NeutronOverload

On Series X Quality mode is typically worth it as most titles that have one are including Raytraced reflections (Hogwarts Legacy, Guardians of the Galaxy, GTA V), or use it for vastly improved lighting (Cyberpunk 2077) and typically have very good motion blur implementation and locked 30 with no frame drops which make it still feel acceptably smooth.

Some titles shouldn't even include the option **cough*Elden Ring*cough** as they'll have no significant quality improvement and performance suffers horrendously.... if "quality mode" in a game is not LOCKED 30fps without 1 single dropped frame EVER, it shouldn't even be there as an option.

Utter hot garbage, a complete downgrade from the previous dashboard in every single way; pretty much nothing was changed on the homescreen except a few extra icons at the top, 90% of the "updates" are below... where they have now made it impossible to pin more than 2 game groups to home, whereas before you could have a dozen or so, this is a BIG deal for people with a huge collection (350+) like myself who had everything organized by genre, now pigeon-holed into 2 groups of 40 visible games each max.

But before you can GET to your home groups, the FIRST row below home, which CAN'T be removed, is basically an AD for "top X games" (top new, top free, whatever), and below the MAX 2 group pages, EVERYTHING else below that is fixed to more ADS! So it was an "upgrade" for Microsoft and a DOWNGRADE for CUSTOMERS CUSTOMIZATION.

There was TONS of outcry on Twitter when it came out, and of course Xbox completely IGNORED all of the negative feedback, because why should they care at all if the piss off literally their entire installed user base? What can we do about it?

Even the 2TB expansion card is crap, the fact they limit games to only be able to play from a proprietary first-party overpriced storage media which you can only connect one of is crap. My games collection spans 2x 4TB SSD drives, a 2tb expansion card and all my internal storage... have to keep moving games over to SSD when I finish them (making them unplayable unless moved back) to make room for new titles, utter garbage!

Load times and performance of games that can run from SSD I have compared versus moving them to internal storage, the benefit is minimal, maybe a couple seconds faster from internal. I see no valid reason to FORCE users to have to use a specific storage device; it should be MY choice which games I care about faster load times, and which ones I'm fine playing from SSD, but then if they let us do that they'd be mi$$ing out.

It is especially egregious in that EVERY new game requires being installed on internal storage, even dinky little indie titles, 2D games with SNES-like graphics, games which would have 1 sec load times from a floppy disk, puzzle games, arcade ports, anything "X/S optimized" requires internal storage... for absolutely no good reason!

This even includes games which PREVIOUSLY played from external SSD just fine, but after an "X/S" update patch, they suddenly become unplayable unless moved to internal storage, just further proof no game NEEDS to be on internal storage; it's literally just a money grab move to sell proprietary storage cards.

Surprise! They don't mind continuing to support their games years after release free of charge, but changing the "cap fps to 30" flag from 1 to 0 that you could do yourself if this was a PC game isn't something they're going to give anyone for free 😂

If he really wants to install "confidence" in digital purchases, then there needs to be a way to get a game that was purchased digitally to be guaranteed to be able to launch FOREVER, including if Microsoft ever goes bankrupt, if every server goes offline, if the internet ever ceases to be, if I take my console somewhere that has no internet, every game I purchased and installed needs to be able to continue to play.

That's how it works with physical purchases.

That's how digital purchases on Mac and PC works.

But yet, an Xbox digital game, even fully downloaded installed and updated, WILL NOT LAUNCH AT ALL if it does not connect to Xbox services to confirm the game actually belongs to you on initial launch after install or after a console reset, and the console does not go offline for more than a month!

With the amount of controllers, especially "elite" models that suffer from horrendous stick drift, this seems like something that should have been released years ago, at the very least bundled with the elite controller software, to fix where "true center" actually is

Red Dead 2 and Arkham Knight really need 60fps updates, the fact some third party "mod" can enable it goes to show just how little work is actually required to do so, I am sure it is literally as simple as a config.ini file somewhere changing a "fps cap" value from 30 to 60.

The real question isn't will it happen, the real question is why HASN'T it happened?

It's a great feature but I don't understand why some games don't support it... some of the simplest games too, like the Ghosts & Goblins remake, or others that take AGES to get through the title screen like The Outer Worlds (either the original game or spacers choice edition doesn't support quick resume, yet the other one does! They're basically the SAME GAME! It makes no sense!)

The ability to pin more than 2 game groups to home... crazy to think as recently as one year ago we could pin about a dozen game groups to home, keeping everything organized and on home by genre, but midway through 2023 Xbox decided to arbitrarily mostly kill this feature, dropping the max groups pinned to home to a measly TWO! Seriously that's like nothing! They must think every Xbox gamer only owns like 10 games or something

Would love to see them "partner closely" with, for starters, getting FF15 a "Series X Enhanced" update, get rid of the nonsensical options of Detail at 30fps vs crap resolution at 60fps and let's see it run better looking AND smoother than it can on any PlayStation console, if I was Phil that would be my first "act of good faith" demand; you want to claim fealty to Xbox? PROVE IT!

After that, the next order of business needs to be a complete port of the FF7 remaster series, starting with the first one immediately, and then each one thereafter a commitment to release them simultaneously on PS and Xbox at the same time every future installment, AND the quality and performance must at LEAST have parity with the 50% weaker PS hardware.

Then, and only then, can Square Enix prove that they deserve respect from the Xbox community.

No No No, please God no.... hybrid cloud? A platform that runs on mobile? What, DO YOU GUYS NOT HAVE PHONES???

This is the single dumbest idea and direction they can possibly go in, worse than making the Xbox One a set top box to watch cable TV on... the masses have spoken, PS4 won a whole generation and has sustained its lead since then for maintaining focus where it belongs: DEDICATED GAMING, not gaming + TV, not gaming + "cloud" (name 1 streaming game console that ever succeeded... oh they all flopped? Even when tried from giants like Google? What a SHOCKER!)

With UE5 rapidly advancing, providing essentially the "apex", grand finale of what is possible graphically speaking, with unlimited geometry, ray-traced everything and so on, the focus should be on who can make the first console that can handle anything UE5 can throw at it at maximum settings, in a "worst case" scenario, and sustain 4K/60fps the whole time.

Either that, or that plus VR headset compatibility which Phil Spencer even seemed to imply would be explored with the Series X before its launch.

That would basically be console gaming's "final form", and would require no further advancement beyond that point.

@Fenbops it sounds like you're referring to issues with the hardware limitations, I would assume memory availability, my comment was more directed towards the OP stating that the problem was with getting titles to run at 1440 @ 60fps which, frankly, should not be that difficult to pull off; if you can get the game running on the hardware in the first place and are hitting performance issues, with most engines available now it should be a relatively simple matter to downsample geometry, texture resolution, draw distances or whatever the major bottleneck is to be able to hit the target.

If it's an issue of "can't even get it to run" due to the lower available RAM or something, that one makes more sense, and I do really not get why a next-gen console was kicked out the door with less available memory than its predecessor, though again the main thing that's going to consume memory faster than anything are audio/visual resources, and if you could put together all the textures and shaders at high resolution then you don't really have any more work to do; it's a lot more work to create a "higher res" version of a texture than to just "scale down" what you've already made... pop them into photoshop, run a 50% scale-down batch and save them with _low in the filename and plop one line of code into anywhere textures load: IF (console == 'SeriesS') { texturename = texturename & "_low" } ... done.

These naysayer devs are just living proof of how lazy programmers have become these days...

Is the Series S the top of the line hardware right now? No, but much in the same there are many games that struggle to maintain native res @ 30 even on the series X (cough Elden Ring cough) as proof no matter how much power you throw at a dev team, if they don't invest time into optimization the game is just gonna run bad, end of story.

My take is simple: if pretty much every first party title can pull it off, and third party greats like Hogwarts Legacy can do it on the hardware, then maybe it's time for devs to just stop being so lazy and blaming hardware that's pushing out more tflops and faster CPU than what was required to run Titanfall 2 at 60fps with an internal resolution of 6K being downsampled to 4K