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.