So you may have seen this from us.
The stars were right, and we bought a next generation console yesterday – an X-Box One.
There were financial things that lined up – credit card rewards, a great sale at the store (buy a console, get a free game! Hello, Tomb Raider!), and even a coupon for a cheaper controller (because, there’s two of us gaming…). And hey, Fallout 4 came with it, why not? We chose one without a Kinect, we liked 1TB over 500GB… but all of these are just pieces on the what we got.
But why get it? What moved us this way? We’ve talked before about considering the new generation – and when we reached a decision point on it before almost two years ago, we bought a PS3 instead to play exclusives we missed there… many of which are sitting on a shelf still here in the house… So what changed?
Finally Some Good Games
This is something that happens with every new console generation – there’s not a whole lot out for it at first. The really good games are all still in development. And eventually, by the end of the life cycle of a console, you’re hitting some of the best games on it. Which is the sort of stuff that’s kept us going, video game-wise.
We’re still waiting for a lot of the games that there was buzz about when the consoles first came out. Still in production, two years later. Not really surprising, but it has meant that there has been no rush for us to upgrade.
I think the first big game to finally be an exclusive to the new console generation, and not be on both, was Batman Arkham Knight. Yeah… that one’s on the way. Before that, there wasn’t a lot of reason to upgrade – although for a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition it definitely felt like the upgrade system would help with it running smoothly.
But a lot of the good next-gen games are finally starting to hit, like the new Tomb Raider, like Star Wars Battlefront, like Halo 5, like Fallout 4. All of those hitting here just in time for Christmas this year… Rather than Christmas two years ago when the consoles came out…
Exclusives
So okay, it was finally time to consider the new generation of consoles if we wanted to play some of the new exciting games. That doesn’t necessarily help choose which, because most of the games are on both consoles. However, there are exclusives, and they finally drove our decision.
The big one for us so far is Rise of the Tomb Raider. The first one was amazing and Holly loved it, and this new one is an X-Box One exclusive. Quite the coup. And meanwhile, there’s no comparable exclusive on the PS4 to draw us in, and the other games we’re looking at are going to come out on the X-Box One.
Meanwhile, though I still need to play Halo 4… I am a fan of the Halo series for the story, and I’m excited to be able to continue that into the new generation of games. That’s another exclusive.
And, because we have so much work into our X-Box Gamertags, it is kind of nice to carry that over into the new generation. They’re solid accounts. That’s kind of like an exclusive, right?
Backwards Compatibility!
However, this last piece is the clincher for us. And it meant that there was far less of a reason to wait anymore, while we play through our games we haven’t finished…
Finally, backwards compatibility.
From http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/backward-compatibility which also has a list of the currently available backwards-compatible games.
It’s not everything yet – it seems like they’re working on updates for the games and running them on an emulator. Also, looking through the list of games, it’s a ton of X-Box Arcade games and older games. A lot of the newest games from the last generation actually have HD (they were already HD… super HD? HHD?) versions on the X-Box One – and I’ll bet those ones still don’t end up backwards-compatible. You’ll have to buy the new fancy version instead.
Still, it’s something, and I approve. Also, one of the games we were most upset about with the new consoles was Dragon Age Inquisition – which already got screwed up in terms of import. So I looked it up with the version on the new consoles, and found this page. Basically? They have a save importer for people moving from the old generation to the new. That means we can finally finish the game on the new console, running at higher efficiency. The game was huge, and played like it on the 360 – it was clunky at times.
There’s also a new Game of the Year edition of that… might have to get that…
Comparative Geeks 
My only issue with the XBox One are the profiles, which appear to have to be linked to Microsoft accounts. Here in the household, on our old Xbox 360, we had one profile that was linked to my Microsoft account to enable Xbox Live. And we had a ton of profiles, one for every member of the house, some for my daughter’s friends, some for me to test out different save games (I’d have a good Pat profile and a bad Pat profile, if I wanted to play a game where I knew going in that I wanted to make all the righteous choices or the not so righteous choices.)
Having the flexibility to do that was great, since we as a household don’t play multiplayer games that require online stuff, it was no big deal to only have one microsoft account.
But in firing up the Xbox One, it appears that I can’t create random local profiles, everything is forced to be linked to a Microsoft account and password controlled. That’s just a pain.
There’s a Guest Account area in settings, but I have not been able to figure it out.
I’m sure I’m just doing something wrong, but I haven’t had time to research it, and I didn’t have to on the Xbox 360. It just let me set things up smoothly.
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I’ll see if I can figure out the guest accounts for you then! We had two legit accounts on our 360, one each, then a number of guests as well. One thing with the accounts is that you don’t have to set it up to require the password every time, just on setup. So it can still be convenient – but yeah, online too.
If I recall, the Xbox One was lost in a bunch of outrage at first with all their online connectivity, the whole “always on” stuff with the Kinect that originally came with all of them. I noticed on setting it up there was a very prominent Privacy Settings info page… But their dream is still 100% online connection.
Also, the lack of good/many split and shared screen co-op games – rather than online co-op – says to me that for a lot of the industry, there’s still an attitude that gamers are lonely socially awkward boys/men in their parents’ basement. An attitude that is increasingly completely wrong – I recently saw a stat that 40+% of American women own a gaming console, and only like 37% of men. And couples. Families. People who actually have friends they hang out with…
Anyway. /rant
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Right on! I will follow your Entertainment System advice, ally!
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We’ve had an X-Box One since launch, but it’s really only been worth it for the Kinect voice commands. Very convenient when you’re watching Netflix with a cat on your lap and can’t reach the controller lol
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We actual also just got the new Apple TV, and can use the Siri button on that to do the same sorts of things. Also that remote will turn on the tv and control the volume which can be handy with a combination of cat and Geek Baby on our laps…
Hopefully your Xbox One starts being more worth it as the games start getting better!
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