Xbox Series S [XBSS] [Release November 10 2020]

They're pretty much wedded to it, a lot of people have a lot of discs and not giving people a way to play those? Not good. :nope: Not unless they're going to run a mass disc-mail-in programme where they credit you the equivalent digital licence.

Or you just buy the current ps5 model and after sony produces x millions of them simply says hey find one used or refurbished if you want disks
 
Or you just buy the current ps5 model and after sony produces x millions of them simply says hey find one used or refurbished if you want disks
Sure, if the manufacturer wants to alienate their customer base.

#DEALWITHIT worked out really well. :cool:
 
Don't really see disc drives making it past this generation.
Me neither, but there needs to be a plan for people with disc libraries to convert them to digital libraries.
 
Me neither, but there needs to be a plan for people with disc libraries to convert them to digital libraries.

We're talking about the same company that will gladly sell you multiple remasters of the same game? And the one with the 2nd best backward compatibility support? I say good luck with that. LOL

Tommy McClain
 
They're pretty much wedded to it, a lot of people have a lot of discs and not giving people a way to play those? Not good. :nope: Not unless they're going to run a mass disc-mail-in programme where they credit you the equivalent digital licence.

Agreed. It’s not these consoles are guaranteed to last for 8-10 years. Who wants their console to go down only to have no option for a new replacement, have to buy a used unit or have their disc library turn into a coaster collection.
 
Don't really see disc drives making it past this generation.

Yeah they will probably disappear, but I don't think physical games are going to go away 100% either. Technically speaking, solid 80 MB/s - 156 MB/s microSD cards should be dirt cheap at the 128 GB - 256 GB capacity range by 10th gen. At large volumes, probably not much more expensive than UHD Blu-Ray discs are right now in terms of manufacturing costs.

At those bandwidths they'd be at least as good as UHD, potentially much better, and they aren't replacing the SSDs so it's just a matter of storing the data on the card to make it as a transfer. I can see them becoming the preferred media for physical game distribution in several years, with Nintendo already in on that game. So the PC-Engine Hu-Card will finally become a mainstream physical game cartridge format; you were way ahead of the curve NEC :cool:.

With the S, MS have done a soft transition to digital only for a good % of their console base. The PC and mobile base are already there of course.

I'll happily take the reduction in landfill over the issues with digital. :)

With me it's not just about eco-friendliness though, there's also the issue of rights and preservation. If you get all your stuff digitally and by some freak incident you lose access to your account, you also tend to lose access to all of that digitally purchased software.

The following hasn't happened yet (kind of), but there's also the worry that, particularly if gaming does shift fully to a subscription-based model, that we just kind of play a gamble on games currently available suddenly disappearing. Arguably this already happens with GamePass, as games are taken out of rotation. But I'm guessing they give users a heads-up on what games will be taken out of rotation and when, which would be nice.

There are other issues, though, like with what happened with PT on PS4; that is essentially lost to time, which makes preservation of it almost impossible. What if more gaming companies go full Disney and begin throwing tons of stuff in their vaults, with no means of acquiring them physically? Then we're completely at their mercy to obtain access once more.

And don't even get me started on the potential issues with censorship; take a prior release, lock it to digital, throw it in the vault, then bring it back 3-4 years later but whoops, small things that were perfectly fine (and not genuinely tasteless or maliciously bigoted/offensive/hateful) a few years ago are suddenly the worst of sin now and must be edited out of the re-release. Guess there goes the original artistic vision o_O
 
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Don't really see disc drives making it past this generation.

Same for plastic boxes with powerfull hardware under the TV (or yes, besides since 2020). Eventually, if thats past this gen or the gen after that, its probably going to be all service (PSnow, Xcloud etc). Just everywhere you can sign in on will be your console.
 
Was just thinking that I'm surprised that Doom eternal has been patched to run at 1080p60 on XSS when it runs at 1440p60 on the 4pro, guessing 1080p60 on PS4.

I know it's just a quick patch, but dynamic resolution 1200p60 at least seems like an easily achieved goal with no testing required above and beyond what the current patch would have required.
It's just running in BC mode.
 
I also don't see how the division 2 is getting 4k60, same as PS5 and XSX.

Maybe they made a mistake with the release of the details?
Maybe it's 1440p60 DR, as I guess anything above 1080p is sometimes just called 4k?
Nice to hear regardless of what it actually ends up being.

Just find the Doom one a bit underwhelming considering they bothered to patch it, and this one strange based on them saying 4k60.
 
PUBG's reddit recently posted info about their most recent game update. Here's a section which I found interesting:

Recently we announced that PUBG would run at 60 FPS on Xbox Series S starting with Update 9.2 and we'd like to share more info with you on how this was achieved. The Xbox Series S uses the Xbox One S version of a game, which means that if we make changes to Xbox Series S, it'll affect Xbox One S and vice versa. This means that to deliver 60 FPS on Xbox Series S, we had to make sure that our game build is stable on Xbox One S with an increased frame rate cap. However, our engineers were able to find a workaround that allows us to make changes unique to a specific device (The Xbox Series S, in this case).

So why not use this workaround to enhance other graphics options on other Consoles too? We technically could, but this is where we cross the line between backwards-compatibility and native support. Every time we add enhancements that are unique to Xbox Series X/S and PS5 consoles, each one becomes a risk that our teams have to be mindful of. If an update brings a stability issue and if there are too many variables between last-generation and the new current-generation settings, the dev team will have many more potential causes to consider.

I suppose I never thought about that before. Cross-gen games using 8th gen versions might not get any extra work done to them on 9th gen consoles if it would then "break" the game on 8th gen machines. Even if there's a workaround, like they say here, it might be more trouble than it's worth. There are a lot of consoles to have to deal with in the Xbox ecosystem.
 
That's kind of funny (odd way), given there is a XdkGen9Aware that allows the developers to know what machine profile they're running on. The same likely exists with the GDK too. But the point does stand that if you make changes to the same codebase it can impact the former generation hardware.
 
That's kind of funny (odd way), given there is a XdkGen9Aware that allows the developers to know what machine profile they're running on. The same likely exists with the GDK too. But the point does stand that if you make changes to the same codebase it can impact the former generation hardware.

It sounds like they were trying to avoid forking their codebase for nextgen consoles. Understandable, because then you have twice code maintenance and testing to do for every new version going forward.
 
It sounds like they were trying to avoid forking their codebase for nextgen consoles. Understandable, because then you have twice code maintenance and testing to do for every new version going forward.
Although that may be true, then why say they found a way to do it. Do they mean they read the updated developer docs?

As has been mentioned, there is now a profile flag to indicate if running on current gen for XDK BC code.
It's what makes uping resolutions and framerates without having to move across to GDK possible.
 
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