First day Xbox One impressions

[Steve]

I've been playing around with my Xbox One for a few hours now, so I thought I'd post some impressions.

 

Console hardware

 

Everyone's seen what it looks like. Personally, I like the design - it's kinda "modern retro". It feels well built. When it's on, the Xbox logo lights up in pale white. It's quite big and it has an external power supply, but the positive side of that is that it has a large cooler and fan in it. The fan is really, really quiet, even when the console is under load, so I'm definitely impressed with the noise levels.

 

You get everything you need in the box, including a high quality HDMI cable and headset, although the headset is one of those shitty mono ones you can buy for a few bucks - it'll do the trick, but if you're a big online gamer you'll want to buy something better.

 

Controller

 

For me, this is close to being the perfect controller. I loved the 360 controller, but the D-pad was pretty poor, even with the redesigned version they brought out. The D-pad on this controller is a proper cross shape, not a disc with a cross on top of it and it works great. The "battery bulge" is gone, but the controller still runs on batteries - now you remove a flap from the back and the batteries go inside. You can still buy a Play & Charge kit if you want to, but I like using Eneloops as I can just swap them out when they die and carry on playing wirelessly.

 

The controller now has rumble motors in each trigger as well as the regular rumble, which does make a noticeable difference when you're playing a game like Forza and the wheels on one side of your car catch the side of the track. The size and weight is spot on too.

 

Kinect and voice commands

 

I've got the Kinect set up about 2-3 feet from me, which is not the optimal position, although it can still see me just fine. It will sign people in automatically when it recognises them.

 

One little feature that is really cool the first time you do it is redeeming a code. You just say "Xbox...use a code" then you hold the code card up and Kinect reads the code off it. I've done it 4 times and it worked perfectly every time. It beats typing in long strings of numbers/letters with an on-screen keyboard.

 

The voice commands are hit and miss. Certain commands always seemed to work, such as "Xbox...pin Internet Explorer", but with other commands I'd have to repeat them sometimes before they were recognised. I'm sold on the idea of talking to a console, but there is plenty of room for improvement with the voice recognition.

 

What does work well is noise cancellation. I was playing Forza with the sound cranked up and I said "Xbox...snap Skype" to see if it could hear me and it worked just fine.

 

Unfortunately I have no Kinect games I can use to test the accuracy and lag, so I can't comment on that.

 

Dashboard

 

The main dashboard view has been simplified, so you now have 3 sections - Pins, Home and Store. You can browse with Kinect motion controls, voice controls, with the controller, or via a second device using Xbox One SmartGlass. If you can get the voice controls working, you'll probably get used to using those, but otherwise, navigation is just fine with a controller.

 

On the Home screen is a large tile that shows your current activity, for instance, if you're playing Forza and you tap the home button on the controller, it takes you to the Home screen, but Forza is still there paused in the large tile, so you can jump straight back into it and pick up from where you left off.

 

There's a bunch of apps available, including Skype, SkyDrive, YouTube, Netflix etc. Each of these downloads on demand, just like on the 360. You get 7GB of free SkyDrive storage, so any movies, photos and music that are in the cloud can be accessed on the Xbox One via the app.

 

There's a snap feature which allows you to snap one app down the right edge of the screen, for instance, you could play a game and snap live TV on the right. You can do it just by saying "Xbox...snap" followed by the name of the app, and to unsnap you just say "Xbox...unsnap". You can do that stuff with a controller too.

 

The TV guide stuff hasn't launched in the UK yet, so I wasn't able to test that. I don't have anything plugged into the Xbox One's HDMI in socket, but the idea is that you have your cable box plugged into it, then you can still get notifications when friends come online, you can snap apps to the side, so you could have a Skype conversation snapped to one side while you're watching a movie - that kind of thing.

 

There are 2 off modes for the console - You can either have the console turn fully off, which means it'll take longer to start up, or you can set it so it goes into a kind of sleep mode. Resuming from the sleep mode takes about 10 seconds.

 

Games

 

So far I've only played Forza 5. A downloadable version came free with the console. It weighs in at a rather whopping 32GB, but you can start playing the game before it's fully downloaded. In fact, I only needed to download a few GB and I could play, although I did reach a stage where I couldn't continue until more data had downloaded and I had to wait, but that's still better than having to download the entire 32GB first. If you use sleep mode for the console, it will download updates for games and stuff in the background, so your stuff is always up to date.

 

Forza looks great, especially for a launch game. It renders at native 1080p and maintains a solid 60 FPS. When you play a single player game while connected to Xbox Live, you are actually racing the "drivatars" of other real people. A drivatar is a profile that is built up based on your driving style, how you overtake, how aggressive you are etc. which is uploaded to the cloud and kept up to date. So, my drivatar will be out there appearing in other people's games while I'm typing this. If your drivatar places in races, you actually earn credits too.

 

The core game is still Forza though. If you like Forza games, you'll like this. If you don't, this isn't going to convert you.

 

The TL;DR version

 

Great: -

 

The console is as close to silent as I could reasonably expect, even under load

The controller is superb

Forza 5 looks and performs great

 

Good: -

 

The dashboard functionality, which is considerably improved over the 360

Things like the "redeem code" feature and auto-login via Kinect

The sleep mode that downloads stuff in the background and has a reasonably quick resume

The range of apps

Everything you need is included in the box including a Live Gold trial and high quality HDMI cable

 

Meh: -

 

The hit and miss nature of the voice commands can make them frustrating to use

The included headset is one of those rubbish mono ones

The console is pretty big and cannot be stood up vertically

Still has quite a large external power brick

 

All in all, I'm really happy with it. I don't care about the power brick (I stuff that behind the TV anyway) or the shitty included headset (I'll buy a high end one soon), but I do hope they can improve the voice recognition via software updates.

[Motek]

Thx Steve really informative.

[Steve]

No worries!

 

I've been playing around with some of the apps. The YouTube app is great. The layout is really nice and it runs really well. Here's a photo of it: -

 

http://i.imgur.com/WxUzoh1.jpg

 

When you're signed into your YouTube account, obviously it will populate with your videos, subscriptions and what have you.

 

What's cool about it is you can pair devices to it, so I paired my Nexus 5 phone to it and when I'm watching a video on that, I can press one button at the top of the YouTube app to beam the video to the TV via the Xbox One, just like with a Chromecast. Maybe you could do that with the 360, but I don't remember seeing that feature.

[Steve]

I just tried the Kinect out to actually play a game. There's a game coming out next year called Kinect Sports Rivals and there's a free preview version that's available to download now.

I'm actually impressed with it. I never owned the original Kinect, but I did try one out. The lag and lack of responsiveness really spoiled the experience. With the new Kinect, the responsiveness is much improved.

I tried a wave racing event, where you ride a jet ski. You twist your wrist to turn the accelerator and tilt the imaginary handlebars left and right to steer. I was only standing 5-6 feet back from the Kinect, but it worked great. It gave me one of those "fucking hell, this is crazy" feelings, like the first time I played Wii Sports on the original Wii launch day. Obviously, what's going to make or break it are the games. With each Xbox One coming with a Kinect, I hope that it gets some attention from developers.

[Steve]

Here's a video of me kicking some arse in Ryse: Son of Rome: -

 

[Jacken]

thanks for posting this. you should get Dead Rising 3

[Steve]

Check out my eagle skills.

 

[djnumnuts]

So you got it all sorted then with replacements and what not?

[Steve]

Yeah man. That all got sorted and they compensated me with a free game too (I chose Dead Rising 3).

[d00ban]

Cheers Steve. Sounds really good. Imma wait for em to come down then get one. I thought the controller looked promising in the video I saw of it.

[Guest petesasqwax]

it does look like the shit, but I'm always between 12 and 24months behind on most games, it seems. I'm just playing Dishonored now (GOTY edition with DLCs) and loving it. I've got Witcher 2 to play after that. There are so many great 360 games that I've not played yet, I can't see me getting a next gen console for a while

 

That said, my wife is immensely impulsive and is likely to randomly go and buy one on a whim after Christmas, so this may change

[Steve]

Being a year behind the curve is not a bad way to be with video games, because you pay loads less for the games and they're usually fully patched up by then. I'm just a sucker for new tech.

[Guest petesasqwax]

It's not even a conscious thing, I just don't get a lot of time to play games and the ones I do play tend to be really quite involved, lengthy affairs. I blame KOTOR on the original Xbox for getting me started down that route. I've played a handful of games this year and most of them have been Assassin's Creed titles I've been catching up. Played Skyrim, the latest Fable, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 etc. Other than Fifa, that's the only kind of game I'm bothered about which does mean I tend to get decent value for money

[d00ban]

I don't mind being a bit behind with games. It means I can be a bit more choosy with what's good. I just don't have time to play em any more so I always try to pick games that cut through the crap. I hate computer game cliches, like going around collecting things from dead peoples bodies really doesn't get me going at all. To be honest though, that means I don't end up playing too many games at all.

[Guest petesasqwax]

I don't get enough chances to do that kind of thing in real life so Dishonored is escapism for me, to an extent. jumping off buildings to assassinate people is very similar to my day job, though, but I can see past that most of the time