Xbox Series X is going to be the most powerful console on the market heading into the next generation, and it is releasing on November 10th, 2020. The Xbox console is touting some rather impressive features that are focused on improving the user experience in almost every facet.
With review units being sent to critics, it’s safe to assume there will be takes on what features work and which ones fell flat. In the meantime, it seems best to list the five features that feel next-gen and five features that may end up being gimmicks when all is said and done.
10 Gimmick: Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass is currently the best value in gaming. The fact that new games are added regularly and that the large stable of studios in Xbox Game Studios will launch their titles into the service makes it so you’re odd if you don’t subscribe to the service. However, it “might” be a gimmick. There’s a good chance Xbox Game Pass continues to be stellar, but if it manages to fall flat on its face due to increasing prices or other issues, it could blink out of existence.
9 Next-Gen: HDR
What is HDR and why does it matter? This is a question consumers are currently asking themselves around the globe. For the uninitiated HDR stands for high-dynamic range and is the term for the latest craze in television technology. It provides the ability for a larger range of color detail to be displayed with brighter highlights and deeper shadows. It may seem odd at first, but the moment you lay eyes on a game running in real-time that supports HDR you’ll understand what you’ve been missing all along.
8 Gimmick: D-Pad
Now, before you start arguing that the new D-pad is an improvement on the previous one and therefore it can’t be a gimmick, wait one moment. The addition of a new design for the D-pad seems to be a compromise they made to get as close as they could to their premier $150 controller, the Elite and Elite Version 2.
It’s currently unclear whether this change was for the better and if meeting in the middle was the best choice possible. The verdict won’t be apparent until months after launch when millions of players have put time in with the new controller.
7 Next-Gen: Ray Tracing
Ray Tracing may sound odd and is currently positioned as what most feel to be a technological gimmick. What it does is fully evolve an image as it uses an algorithm to properly render lighting effects by generated the appropriate look and feel of pixels as they relate to one or many light sources. It was used for a long time in 3D modeling and environment work and is coming into the forefront thanks to it being implemented in real-time, which takes a tremendous amount of computing power to pull off in any capacity.
6 Gimmick: 8K
When looking at the current technology landscape in terms of norms for households, 4K televisions are barely entering the space where they are becoming adopted by the mass populace. The notion that 8K will be useful, or that 8K televisions will be common in this generation of consoles seems quite absurd to say the least. Most gamers will say that they would take steady performance over increasing pixels in visual fidelity. Developers will likely take the same route and 8K will be nothing more than a gimmicky launch promise.
5 Next-Gen: Quick Resume
The Xbox One introduced the ability for people to play games as they were downloading once they reached a certain threshold. For the Xbox Series X, it seems the thing they’re doubling down on is a neat new feature called Quick Resume. It allows users to create save states for several games and will gift the ability to swap between them with minimal loading. Players who enjoy playing multiple titles at the same time or swapping between single and multiplayer experiences will have their day to day usage become seamless.
4 Gimmick: Share Button
The slightly redesigned Xbox Series X controller is pretty much the same form factor with some subtle changes and a new d-pad which we already discussed earlier. The other change is the addition of a third centralized button called the share button which will allow users to save screenshots and videos.
Though the usefulness seems apparent, it’s unclear how seamless the experience will be using the button and if, at the end of the day, it was necessary to add to what many consider to be the most ergonomic controller design to date.
3 Next-Gen: Load Times
When discussing load times the screens with moving text or character models are the area of focus. In addition to those screens, game designers work in clever ways to load in parts of the game without players noticing. This is done with the use of narrow passageways, crawling sections, or something similar. Early demos for the Xbox Series X are showing non-optimized games with shrinking load times, so it’s safe to imagine the difference will be even greater on those developed to take full advantage of the hardware.
2 Gimmick: Smart Delivery
Some people like to argue that Xbox’s Smart Delivery initiative is confusing or complicated, but it’s rather simple when you look at it. All it means for users is that games that are part of the program will give customers who purchase their game access to the best version of that game on the Xbox console they’re playing on. This is a bit gimmicky considering it will likely lose third-party support in the next six months or so, but until then it makes it so gamers can make current-gen purchasing decisions with little buyer’s remorse.
1 Next-Gen: SSD
There’s no doubt that the change from standard hard drives to solid-state drives is going to greatly change the quality of life on next-gen consoles. The read and write speeds of these drives will not only open up plenty of avenues for developers, but it will make the user experience much faster and seamless all around. In early Xbox Series X previews, there have been numerous examples of games running better thanks to the SSDs with no optimization implemented, as they are improved naturally thanks to the change.
NEXT: Xbox Series X: 10 New Games You Can Play On Launch Day
