5 things We Hate About The Xbox One

As part of our whinge fest series, we look at all major gaming platforms and decide the top 5 things we hate about them. Now it’s the Xbox One’s turn and man, was this an easy one to do.

5. ITS AN EYESORE

Look carefully…

Some people think the Xbox One looks sleek. Some people need to go to Specsavers. The Xbox One is supposed to blend into your home cinema setup but the designer of the console seems to think that the average consumer is either a member of the Borg, from North Korea or has a home cinema setup from 1980. It looks a giant VCR and with the console being so massive, including the Kinect and the power brick that looks like the Ghost Trap from Ghost Busters, the bloody thing really does take up a lot of space. Maybe this is part of Microsoft’s dastardly plan; to take over our living rooms by designing a console that literally takes up our living room.

4.THE USER INTERFACE

Oh how we miss the blades. Microsoft seem intent on force-feeding the Windows 8 UI on us, even if our bodies reject it from every orifice. Whilst we’ve been given some freedom in terms of customising our pins and backgrounds, it still feels clunky, slow and is generally akin to optical-rape. The UI was clearly designed for use with the Kinect and for many of us who elect to not purchase the ill-fated peripheral, we have to make due with a cluttered mess, which is difficult to navigate and focuses on form over function, not that it even excels at any appreciable level in the former department. Whilst the PS4 UI might seem barren in comparison, at least its functional and we prefer its simplicity over an interface that just tries way too hard. Nothing is intuitive about the Xbox One interface.

3. LONG INSTALLATION TIMES

Every Xbox One should come with its own cryostasis chamber

Defenders of the Xbox One’s arduous installation times tend to say ‘go make a sandwich’ or ‘watch some tv’ whilst a game installs. What they fail to realise is that the installation times are so long that we could prepare a full course dinner or complete an entire season of Breaking Bad by the time some games are done installing on the Xbox One. Long installation times were a major gripe we had with the PS3 but Microsoft have followed Sony’s initial missteps here and decided that time is a luxury we can afford. It is infuriating to have your mates come round to play a new game and be forced to watch the installation bar crawl to a finish. Both the PS4 and Xbox One use the same blu-ray drive so why does it take so bloody long on the X1?

 2. THE KINECT

What a gargantuan blunder by Microsoft. They clearly did not learn their lesson from the previous generation with Kinect 1.0. You would think that, when being bold enough to initially lump this camera in with the console, hiking up the price over its competitor’s technologically superior product, they would (1) ensure that the peripheral could finally have some gaming applications via true 1-to-1 tracking and (2) would stay committed to the device for more than a year.
What many of us early adopters are now left with is a device that has little to no core gaming applications. Aside from D4 and the mediocre Kinect Sports Rivals, we struggle to think of any use of the camera for our core games. Microsoft promised so much and yet all these promises have fallen flat on their face. Whilst we like the Kinect in terms of its ancillary functions on the console (which can be very hit and miss at times) had we known that the device would be relegated to the sidelines in terms of gaming, we would have sold the device in the first place. The Kinect seems to be a rather ironic name considering how it feels like the awkward third wheel in our gaming sessions on the Xbox One at times.

1. IMAGE QUALITY

When the GameOnDaily crew discussed the Xbox One there was one point that made everyone feel some desire to stab their console through whatever part would cause it to suffer most: Power (or the lack of it). After some discussion we decided that “power” is a set of numbers on a specification sheet, and the numbers themselves are not the problem. It’s silly to get angry about some digits just because we’ve seen bigger values somewhere else. We buy a console to play games, not compare spec-peens.

At least the whole power debate gave rise to so many hilarious gifs and memes

But does the power of the console figure into the games that we play? Absolutely! John Carmack said that it is extrordinary just how close the capabilities of the Xbox One and Playstation 4. He is a smart man, and so far his words have proven true in all but one regard: Image Quality. And that is a valid cause for a rant.

“Power” is not the real problem, but more power certainly could be a solution.

You can stick all your theories and hot words into a pot. ESRAM, Native resolution, 60fps, Stream Processors, frame buffers, upscaling, Jaguar cores,  whatever. Mix it up, bake it how you like. The end result doesn’t require any great technical understanding: Too many Xbox One games have visual defects that the human eye can process to reach a conclusion that the image is ugly. Jaggies, screen tearing, stutter, shimmering…. It’s not good enough.
“Power” is not the real problem, but more power certainly could be a solution. It isn’t the only available solution though. Personally I (Asa) have a 4k TV, and it can take a 720p60 image, upscale it, and display it without a single perceivable defect. Boosting the native resolution grants more detail, but it shouldn’t be essential to achieving a clean image. Post processing has come along way over the years, and there is no reason at all for a console that is apparently dedicated to games (and that definitely strains to push 1080p) to feature such lacklustre image processing.
Can the situation be improved with the current hardware? We really don’t know. But if jaggies and screen-tearing are here to stay then honestly,  we are ready for a new console.