Winners and Losers: Xbox One Edition

Hi. 

Last week’s Playstation 4 release was a major success for Sony and a successfully-thrown gauntlet for Microsoft to match. Though it has been a rocky year, momentum has built behind the Xbox One. Can it match the PS4’s lead? Will it top the PS4’s lead? Only time will tell.

For now, here's my snarky oversimplification and editorialized qualitative judgments on the years of hard work many talented people put into an expensive and complex piece of hardware.

Sony

Microsoft’s olive branch last week from the official Xbox twitter was oddly sweet, and despite a few snipes from Sony over the last few days, they set it aside to send congratulations both from the official Playstation feed and from the feed of Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida. Nice to see before the inevitable scrap and stone-slinging starts up in earnest.

Microsoft

This has been a nightmarish year for the house that Gates built, with poisonously mixed messaging, executive departures, at least one veiled rape joke at E3, and generally hostile reactions from many members of the gaming community, but they managed to generally right the ship by the end and are looking at a great launch. This is a bold new console regardless of whether or not one likes it, and they’re basing some major decisions on some real gambles. Even if what they’ve produced doesn’t appeal to me (I have neither cable TV nor enough room to use the Kinect), I have to salute them for taking the Xbox brand in a new direction and I wish them all the best.

The multiplatform integration

While those looking for just a game console haven’t loved Microsoft’s attempts to make the Xbox One a more “casual” device, what work they’ve done has apparently gone well. Early reports and reviews state that the transition between apps and TV and games is largely seamless, and some of the picture-in-picture stuff sounds pretty cool. Even if this isn’t your cup of tea, at least it’s a success.

Kinect usage

It’s not perfect by a long shot, but when it works, it really does seem to work well. The user interface is a bit messy for controller usage (more on that later), but being able to cut through it by simply speaking is the kind of space-age technology which Microsoft has declared is the true definition of next-gen. 

Other Kinect features are pretty cool, as well: the face recognition technology, considered a large improvement over the tech used in the original Kinect, makes for a much smoother experience, the ability to read codes by just putting them up to the camera instead of typing them in makes the otherwise tedious task seem archaic, and the controller-detection has always seemed a cool feature. Time will tell if the admittedly rigid set of voice commands becomes smoother and the games make notable use of it, but right now, the new Kinect is already performing more admirably than the original Kinect ever did.

The sales

Those expecting- or, dare I say, hoping for- the Xbox One to wither and die met their match this weekend. For its worldwide release, the Xbox One sold through one million units; in other words, they sold basically everything they put out onto shelves. If anyone really wants to keep track of the competition between Sony and Microsoft, one could make the jab that Sony sold one million in America alone and it took Microsoft a worldwide release- but I would prefer to instead point out that the important thing here is both companies sold everything they put onto the market. Both of these consoles performing well is a truly great sign for the industry, and their competition heating up only means good things for us consumers.

Forza

With reviews almost unanimously singing its praises, Forza Motorsport 5 is an unmitigated success- a rarity, as we all know, for a launch lineup. Smooth, beautiful, and apparently a bundle of fun to play, Forza 5 is the kind of game which could (if backed up by software of similar quality) establish the Xbox One as a solid game console and make it an all-around valuable purchase.

Basically every game that isn’t Forza

Okay, maybe not every game- opinions on Dead Rising 3 aren’t bad but are without a doubt tempered- but the exclusives in this lineup are hurting. Crimson Dragon is not so good, Lococycle was described by Polygon as “the most overtly racist game of 2013,” and one of Ryse’s top reviews describes the combat as “suffocating.” Forza is a window of hope into a next generation of solid titles (Titanfall looks pretty awesome!) and launch lineups are notoriously weak, but at the very least some stronger indie support could have landed the Xbox something along the lines of the truly great Resogun. The multiplatform games are pretty good, but it’s hard to count that as anything but a loss for the Xbox One- if I’m a hardcore gamer and the best games are multiplatform, why play them on the console $100 more expensive?

KSI

Popular Youtuber KSI is a creep, and having him at the Xbox One launch was an initial misstep on Microsoft's part. Associating their brand with him at all, particularly on such a momentous occasion, could have been seen as giving his behavior an explicit thumbs-up and sending a bad message for how they wish to be represented. The follow-up, a statement saying "This does not represent Microsoft's endorsement of KSI's personal views, and we are not planning on working with KSI in the future," does clear things up a little but doesn't change the fact that the guy was there for a big moment in gaming history.

The controller

This is not a huge problem so don’t take this is a major loss, but there have been a handful of reports that the rearranged bumpers on the Xbox One’s controller are not all that comfortable and have caused cramping up on extended play sessions. I totally respect mixing things up and the response from the triggers while driving in Forza sounds awesome, but all Microsoft really had to do was take the truly excellent 360 controller and do nothing in order to have an unmitigated success here. 

The design

There’s no other way to put this: though design is in the eye of the beholder, the majority opinion seems to be that the Xbox One is as industrial-looking and bulky as initial images demonstrated. Adam Sessler reiterated the VCR comparison and it really seems like any beauty here comes on the inside. Also, in order to avoid hardware failure, it absolutely cannot be placed upright or- in this case it is like the 360- it cannot under any circumstances be moved while a disc is in the tray.

The user interface

The Windows Metro design is very attractive, but here it is said to be cluttered if controller usage is your thing. Menus within menus are name of the game here, making the Kinect usage your only way to smoothly get around.

Hardware failures

Yeah, go figure. Like every new hardware launch ever, the Xbox One is facing failure reports- and like the Playstation 4, there’s a variety to choose from. Disc drives are flat out not working and producing a sort of grinding noise, a few people are being banned for doing an emergency offline update (can’t figure that one out for the life of me), the console’s loading screen is flat out hanging, and installations are slow or just not happening. It’s not good, but as with the PS4, we won’t know the scope of these issues for a while and- while I truly am sympathetic to those who shelled out $500 and are getting screwed over- early adopters should know what they’re getting into.