What do you think of the Xbox One X?
So, it’s June 26th, which is a special day for me for reasons, one of these reasons is that it is the day when I got an Xbox One. 3 years ago, I moved from the 7th generation of consoles with the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One, getting a Titanfall bundle. Initially, the Xbox One was the future, holding a lot of good features such as capturing gameplay, Kinect, Skype and many other nice things, while it was a near perfect console at the time, my opinion changed over the years, as I will outline in this article.
DESIGN
The Xbox One was bulky, large, similar to a VCR box (hence why a lot of people joked about this), it only came in black, with only a few exceptions in limited editions, but sometime later, white consoles were sold in bundles. Its size and looks did change with the reveal of the S version, which was smaller and better in performance, and now with the new Xbox One X, which is promoted to be “The Most Powerful console” being also the smallest out of the three versions. Anyway, back to the first one, it had a non-physical power button (which sometimes accidentally turns on and off if you touch it even with a wire), a Blu-Ray drive (got upgraded to a 4K one in the S), a large fan which manages cooling, 3 USB 3.0 ports (1 to the side, 2 to the back, 2 HDMI (one for TV Box input), optical audio, Kinect port and Ethernet port. To be honest, apart from size and weight, I don’t have many problems with it (the glossy top is prone to scratching if anyone has experienced that).
PERFORMANCE
Inside, it was powered by an AMD custom 8-core APU clocked at 1,75GHZ for the CPU and 853 MHZ GPU with 8GB of DDR3 memory, 8GB of flash storage and 32MB of eSRAM. One of the downsides at launch is that it had only 500 GBs of storage but it was upgradable with external drives. Compared with its competitor, the Playstation 4, it was slightly weaker, most of the games being outputted at a resolution of 720p, 900p with a few exceptions, including first parties, at 1080p. For framerates, both systems held most linear games at 60 FPS, while open world games were at 30 FPS with rare exceptions. Overall, it held strong, even if it was beaten by the PS4. A major upgrade will be had with the new Xbox One X with its promised 4K and 60 FPS, will it manage that target? Only time will tell.
GAMES
On the games is where I have to say that the Xbox One sucks. After 2015, with the release of Halo 5, Microsoft decided to change the way their games were released with the new “Play Anywhere” system. Because of this, games were released on both Xbox One and Windows 10, which, theoretically, it means that the Xbox One does not have a lot of “True” exclusives, since they are on PC as well, otherwise, there weren’t any exclusives which have drawn my eye, neither Halo, or Forza, or Gears, or anything in-between, well, apart from one, ScreamRide, and maybe #IDARB, sadly, they aren’t that known or as popular.
CONTROLLER
Obviously, I couldn’t talk about the Xbox One without mentioning the controller. Honestly, this is the best controller for gaming, it’s big, perfect for my hands, sturdy and easy to use, the triggers and bumpers are way bigger than on the 360, though the bumpers are a bur stiff (not on the new controllers). And the joysticks are really easy to use, albeit they could have been taller. The high-end controller, the Elite, is very expensive but offers some degree of customization. The only downside of the first controllers is the proprietary connector for the mic, which required an adapter if you wanted to use it, the new controllers do have a 3.5 mm headphone jack which makes life easier.
CONCLUSION
The Xbox One had problems with its launch, some problems over the years and now it does still have some, but it continues to be a fun, easy to use console from Microsoft, looking forward to its future and a solution to the exclusive problem.