XBOX Series X

I did worry about that --the lack of central character when I read the reviews, but whilst Marcus was a breath of fresh air compared to Aiden in the first game, I’ve found that some characters in my “legion” have grown on me more than others.

They also have their own perks, which comes in handy for certain missions, such as being able to call in a cargo drone to fly around on.

I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The world feels more lived-in than San Francisco and the plot is very…umm…topical.

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Gotta love early deliveries and WFH! :blush:

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I’m trying to get everything done ASAP because I know when the parcel arrives that’s the end of my working day!

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To be honest I’m expecting day one updates and a decent chunk of set up time, which luckily I can now get done in the background while I work.

Pro tip - apparently the Xbox app is the way to go with initial setup.

This is my plan.

No text from DPD with a delivery time yet though :thinking:

Amazon website - “We’ll deliver your parcel Tuesday 10th November”
DPD email - “We’ll deliver your parcel Wednesday 11th November”
Amazon email - “We’ll deliver your parcel Thursday 12th November”

:frowning:

Looks like it’s coming tomorrow :pensive:

But from looking at Twitter, Amazon waited until this morning to tell some people they’ll get their console “before 31/12/2020” so it could be worse! And hundreds of people in the same position as me having been told it will be today and then it doesn’t arrive.

Do DPD not have the Xbox themselves yet? If they do and it’s at your local delivery depot, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be today. When buying from amazon the date on their website is usually the accurate one.

DPD have it now but they’ve said tomorrow. That’s the one I’m putting the most belief in.

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Had my Series S for a week now, so I thought I’d share some of my impressions.

I still haven’t gotten used to just how fast it is. I’d gotten so used to browsing Reddit whilst waiting for games to load, that I keep going to do that now, and by the time I’ve launched the Reddit app, the game has loaded. It’s insane, and on the series S, is by far the biggest improvement that I notice regularly.

On Destiny 2 for instance, I can leave Europa and be loaded into the tower in under 10 seconds. This is something that used to take minutes, and it’s not even optimised yet, which is a shame because it would have been nice to play through the new campaign in glorious 60FPS.

60FPS feels fantastic in comparison, and despite being 1080p still, there is an increase to the graphical fidelity over my Xbox One S. It’s so smooth, and consistently so, that even the most hectic gunfights don’t result in any frame drops. I’m looking forward to that experience on Destiny 2 in December too. Sea of thieves also gets similar improvements to Fortnite, which I’ve not had time to play yet, but looking forward to that.

Watch Dogs Legion enhancements are disappointing. For some reason, on series S, they decided to make the game run at 4k30fps. It by no means locks to 30FPS either, and I got a bunch of frame drops when playing, and these are only made by worse by the game’s instability. Some launches it’ll be a fine consistent 30FPS experience, and others it will be so choppy. It’s such a broken game when you combine that with all of the crashes. I would have rather it be 1080p 60 FPS like the other games go for. Watch Dogs is the only game I have with ray tracing too.

Storage size is a significant issue, and the only negative thing about the console in my opinion, and given that 4K games aren’t much bigger, part of me wonders if I should have gone with an X. Alas, I caved and bought the expansion card.

On the controller, everything is matte now, and the triggers are textured, which I love. Good iterative improvements.

Overall, it’s a solid experience. It doesn’t really feel like a next-gen device though, but rather an iteration on the last generation, which I presume is more down to the approach Microsoft has taken, rather than the console itself. It’s the same Xbox one experience, just better, faster, and snappier. I’m satisfied with the console and I love the series S design. I just wish they had offered a 1TB version, and that more games were optimised for launch.

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If you haven’t seen this, super interesting background on why they made the S instead of just keeping the One X around.

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As someone who has zero interest in 4K, I’m very much glad they did. Don’t fancy paying next-gen prices for a headline feature I don’t care about. It’s all about FPS for me now. 1080p60 here’s that sweet spot where it becomes good enough for me, and any improvements beyond that I hardly notice so don’t care about.

This bug matters now because it’s started affecting me. Very annoying. Anyone else experienced it and have a quick fix method that doesn’t involve hard restarting my console an hour into a destiny 2 raid?

Hoorah! Looking forward to being able to play this both on switch and Xbox. iOS next? :crossed_fingers:

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After just googling the latest news on the Halo tv show, I just stumbled across a pretty sizeable news report discussing a very recent press release from Bungie. Since Bungie don’t have their own thread, and I don’t feel it warrants one, I thought I’d post it here is this is the thread where I’ve discussed Destiny most.

The headline is the most exciting part for me. I’ve long felt Destiny, with the depth of its lore, characters, and universe, would be more suited for episodic or cinematic story telling than Halo. I hope we see something come to fruition here. Perhaps even entice some of the larger stars in the cast to continue doing voice work for the game (Where are you Ikora?).

The article glosses over some of the other announcements briefly, as in a transition to becoming a publisher, as well as working on some of their own fresh IPs. Exciting stuff for Bungie.

Xcloud is finally launching in iOS via a PWA. Will work on PC too.

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Hoping I get invited soon :crossed_fingers:

Edit: nothing yet :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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I just got my invite! Well actually I got it on Thursday, but I only just saw the message! Looks like these are apparently being sent out via Xbox live and not email, so keep an eye out for messages from Xbox on your Xbox!

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A few quick thoughts after a very brief test. Works really well for a beta. Same sound crackling issues that were present from the console streaming beta in the Xbox app, so I’ve no doubt those will be eradicated at some point. Frame rate is quite choppy at times too, and the input does lag, especially with motion.

Some first party games have support for touch based controls and motion/gyroscope inputs, which is awesome and unexpected. Sea of thieves is one of those games. You can see the icon that identifies in the post above this one in the bottom left corner of the game cover art.

Here’s a screenshot of what these controls look like:

The walking icon on the left is how you move. The eye icon on the right is how you look around, and there are other various inputs there for buttons too. You can also use motion to look around. If you’ve ever played splatoon on wii u or switch, it’s exactly like that! If they sort the frame rate issues out, that will be a very nice experience in FPS games!

Also, my parrot is called Frank! Say hi, Frank!

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Jealous of this :weary: hoping mine turns up soon.

Hi Frank! Never really got into Sea of Thieves that much, as cool as it seemed! Although perhaps because I didn’t really have anyone to play with.

Really can’t wait to get my hands on this. Hopefully as the tech gets more bedded in, and I move to 5G at some point in the next 18 months, should massively increase the amount of time I can spend gaming :upside_down_face:

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