I got a One. My first Xbox. Thoughts & Impressions.

I was all Nintendo/Playstation up to PS3. A bit into that I decided that gen wasn't going to be what I wanted so I sold the PS3 and upgraded my PC and played games on that, saw the great rise of Steam and later GOG. I experienced 4k IQ and smooth and clear strobed 120fps on one end, but also went back and played pixely old classics and had a lot of fun there, too. Somewhere in this and the indie renaissance, the hardware wars kinda became dead to me. I got a Wii U, had plenty of fun with it even though it wasn't very powerful and a lot of stuff was 720p.

Now my PC is aging and I don't want to build a new one until a couple years into DX12, and Wii U wouldn't have main market titles, so I figured I'd get another console. I never had an Xbox before, I only played Halo 2 and some Mass Effect at my friends house. However, I had been using the 360 and now One controller for years now on PC. Best controller ever. PS4 has some nice games, but Xbox had a few key things. I was a massive KI fan back in the day, so that was huge to me. I never experienced Halo campaigns, only multiplayer, so I wanted to do that. And as a big racing fan, Forza Horizon 2 seemed like the best open world racer yet. I'm also a huge Mikami fan so Scalebound is something I really wanted, more than other big franchises that are getting long in the tooth.

I looked into a lot of comparisons for multiplatform games, and the difference between Xbone and PS4 were surprisingly small to me after all the clamor that was made about it. Yeah, I could see the differences, but it was really small potatoes compared to the massive scope of performance differences I was used to on PC. I was also very interested after seeing them incorporate Xbox into Windows 10, their voice command stuff with Cortana seems like it'll be great, and hell I already had a Live profile from a handful of PC games. Then the massive sale for an MCC bundle with 2 free games and $50 credit happened, so that sealed it.

Some initial impressions:

• It's heavy!
• I set it to instant-on mode in setup, and last night I was downloading MCC and AC Black Flag. I thought it would go overnight. I woke up to find out the system turned off and stopped downloading them after 1 hour. I guess the "download updates" meant literally only downloading system updates. If it won't finish huge downloads, I don't quite see the point of a more suspend-type off. I set the power options to not turn it off after an hour.
• For some reason screenshots look different on my monitor (BenQ XL2420Z) than the gameplay. This goes for both full RGB or limited mode. Strangely, the screenshots look darker on Xbox and internet browsers, but correct brightness (like when I'm playing) in Irfanview and Photoshop, and if I save a copy in one of those programs, that copy is brighter on Xbox and browsers. On my phone (IPS panel, better colors than my TN monitor) the original dark and the brighter copy look identical, somewhere between them in brightness. It's so weird.
• I thought Xbox had a kind of Miiverse thing going on, but I can't find a profile where I can post stuff to, and game hubs look like a twitter feed on a phone app, pretty basic. Are they working on a more robust social structure or am I just missing wherever it is?
• The tiles on the main screen seem to shuffle around. Is there a way to lock them down in their positions? So far I've only figured out how to unpin the TV app that I won't be using. *Game installs from disc don't take all that long. Like the graphics/performance disparity, I was expecting it to be horrible from all the bad stuff I heard.
• However, installations from disc are WAY BIGGER than I expected. If I have to install 45GB of a game to HD in order to play it, what exactly is the point of discs? I have MCC, Horizon 2, Arkham Knight, AC Black Flag, Sunset Overdrive, and Peggle 2 installed and I'm already down to 164.3GB and AC Unity arrives tomorrow and I'm waiting on the big game sale before picking up KI. I am slightly regretting not going for the 1TB model now if it's going to be like this.

Some things better than expected, some things worse. Overall I'm having a lot of fun with the games, which is the important thing. Navigation could use a bit of cleaning up, but it's not too bad. I figure if I get voice commands going that should smooth out the experience. Oh, and I didn't have a bluray player before, so that's another plus.

Submitted by dicetrain Xbox 720 Release Date 2015