Well, my daughter is closer to moving out to college and a dorm, and the series s would fit better.
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Xbox Series X (coming 10 Nov 2020)
- Thread starter gkarris
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Well, my daughter is closer to moving out to college and a dorm, and the series s would fit better.
I just had a look on my Xbox One and there are 179 games in my library, 145 currently installed, only three of them are from Game Pass, and I own precisely six discs (one of which came free with the console).
Nobody really needs an optical drive in 2020. I'd get a Series X rather than S, but the drive will only be used for playing DVDs.
Also, the ability to quickly switch between games seems to be a big new feature for the Series X but you can't do that if you have to keep swapping discs to prove you own the game.
Gamepass is designed to kill the used game market. As you correctly said, quick switch requires games to be installed.
Where discs will make sense is if game downloads are 100-200GB large *cough cough Flight Simulator*, and it’s basically quicker to pop in a disc and reinstall a game. Furthermore, will downloads be throttled either MS or ISP.
It‘s too early to tell whether discs will be advantageous or not.
Good so no more ladders or tunnels or endless running across a nondescript plain for 30s
100GB - 200GB ?? That's multiple discs. Also that's without any day 1 patches required to play or add on/additional content you want to download.
I also guess is there was bandwidth throttling, it would be totally done by the ISP. They are infamous for being like that. It's in MS best interests for us to buy and download as many games as possible. The ISPs are quite the opposite.
I haven’t installed from a disc in a long time, but I’m not sure it would be any quicker, given the way today’s games tend to get continually updated. Call of Duty Modern Warfare, for example, the package on disc would have been around 50 GB but there was a day one update of an additional 50-60 GB that had to be downloaded. The file size seems to go up and down with various patches, but right now my PC version is around 230 GB. Even if I had a disc, I’d still be looking at a huge download to reinstall it.
PC games have been all digital for over a decade, and it has been a while since Apple sold a Mac with an optical drive. But Microsoft got absolutely savaged by gamers when they said that Xbox One would have a hybrid disc/online licence system, which would have meant used games would have to be “reactivated” for a fee. Perhaps console gamers still aren’t ready for the digital future!
COD MW at 230GB on your PC? You must be kidding right?
Hmm. Now I am having second thoughts about buying the S and might buy the X to ensure that I don't develop storage anxiety Within the first 12 months.
If I buy an Xbox instead of PS5 it will be for flight simulator and Forza. Open world games will only get bigger. Although some content can be loaded dynamically from,the web, locally stored/cahached content is best for frame rate and possibly fan speed.
So the 500GB internal storage of the Series S will hold what, like two AAA games?
I wish! Looks like it has shed a few GB since the last update (it has been at least 13 GB higher at times) but Call of Duty is a total porker.
Flight Simulator weighs in at 110 GB on PC. I checked a few Xbox games as well, and the largest one I have is Red Dead Redemption 2 at 119 GB. Then there's Hitman 2 (118 GB), Halo Master Chief Collection (101 GB), Halo 5 (97.5 GB), GTA V (84 GB) and dozens of others in the 40-60 GB range.
Those are are basic Xbox One games without 4K assets, but I expect there will be some sort of heavy compression involved on the Series X/S. Otherwise you won't be able to store many games on either of them. The OS reserves a lot of space for quick swapping, in-game DVR and things like that. Current Xbox models reserve between 140-220 GB for the OS. I'm sure I read something about Series X having 100 GB of SSD as virtual RAM.
Bottom line is even the Series X is likely to run out of storage space quite quickly, if you like keeping your games installed. I hope the expansion drives aren't ludicrously expensive.
Thanks for the insight!
Is this a reasonable guestimation?
512GB: Space for 3-4 flagship/big title games
1TB: 6-8GB flagship/big title games
One of the biggest benefits of the rapid SSD is the ability to load assets and environments into the RAM in near-real-time. This could make compression tricky as it would add time and a resource(CPU) tax.
Good point about quick switching. I wonder how much space on the SSD the feature will use for storing cached/hibernated sessions.
Although I'm not a storage whore, Gamepass benefits for big storage. It wouldn't be ideal to have access to hundreds of games but have to constantly redownload 60-120GB of data. This is where game streaming should fill the void as it would be great to stream single-player games that are not sensitive to low latency.
I like how MS has approached storages for Flight Simulator. Creative assets are downloaded from the cloud as you fly. However you can cache some of it.
When I had a PS4 Pro and casually played Grand Turismo a few times per month I was sometimes annoyed by the overly frequent pathes and updates of cars and tracks that I never used.
I have read that GTA6 will have separate single and multiplayer games. If so, this would make alot of sense in order to reduce wasted storage for those who play online and have zero interest in the single player games.
Or possibly a single AAAA game.So the 500GB internal storage of the Series S will hold what, like two AAA games?
Ubisoft Is Working On Two AAAA Games: Beyond Good & Evil 2 And A Title From Ubisoft Berlin - PlayStation Universe
New LinkedIn listings reveal that Ubisoft is working on two AAAA games. One of them is Beyond Good & Evil 2 and the other is a new game from Ubisoft Berlin.
www.psu.com
Supposedly it's possible to reduce the install size because a single asset can be accessed equally quickly from anywhere on an SSD, whereas on a spinning rust disc they're often repeated in multiple locations for optimal loading speed. Not that you'd know it while waiting five minutes for Red Dead 2 to load...
I'm not expecting to be able to fit many games on it, anyway. I expect it will be like my PC games library, where I've only got about a quarter of the games I own installed. Which, of course, means I hardly ever play the rest.
Sounds like some games will definitely be better suited to streaming rather than downloading every time you want a quick go. In which case, Series S might be the better deal.
I would love the ability to uninstall and download games from my phone, so should I be at work or somewhere, I could make changes so that my game of choice is ready to be played as soon as I get home.
I think the better solution would be a seamless way to move games to and from the external storage attached to the console. For backwards compat it wont matter so much but for new gen games they will need the performance boost that being on the main SSD provides.
I think you've been able to do the download part remotely for a long time now, so we're halfway there. It even shows the install progress bar on the phone. I can't see any option to uninstall but it seems like a logical step - like archiving unused iOS apps.
You can archive Switch games though. Basically it's an uninstall but keeps your saves and the game icon in your game list. Not exactly the same thing though.
What we need for the next gen consoles is an easy way to move games to and from external storage to the main SSD. I know that's a lot more SSD writes. But with games this large, that's the best solution we have.
I should imagine they'd have that option somewhere. Having to move games from an external drive to the SSD would be annoyingly slow and would go against the whole fast loading / swapping between games message they've been promoting, but I think they'd want to avoid the fuss people with metered connections will kick up if they have to repeatedly download the same 50 GB file.
Unboxing videos have just dropped on Youtube! It only means one thing, reviews and comparisons between the X and S will be released a few days ahead of pre-orders opening
Especially those with a slow internet connection or with multiple members of the same household streaming Netflix/Youtube while scrolling through Tiktok.
I just installed windows on my MPB with the intention of playing Flight Simulator 2020.
I created a 190GB partition for Windows 10 but couldn't install FS as 152GB was required and there was just 148GB left after installing Windows! Mad. This is would expansion packs and pre-caching of building terrain from Azure cloud servers.
Since then I have downloaded Forza 4 but have been unimpressed with the download speed 8-10MB. Because next gen consoles are capable of loading assets in real time, open world games will only get bigger.
The cheaper Series S could be a false economy for some if they buy one for £249 but then have to spend £100 on a 1T memory card.
Some recent non-gaming laptops can run FS at 1080p high with playable frame rates. That setting still looks very good. The more powerful Series S should be capable of higher settings.
It's a very demanding game and on the Xbox there will likely be at least two gaming settings depending on whether the priority is eye candy or framerate.
FS 2020 is one of MS greatest games ever and a first party exclusive. It's in MS interest for the game to look respectable on the Series which has the potential, together with FS, to attract new Xbox customers.