world, what the point of turning it on and off if you are going to turn it on when watching netflix.
Again, this is a minor complaint not a deal breaker.
I was excited about getting a new Xbox, but since I can't find one, and there seems to be so many launch issues. I may just get a 2nd Switch so I can finally finish breath of the wild (among others) without my son going: "I want to play Mario kart"
The next gen can wait until next year.
@evan23 Does it? As you said it's minor, but also strange and non-sensical.
I'll admit I haven't used any media apps as my TV has almost all of them. I had assumed Game Mode would be turned off for Video this was why it turned off on the dashboard
At the moment I go back to the dashboard and get a notice Game mode has been turned off. Go into a game get a notice it has been turned on, back and forth ad nauseum! My tv's notice is too large and in the middle of the screen making it irritating. I've resorted to having game mode on permanently.
@Dijita I may very well be in the same boat as you. I didn't have an Xbox last gen, so I've got more than enough to do on this thing right now. I had also gotten a PS5 day one and pretty much instantly regretted it. But I think that was a big part of it. I have a PS4 Pro. So I had something to really compare the PS5 against. Whereas the Xbox I didn't. If I had already owned a One X I'm sure I'd have been perfectly happy to sit on it for a while. But either way, there's a lot of us in the world that completely missed the Xbone. So that creates a really good opportunity for new Xbox users. People like us can wander in off the street and Game Pass just automatically has more than we know what to do with.
There will always be issues with day one machinery. Always has been. The overall experience though is vastly positive. You can list hundreds of little things that could be better. Storage, consistency of new tech, even design but what matters is the end result. This was the first time I've preordered a console and got it on day one, I am not disappointed at all. The ssd makes such a huge difference. Yes, storage will be an issue, especially as games get bigger, but xbox has already sorted expansions and an ssd external for non optimised games works fine.
I’m more than happy with my Series X 😀 put it this way - I’ve hardly touched my PS4 since getting my XSX!
I'm loving mine! Got the X and just tried out the disk drive on Friday when i rented a game from the library. This thing is super fast and honestly doesn't make a sound. I can get into games super fast and the lack of loading is making the most of my limited gaming time. Like I've been saying before the launch the SSD and it's impact on loading is the true next gen feature. No going back once you get a taste of it.
If you paid $300-$500 on a console, you better be happy with it because you knew enough about it to think it was worth the asking price. Paying that much and not researching is just dumb. If you aren't happy at this stage, I don't feel sorry for you.
@Kefka2589 as a new Xbox user i have so much i want to play on gamepass it's actually overwhelming. I have zero regret, actually a sigh of relief, that i changed my mind from getting a PS5 to a series x. This thing is amazing.
@Krzzystuff I've had some time to really think about it, and I'm honestly really happy with my current situation. I'll surely spend more time with the Xbox playing catch up and just enjoying 3rd party stuff that's on Game Pass, and I can still catch a ton of JRPGs and Some Sony 1st party stuff on my PS4 Pro. So dollar for dollar, I think this was the best case scenario for me. Plus I have one of the LE Death Stranding Pros and I'm honestly not eager to quit using it. I really love that thing.
Very happy, Shes beautiful..
@evan23
It’s with a Samsung q90r tv.
Sometimes if you come out of a game then put the console in rest mode.
Then come back next day and play the game it sometimes does not pick the game up in hdr.
You then go back to dash board. Then back to the game and then it picks up hdr mode, after a couple of goes.
I think xbox one x and series x and Samsung q90r don’t hand shake perfectly.
As I said PS4 PS5 are fine. However Sony and Microsoft consoles do apply hdr chip configuration slightly different and in the menus.
@evan23 definitely agree on the d-pad issue. Why, Microsoft? The first time I touched it the wife remarked how ridiculously loud it is. The older version was loud enough already. Clicky buttons seems to be an American thing, they even call remote controls "clickers".
@Dezzy70 Xbox has always been funny for HDR. I can't remember how often I'd exit an HDR game on the 1S and the menu screen displayed in weird colours because it didn't exit it properly (LG TV, via HDMI switch box). No such issues on PS4 (or 5, also not seen it on XSX so far). I quite like how PS5 outputs HDR constantly. Caused a brief black screen before I disabled HDCP, now it's perfect. It even outputs HDR on non-HDR games, but I don't think it actually changes the image on those games.
@AJDarkstar
Correct and it was very sad to see these faults come over to the series x with the way Xbox consoles handle hdr. They must know they exist as you seem people writing to them on the forums.
Yes the PS5 seems perfect handling hdr and hdmi switch on my q90r then again the PS4 pro did as well. Maybe it is Sony better knowledge of TVs etc as their engineers design and manufacture them as well.
Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of improvements I'd like to see (many of which are listed above), but the fact that it loads so damn quickly is just a huge improvement for me. Star Wars Battlefront 2 used to take minutes to load — now it's under 10 seconds!
The Xbox Series X is an extremely solid piece of hardware both figuratively and literally. It turns on so fast it has started up before the HDMI kicks in on the tv. The console is powerful and quick and will over the life of the gen prove to be very able. The design is both basic and extremely clever - although it looks utterly awful on its side. The controller is a nice baby step up from the last one which needed very little improvement.
All that said mine currently sits idle because Halo is absent. The results next to the PS5 have not shown any gulf in power, backwards compatibility is more reliable on Xbox but has unfortunately fallen foul of a quirk of last gen where games from early in the gen run at higher resolutions on PS5 and games from the end of the gen run at more stable frame rates on PS5.
In the end my feeling is one of being pretty underwhelmed. Not because there is anything wrong with the console but because I don't feel like I have anything to be really excited about on it.
For me, right now it lacks the magic of a new generation.
@Dezzy70 could be, perhaps Sony learned a few things after the initial HDMI woes on PS4, which even Sony TVs had trouble with. Even on PS4 Pro, setting it to 2160 RGB could cause momentary black screens, which 2160 YUV didn't have, but I noticed PS5 just has a single 2160p setting, so it could be they're just using YUV as the default. Either way, it seems to work well so far.
@Medic_Alert There's something to be said about the auto HDR for BC though. Those early titles may be 900p, but they also take advantage of the auto HDR, which really lends a lot to the overall image quality of games that didn't feature it. So there's some give and take there. The only example of games I've really seen holding a more stable framerate is something like Sekiro. Which in that case the framerate is a tad more stable, but the One X build was native 1800p vs checkerboard 1800p on the Pro build. Which nothing against checkerboarding, it's a nifty technique and I think native 4K is more often than not kind of a waste. But the build is less demanding and ultimately shy's away from frame drops. But on the flip side, I fired up The Witcher 3 on the PS5 and you can only squeeze 30fps out of it no matter what, but the One X version had a 60fps mode that looks utterly fantastic on my XSX. So I think they both work really well. I just think one's experience with BC on either machine will largely be influenced by the software selection more so than just the machine itself.
@Kefka2589 all fair points. I haven't really played around with it myself and I am judging it based on the various videos I have seen.
In all fairness any gains by PS5 on backwards compatibility are by l chance as opposed to any skill or planning.
@Medic_Alert I've fiddled with the PS5 BC a decent bit, but I have by this point maybe too much hands on with the X BC. I've fallen down the rabbit hole of nostalgia and am revisiting every game from the last 20 years. Banjo Kazooie with HDR is utterly phenomenal.
I could definitely see the PS5 GPU's less cores higher clocks maybe lending a hand to BC in some situations. Seems like you could maybe get a bit more juice with less optimization required. But at the same time, both of these systems are so overkill for most of this software it just hardly matters.
@AJDarkstar
If you go to HDTV TEST there is a whole video on how the PS5 outputs to tv and probably the best settings to have.
Explains RGB Is full chroma 4:4:4 etc etc.
@Dezzy70 Weird, I haven't seen 4Pro, 1X, XSX, or PS5 have an HDR dropout, though on the setup I have with a 40ft+ HDMI run with boosters I get intermittent screen or audio dropouts with all of them.
I absolutely love Quick Resume, and if I play Miles on PS5 and power down it drives me nuts to have to go through the logo screens and back into the game. Yeah it's "fast" but it's annoying and logo screens have timers to make sure you see them. I just wish it would start working more univerally, and make me aware of what games have a QR point, what games will get bumped from QR when starting a new game with QR, and let me force a QR save when exiting a game manually. Right now closing the game just ends it.
Needs some work, but it's all on the software side. Right now, Ori, Yakuza, Watch Dogs, Planet Coaster are supporting QR. AC:V, Forza, Tetris, BC games, are not supporting it.
@Medic_Alert I haven't found very many last gen games that didn't get a 1X patch except some very early ones. And yeah, the later games run at higher native res, so lower potential framerate. But at least they run
@NEStalgia We must play different games. For me, all of the BC games I have tried supported QR.
@evan23 Really? Well, that's good news! I must be hitting on the exceptions. I've tried Sekiro, Ryse.....I can't remember the other two I tried that are installed now. I wasn't sure if BC worked with QR or not, and when I saw those didn't I just figured QR's not part of BC. That's cool! So maybe it's just down to the waiting game for when they have that system update that addresses the QR exclusions then.
@Dezzy70 my console just says it's outputting 4k HDR 60Hz at either YUV 422 or 420. Should be 422 in theory. My HDMI switchbox says it supports 444, but PS5 says it's limited by HDMI 2.0. But I was just referring to the colour output being automatic rather than having an unnecessary option.
Love my Series X to death despite an apparent known-issue with it losing track of my controller and wireless headset if left unattended for 10-15 minutes. Fix that and I'm 100% happy with it. It really was the weirdest console launch (Xbox and PS5 both) that I've ever witnessed though, and I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 days. I do rather like this approach though. I love playing older games but my TV only has so many inputs and my house is only so big. Nice to be able to more or less shelve my PS4, Xbox One X, 360, etc. for now.
@JetmanUK
I bet that person didnt even has a xbox.
Haha
It's an absolutely brilliant machine, but I feel like I haven't really seen it stretch its muscles yet. We need to see some proper next-gen content.
Mine started having coil whine problems tonight
I'm genuinely enjoying my time with it (or as much as I can with a newborn in the house). I second the comments about having games that stretch the kit to a next-gen level, but I really like the loading speed, interface and joypad refinements. Forza Horizon 4 really does looks special, and very much enjoying hammering Game Pass when I can.
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