Xbox One: My First Two Weeks
After spending a couple weeks with the Xbox One, I’m optimistic about its potential, even though I’ve yet to be blown away by anything it has to offer.
I picked up Battlefield 4 when I grabbed the Xbox One, and while the game looks great, it’s not a dramatic leap forward from the Xbox 360. The same goes for Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Killer Instinct and Call of Duty: Ghosts. Don’t get me wrong–all of these games look impressive. But visuals alone aren’t the main selling point of the Xbox One for me.
The worst part about the Xbox One for me is the interface. It’s really just awful to navigate. The only saving grace is that you can “pin” items to a home screen, so I’ve just basically put all the apps I use regularly in one place.
And speaking of apps, I have used both the Twitch app and the YouTube app quite a bit since I bought the console. Both are great. I’ve yet to really dive into the Skype app, but I will in the next few weeks.
One of the things I’ve been pleasantly surprised with so far is the ability to use regular headphones with the Xbox one and use the Kinect for your chat mic. The audio quality isn’t as good as a mic, but it’s a nice option and it allowed me to use a decent pair of headphones for game audio until I got my Xbox One headset. And speaking of that headset, it’s really nice. This is probably blasphemy, but I find it more comfortable than the Turtle Beach headset I had for my Xbox 360. What’s even better about the new headset is that you can unplug it and use pretty much any headphones with the adapter for game audio purposes. So when I’m playing by myself and the family is asleep, I can just pop in my phone earbuds and enjoy the audio without the bulky headset.
As far as chat goes overall, Microsoft just patched in cross-game chat, so I haven’t had the chance to try it yet. but I’ve had no complaints about the chat functionality so far. Time will tell.
Another pleasant surprise–the controller. I expected it to be just like the Xbox 360 controller, but I actually like it better. The shoulder buttons and triggers are wider, and I Iike the smaller and more concave versions of the sticks. The only thing that feels like a step back is the clicking of the sticks, but that might also be because the controller is new.
I have not used too much of the voice navigation on the Kinect yet, but there is one command that is pretty great–”Xbox, record that.” With that command, the Xbox automatically records the last 30 seconds of gameplay. So, you can capture a great moment right after it happens. You can also open the game dvr function and record up to five minutes of gameplay, but I found that a bit distracting, as i was trying to make something cool happen as opposed to just capturing something cool I did in the course of gameplay. No matter how you record, you then head over to the Upload Studio app to edit clips, add effects and then upload them to OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), where you can share them. My one gripe with this (as you’ll see in the video below), is that when you embed a clip you saved to OneDrive, the video does not play in the blog page, but rather brings you to OneDrive to view the clip. I’m hoping that gets patched later on, as it really discourages the use of clips for blog posts.
Twitch broadcasting is supposed to arrive with Titanfall, and the most exciting thing about it is that you’ll be able to archive broadcasts, which is what really bummed me out about the PS4’s twitch integration. I will be doing a good amount of streaming and then posting the archived streams to the blog here.
So after two weeks, I’m definitely enjoying the Xbox One and I look forward to really getting into Titanfall with my gaming pals this week. Down the road a little, I am chomping at the bit for Elder Scrolls Online. That may actually become my most-played game on the Xbox One, if it’s as good as it’s shaping up to be.
I’ll be posting a lot more about my experiences with Xbox One, and if you have specific questions, feel free to pose them in the comments below.