Going against many of my personal principles, I bought an Xbox One on release day. And I'm not sure why. In the lead-up to its release I'd essentially disregarded the console in its entirety. The bad press from the announcement, and Microsoft's painfully bad PR team screwing things up worse (if the gaming community has an issue with you, never patronise or insult them). They went into some pretty drastic damage control for a while there, and reneged on some of the pretty intense restrictions on the console, turning it into something a little more appealing. When release day was approaching fast I suddenly had an urge to get one. Because I'm an idiot. There were two main things that should have stopped this.
1: I'm a Playstation gamer. I prefer the controller, the system, the exclusives, the overall console experience. Originally I'd intended to get a PS4, but a major obstacle prevents that until next year. The damn thing is already sold out everywhere, with heaps of backorders and orders pending. Many people have orders that won't be filled until late December. I couldn't get one if I tried.
2. It's a stupid idea to buy a console on release day. This is a big one that most long-time gamers are familiar with, particularly with the last few generations and their focus on online connectivity. Console release days are notorious for having issues, with hardware failure, internet connection problems, missing features and a lack of games that takes maybe half a year to correct itself.
Neither of these points, which still weigh pretty heavily in my mind (moreso now actually) stopped me from forking over the cash to pick up the thing. And I'm still trying to figure out why I did. This blog is for me to vent a little.
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There are a variety of emotions your Xbox One will make you feel. Confused, frustrated, aggravated and, worst of all, just tired. It will try your patience with its constant installs and downloads, it will frustrate you when things don't work and you have no idea why not. It will confuse you when, after getting the thing to work, you find yourself confused and lost, looking at unexplained features and not knowing what anything is or how to even work the console.
The Xbox One is, according to Microsoft, not merely a console. It's an entertainment centre. It's a hub for television, movies, music, internet and videogames. Microsoft can't make television or Blu-ray players so this is their move to challenge Sony in the home entertainment market. And it's an odd one. What you get is a Frankenstein-ish mishmash of useless features in a console that doesn't feel tuned for gameplay.
The major issue with the console becomes immediately apparent when you first turn it on. It needs to connect to the internet or it doesn't do anything. On first boot up the console immediately wants to go online so it can download an update. You can't skip it and you can't postpone it; the console won't even begin the initial set-up until it downloads the update. If you can't get or don't have an internet connection you can't do anything with your Xbox One. This is the deal breaker.
And that's the main issue I have with the console; it is so ingrained with online connectivity that it won't do anything without it. If you turn on the console while your internet is offline, you won't be able to view basic things like your profile or your achievements. In fact two thirds of the dashboard menu will be blanked out. Some games will just refuse to launch as, without an internet connection, they can't confirm you actually own them (an insulting mechanism that amounts to monitoring what players do). Xbox One's insistence on a constant, stable online connection is invasive and concerning, and the fact that it refuses to do anything without a connection is a troubling sign.
How smooth and seamless installs and downloads are is completely dependent on your internet connection and speed. If yours isn't great (like mine) then expect to wait hours instead of minutes as otherwise trivial patches take full afternoons to install. I had to move my modem directly next to the Xbox to get a good signal. Once I did things improves but I shouldn't have had to.
User friendly is not how I'd describe the Xbox One. Actually the console doesn't even bother trying to ease you into anything; once the initial set-up is done you're left to figure out everything for yourself. The console has no instruction manual, only a tiny 'quick start' guide that only shows you how to plug it in. I don't understand a lot of the basic user interface, or the features. What the hell is Snap and how does it work? What are all these odd pre-loaded apps and how do I get rid of them? When you trawl through the limited menus and eventually find the Help tab things get worse where instead of providing you with simple, reassuring instructions the console instead loads up an internet browser to go online and look for help.
The days of buying a game, inserting the disc and just playing are far behind us now. While last gen introduced the annoyances of patches and installs, Xbox One makes things abundantly worse. All disc-based games need to perform a lengthy install onto the console, some as big as forty gigabytes. These installs can take a long time, and even longer with patches. It's made worse by the fact that you can't check how long the installs will take, you can only guess and wait.
The console is full of so many frustrating and baffling basic oversights that it's embarrassing. You can't check how much hard drive space there is on your console. Instead the console will give you a message telling you if you're running out. This is a frustrating decision as it prevents you from actually looking at what's taking up the space, forcing you to live in the dark about how much space there is, setting you up for failure for the day you buy a game and find you don't have the space to install it.
So basically getting the console to actually work is a harrowing experience, one that will test your patience and your internet connection.
This was the first part, where I talked about the potentially harrowing set-up process with a game console that doesn't want to be a game console. Next blog I'll talk about what happens when you actually start using the thing.
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