After a dismal reveal and a solid E3 2013 overshadowed by terrible DRM, anti-consumer policies, the Xbox One faced an uphill climb when it launched on November 22nd, 2013. Sony had taken almost all of its thunder during E3 by proclaiming that used games would be continued to be supported on PS4 as well as having a lower price point and unbundling their camera, it seemed that Xbox One could do nothing right to anyone but the most hardcore of loyal fans. But a lot has changed for Xbox One in the past 12 months (and earlier) and the box we have today, for a great many owners, is a different product than what we thought we were getting for the month or so after the reveal. But do these changes really matter? Or is it just lip service or is Microsoft’s hubris disguised as faux humility?
Before I begin, I want to address the elephant in the room. It would be impossible to truly assess the current state of the Xbox One without offering a summary of how I felt about it before it launched. Going into the reveal, I was ready to allow Microsoft to claim my launch dollars. Last generation, while I wound up preferring Sony’s exclusives and media capabilities much more that what Xbox 360 offered, the 360 was still my lead console for third party titles. Xbox Live, the controller, my online friends, all factored in to my over decision that my Xbox would be my go-to console for gaming, which is what I bought it for in the first place.
It wasn’t until the lack of straight answers regarding used games that my decision, once firm, began to waiver. However, I was on solid ground once Microsoft announced the litany of restrictions being imposed on used games in an Xbox Wire post a mere days before the start of E3. That solid ground had my feet firmly planted in the “no way, Microsoft is getting my money” camp. E3 came and went and the only game that Microsoft showed that made me glance in their direction was Titanfall. However, I was steadfast in accepting that I would have to miss out on it because there was no way in hell they would be getting my money with those policies.
Thankfully, about 5 days after E3 2013 ended, Microsoft, much like how they announced the policies, reversed course on all of them with a post on Xbox Wire. Gone were the things that kept me from wanting an Xbox One. And while the die had been cast and I was going with PS4 at launch, I knew that I would still be getting an Xbox One by the time Titanfall released, and I’m glad I did.
I present this history because I wanted to express and be very clear about my stance on the Xbox One pre and post reversal. With that out of the way, let’s look at how the Xbox One has shaped up this past year.
At launch, much like PS4, Xbox One had a solid line up of games to play. Dead Rising 3, Forza 5, and Ryse: Son of Rome represented the opening salvo for their AAA exclusives, while most major 3rd party games also debuted on the platform. Dead Rising 3 is a fun, if relatively uninspired entry into the Dead Rising franchise, which is still a solid launch title. I’m not a fan of racing games by any stretch so I can’t speak to the quality or my experience with Forza 5, but by all accounts, it’s a very good racing game and it’s certainly gorgeous. Then there is Ryse….A truly gorgeous game which, for me, felt shockingly empty in terms of gameplay. I know this game has its fans, so I’ll just say, I am vehemently not amongst them. Thankfully, as mentioned earlier, the third party AAA offerings still offered a ton of stuff for Day One purchasers to play.
The coming months, like PS4, didn’t really offer much to be excited about until March 11th. That’s the day when Titanfall released. A game which, to this day, remains the most fun I’ve had playing a shooter since Modern Warfare 2. It was the absolute system seller for me and remains my favorite exclusive this gen so far.
Titanfall also marks a significant moment for Microsoft this generation and for its first year with Xbox One. While Titanfall isn’t available on PS4, it’s not owned by Microsoft and shows their play for third party, console exclusives rather than taking the Sony route who has a slew of first party studios making first party exclusives. At the end of the day, an exclusive is an exclusive, but I find it more interesting when the first party is making games and taking risks than I do buying the exclusive rights.
After Titanfall, it was all about third parties with great games like Wolfenstein: The New Order, filling the late spring, early summer drought. In the Fall, however, Microsoft came out with exclusive guns blazing beginning with Forza Horizon 2, Sunset Overdrive, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection as their three big holiday titles. And herein lies my dilemma. Not a racing fan, I found the humor in Sunset Overdrive to be pretty poor and I’m not a fan of Halo. That being said, they do have MORE exclusives on the AAA front going into the Holiday so I can’t, objectively, ignore that fact. Those games have a ton of fans and that counts quite a bit.
your not so standard robot attack dog
Taken on these alone, the Xbox One would be in pretty good shape, however, it should be noted that at the time of this writing Halo: The Master Chief collection is currently suffering from matchmaking issues which is preventing many players from even getting into online multiplayer matches. I have already seen a handful of people returning the game or asking for refunds for their digital purchases, which is normally unheard of. It’s definitely not the majority, but the narrative is still that Microsoft’s biggest exclusive this Fall is a broken disappointment.
While the exclusive titles themselves leave me fairly cold, the hardware itself is where I find myself really thinking Microsoft nailed most of its landing. The most impressive aspect of the console for me is Kinect. I can safely say Kinect 2.0 surprised the heck out of me. I was not the least bit interested in the features being touted, enhanced voice commands and certainly not motion controls. That being said, I am a believer – in voice commands, at least. Saying “Xbox record that” has been used so many times that I’ve had to delete over 100 videos from my harddrive. It works great. Saving some awesome moments in Titanfall, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Sniper Elite III has been a great feature and I expect to get much more use out of it in the coming years. I also find myself using it for Netflix and Hulu Plus a lot more often because I can simply say “Xbox pause” and “Xbox play” without even moving from the couch. This may sound like I’m lazy, and for good reason, I am. I like technology that makes my life easier, not harder. In fact, most of the voice commands work amazingly well. The only issues I have with them is “Xbox on” is pretty finicky, only working about 70% of the time, while I can’t tell you how many times my Xbox One has thought I wanted to watch TV when I’ve said nothing of the kind.
The flip side to the Kinect is that, well, a lot of people just don’t want it and the price point of $500, $100 more than the cameraless PS4 is kind of hard to swallow for many consumers since Microsoft hasn’t really offered a compelling case for the additional cost. Sure, like I said above, voice commands have become invaluable to me, but there are clearly a great many consumers that can live without it. As such, Microsoft has unbundled the Kinect for a great deal of skus and in turn have pretty much abandoned any hope of Kinect focused experiences such as the suggested heart monitor reading during gameplay that could be used to adjust the game on the fly. And we’re already seeing casualties of the Kinect being removed from every sku with games like Swery’s D4 and the new Harmonix game, Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved being all but dumped onto the market with little to no fanfare and the poor sales that come with such treatment. Hopefully the Kinect will still be improved upon through future updates, even if it doesn’t mean that games will get much benefit from it.
Speaking of firmware updates; while some things were curiously left “out of the box,” so to speak – like a battery life indicator and storage management, those have since been rectified thorough the steady flow of improvement updates. This has made the console much more appealing in terms of UI than it was at launch.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, however. There is still the fact that the Xbox One is the weaker hardware than PS4 with many games running better on PS4, with some exceptions. If a gamer only has the Xbox One, I can’t imagine this would matter much, but as someone who owns both, it makes my decisions a bit simpler in terms of which version of a game I’ll be getting and for the most part, that isn’t on Xbox One. Another area where Xbox One seems to be coming up short is party chat. Sometimes party chat and parties in general are outright broken for me. In fact, in the past 2 weeks prior to this writing I had to hard reset my console because entering parties stopped everything from working – snap, voice, the game. It’s pretty annoying and not something I expected considering how well party chat worked on Xbox 360. Overall, party chat seems like a huge step backwards.
I’ll say it right now; installing games from disc takes entirely too long. Whereas the PS4 takes about 45 seconds tops, before you can begin playing a disc based game, it can take up to 10 minutes or more before on Xbox One. As someone who uses consoles over PC for ease of use and convenience, this is entirely too long. Especially when you consider the play Microsoft was making for disc being merely a distribution method for content.
Also, the UI, while easy to navigate, takes way too long to boot up apps. Opening the friends app takes about five to ten seconds before anything can be selected or done. Is it a make or break issue? Hardly, but we now live in an age where things are expected, rightfully so, to be instantaneous so having these little hiccups is a bummer.
Xbox One has also added the ability for extra storage through USB external harddrive support. Considering games like Halo: The Master Cheif Collection requires a 20 gig install for the multiplayer because the 4 campaigns are taking up all of the space on the dual layer Bluray’s 50gig allotment, expandable storage is a huge factor for a lot of console owners. When you factor in that even every disc based game requires installation, and thus, valuable harddrive space, it could be a huge factor for every Xbox One owner. And this is something that you can’t do on PS4 as of yet. Sure, you can swap out the harddrive, but for those like myself that couldn’t afford the larger harddrive at launch and began playing games on the stock 500 gig harddrive, not being able to expand the storage a year later is perplexing.
Another feature that Xbox One has over the PS4 is DLNA support. Through an update, owners could now stream media to their Xbox One from their computers. It’s a great feature that not only saves space, but is also incredibly convenient. Now, are these features make or break for any console? To me, personally, no. But it does show that Microsoft is listening to feedback and and showing they have been incredibly deft and nimble in maneuvering to provide these updates at a steady clip and doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
At the end of a year, the Xbox One is a considerably different beast than it was at launch and for the most part, that’s a very good thing. Microsoft has shown they listen to feedback by updating the user experience with the console itself with UI improvements and other firmware updates, and for better or worse, losing the in-every-box Kinect. They also have provided fans some impressive choices for games at retail and digitally, despite my personal aversion to the titles on offer. It’s still struggling in some areas, such as a sluggish UI, some inexplicable party chat issues, and the fact that Xbox One doesn’t run most games as well as the PS4 can. With that said, power doesn’t always win the race, in fact, it hasn’t since the original PlayStation, but if Microsoft can keep delivering as it has in its first year, we may be looking at the comeback kid.
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