- Hello, good morning!
And today we've just gotten our first look at Xbox Series
X Gameplay with huge titles
such as Halo, Forza, and many, many more.
Let's actually compare how the Xbox Series X
is now shaping up with some of the
excellent-looking PS5 gameplay we already have.
So one of the interesting thing is that all of the games
shown off at this morning's Xbox presentation
are all actually being available on Xbox Game Pass.
Now that is something which is cool,
'cause obviously Game Pass means that
you get all this stuff for free,
and you also get it all immediately on day one.
But let's actually take a closer look before we dive
into the big stuff like Halo.
It's some of the launch titles
that are being brought over to Series X,
'cause as far as I'm concerned
this almost tells us more about the performance
and the power of the console
when you look at something like Ori.
Now Ori was a great looking game.
It's a little on the simpler side
on something like the Xbox One.
What we're getting on the Series X
is full 4K HDR 120 frames per second support.
That is something which,
if you would have asked me six months ago,
I would have not expected to see the console generation.
But it makes a lot of sense.
These consoles are capable
of 4K and 120 frames per second at the same time.
And it's really encouraging to see on pretty much
day one of the console launch.
We're going to see at least some games,
and admittedly stuff that may be on the older side.
We're going to see games that are going to be
fully supporting that.
Now it's interesting to compare this
with something like Spider-man Miles Morales on the PS5,
which is sort of an interesting blend of a game.
Now obviously we don't have a ton of gameplay on that,
it's a little it more of a cinematic trailer at the moment.
But the thing with Spider-man is, this in a lot of ways
feels like it's more of a kind of,
I don't want to say expansion pack,
'cause that's obviously not quite this case,
but it seems like very much a little bit
of a smaller scope game when you look at this
compared to the PS4 version of Spider-man.
Now there's nothing wrong with that,
obviously there is gonna be a lot of new content,
whereas a lot of these games for the Series X
are just straight getting a patched come-up
for the Series X.
But the thing is, I think it's really interesting
to look at the approach that Sony is taking
versus Microsoft here.
Sony are going into this with like,
"Hey, you know what?
"We're not really focusing a lot
"on the PS4 backwards compatibility."
They're not really talking a lot about games
that are getting patches to work on PS5,
whereas Xbox has been all about that.
Now obviously I like the idea of buying my Xbox Series X,
plugging it in and on day one having all of these games
that are already optimized for Series X.
But it's interesting to look at the way that
each of these companies are tackling this problem.
Now part of that will certainly will come down to the fact
that while, yes, they are both huge technical leaps forward,
there are certainly advantages on the Xbox side, right?
While the PS5 does have a faster SSD,
the Xbox has a slightly faster CPU
and a significantly more powerful graphics chip.
And as we'll talk about a little bit later
when we get into more of the head-to-head stuff,
I'm going to be really curious to see
how some of these things line up.
Because especially when you look at how heavily
the ray-tracing implementations are really going
to play into this next generation of consoles,
I think it's going to be really interesting to see exactly
how much muscle these consoles have
to truly push the visuals that you expect
out of a new generation.
Now there are a lot of other new updates,
say for example, Forza Horizon 4
is going to be running at a full 4K 60 Hertz.
Now some titles, such as these Next Gen games
like Watch Dogs: Legion,
we don't have a lot of information on,
but we can see that there's things like ray-tracing
which are being implemented.
Surprise, surprise.
Obviously we've already seen some PC previews of Watch Dogs,
and they look great.
Some of the other games that are being updated include,
not only Dirt 5,
which I will say is actually one of the very few games,
especially considering it's a third party title,
which will be supporting not only 4K resolution,
but frame rates up to 120 frames per second.
Now obviously when we talk about the high frame rate gaming,
it's kinda difficult to sort of really get a good idea
that on stream, where you're obviously not going to be able
to see 120 frames per second,
but for me that's one of the things I'm most excited about
for this console generation.
It's obviously a feature we've had on the PC
for a very long time,
and the ability to have 120 frames per second games
right out the gate is really exciting, right?
And obviously this is something we're going to see
on the PS5 side as well,
but it's nice to see that developers
are feeling confident enough to really make this
a huge priority day one, versus like four years from now
we start seeing some games that are starting to push it.
I mean it's easy to forget,
that a lot of the previous generation
especially on the base Xbox One,
we're running games at like 30 FPS.
Now sure, I'm assuming that there will be
some 30 FPS games here and there,
but generally speaking we're seeing a lot of 60 FPS
and a lot of games that are reaching for that 120 FPS
which is gonna make a big difference.
Again, what we actually have a lot of experience with
is Gears 5 running on the Series X.
'Cause we're actually able to play a little bit of that
back in our early preview in February or March
or in the before time.
So we know for a fact
they're pushing the envelope on this one.
So we know that they're running ultra textures,
some actual details that are running above PC spec.
And we also have a little bit of a better idea
of some other games, such as Sea of Thieves,
which are getting a full Series X pass.
In fact, that's one of the nice things about this
is that a lot of these games that Xbox have announced today,
are sort of easy free patches
that you don't even need to worry about, right?
You install the game that you already play on Xbox One,
and it will be not only running on Series X,
but importantly, it will be getting a sometimes minor,
but sometimes pretty major graphical update.
And this also applies to a lot of third party titles.
So we already know a bunch of titles such as like Cyberpunk
are going to be supported on the Series X,
but we also have stuff like Assassin's Creed of Halo,
which while they're a little bit vague
on like exactly how far they're pushing the hardware,
we do know the targeting things like 4k, 60
all that kind of stuff.
And a lot of the gameplay and (clears throat)
gameplay we've seen about it looks solid so far.
Now the game I was really excited to see today
is the brand new edition of Forza Motorsport.
So this is the main line entry
and they've sort of dropped the numbers.
But essentially while we only got a very small trailer,
so you look at something like Gran Turismo
where we actually got real gameplay
and even the menu and stuff, it's kind of hard to judge.
But when you put these two titles side by side,
I think this might be the best like apples apples comparison
with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X.
So let's take a closer look at Forza first.
So we see a lot of things on display.
So first of all, and something kind of interesting to me,
even though Microsoft had talked a lot about
a lot of these games are going to be across generations.
So for example, Halo runs on Xbox One and PC and Series X,
this new Forza game, which is early in development,
so we don't even know when it's coming out,
is an exclusive to the PC
and specifically to the Xbox Series X.
So that means that some of these things such as Ray tracing,
I think should be pretty much standard across the board.
Now Gran Turismo also does feature Ray tracing,
and honestly, you look at some of the stuff like this.
I mean, you look at the Garage games,
it looks incredibly good.
If you do some pixel peeping,
you'll see the Ray tracing implementation
is a little bit lower resolution.
Now based on this Forza footage,
it's a little bit hard to see,
but my assumption is that while both of these consoles do
have what seems to be pretty solid Ray tracing capability,
it might not quite be on the same level of something like
the RTX cards that you get on the PC.
That being said though, the level of detail that you can see
in this clip, I think is really interesting because,
for Forza, it's a game that obviously
has always prided itself on sort of being
a little bit more realistic, right?
And same thing with Gran Turismo, right?
I would feel like these are very sort of similar games.
I'm really curious to see exactly how they stack up,
because right now they're pretty much matching each other.
Ray tracing, HDR, 4k, 60 frames per second,
all of that stuff.
What happens when we get maybe a 120 FPS option?
What happens when you start pushing
the envelope a little bit more?
I wanna see more footage, but from what I've seen,
I'm very excited for Forza.
But man, that could give us like
a little bit of gameplay.
I mean, it's all an engine, but like,
it just wasn't very long.
The game we think everyone was really excited to see
today is Halo Infinite.
Now we've seen this tease for quite a while, all right?
So we saw it at E3 2018, a brief little teaser.
We saw a lot more of it last year at E3,
we saw a little bit of it at the Game Awards.
This is a game that I think a lot of people are hyped for
and there's a lot going for it.
But also while it's probably our best representation
of some real gameplay, right?
So they showed us the menu,
they showed us what I assume was a very fast loading screen
and a few minutes of the campaign.
My main takeaway here is that while yes, it looks good.
This is an Xbox One game, right?
Don't forget, this is an Xbox One game
that is optimized for XBox Series X.
And while that might not sound like a strong distinction,
this is a game that has been in development for years right?
And with that sort of base Xbox One
and One X sort of in mind,
I think it limits a little bit the scope and the scale.
So let me talk a bit about that.
So the Halo Infinite that we've seen
was running on Series X.
Now we do know that it's running at 4k,
we know that it is running at a locked 60 FPS
and the performance looked good.
It's always hard to judge the image quality
when you're watching a YouTube or a Twitch stream,
especially when you look at like live stuff,
it's a little bit sort of low bit rate.
You lose a lot of the detail, gets a little crunchy,
but from what I could tell, it looked good.
Especially when you look at the cut scene, right?
So the cut scene did a good job of showing off
the lighting especially.
You look at like the faces, it looks great.
And like that depth of field was very, very natural.
It looked cinematic, right?
And especially how they transitioned very seamlessly
from the cut scene to the actual gameplay, great.
The gameplay itself looked fun, right?
I mean, it looks like Halo, as you expect Halo to play.
There are a couple of new additions,
but I think my big takeaway here,
is if you look at Halo Infinite,
combined with something like Ratchet & Clank on the PS5,
which is probably the best example
of PS5 gameplay we have right now.
I mean, I love Horizon, it's a very cool looking game,
but that was a trailer, right?
That's not real gameplay, it's a little hard to compare.
So if you look at Ratchet & Clank,
obviously this is a very, very different art style, right?
So it's much more colorful, it's much more poppy.
So you really can't do
an apples to apples, comparison of graphics.
But my real takeaway is that Ratchet & Clank
was really taking advantage of the PS5,
in a way that it kind of feels like Halo Infinite isn't.
So as a game that has to work on Xbox One,
all the way up to Series X,
to me, it looks like the Series X version
is just running at a higher resolution with better textures
and all the kind of stuff that you expect
out of other Xbox One games
that are being ported to the Series X.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And I do know that the actual scope of Halo Infinite
is much larger than before, right?
So they've said something like it's several times larger.
One of the Halo rings is several times larger
than the previous Halo games combined.
Look man, I've up very early this morning.
So the scaler is cool there, but like
I'm not out here to play games
that are a huge open world, right?
I mean, obviously something like Red Dead or GTA five,
I mean, these are huge open world games
that we're able to run last generation.
That's cool, but that doesn't
sort of give you that huge scale.
Now sure I'd bet Elevator at the beginning was a cool
sort of shot to show like, hey look, this world is big,
there's a lot of verticality there.
But I'm excited to play Halo, I think it's very cool.
But I don't think it's showing the Xbox Series X off
at its true potential.
And I think that when you look at some other games
that are coming out,
I think there's a little bit more
that can be pulled out of this.
But actually before the event started,
I sat down with Jeff Keeley for the Xbox pre-show
and talked a lot about my expectations
for what I really think the Xbox Series X is capable of.
- Also I wanted to ask you about the specs
and the frame rates and all that type of stuff,
you live in the world of tech
and our DNA, our architectures and whatnot.
Like what does that all mean to the gamers?
Like how do you think the games are going to be different?
Or what are the things we should look for here
and Ray tracing and things like that,
like what do you think are gonna be some of the big leaps
that we're gonna see,
in some of these games, hopefully today?
- So I think the interesting way of looking at
sort of the previous generation sort of Xbox One PS4,
going into this new generation,
is that it's a much more well rounded package, right?
So you look at something like the Xbox Series X,
spec wise, it is equivalent to a very high end gaming PC.
That's not something we've seen
in the console space for a long time, right?
You look at the Xbox One, it had good graphics, right?
It was able to provide some really impressive games.
You'll get something like Red Dead 2
running on an original Xbox One,
it's really impressive that
that was able to be sort of accomplished.
But the thing is this generation with the Series X,
we have now the SSD,
which I think people are going to very quickly get used to
not minute load times, but a few second load times.
But also you have that really powerful CPU,
which is going to enable these bigger open worlds
sort of more interesting looking physics.
And then you have on the graphic side,
now only sort of more detailed things.
And I think the higher frame rates are something that,
especially as more and more TVs are developing
that sort of tech that
people are gonna really start to appreciate.
But also these new features like Ray tracing, right?
Which are just going to help ground these worlds
in a much more sort of realistic sort of location.
Like I guess for me, it's more about making the console
a much more complete package, right?
You're not sort of sacrificing because you're
playing games on your PC versus your Xbox or anything.
Like you're gonna be getting
a very similar level of performance.
And a lot of cases, something like the Series X
is going to be significantly more powerful
than any other gaming device in your home.
So the summer of consoles is fully upon us.
So hopefully you guys enjoy,
make sure to subscribe to the channel
for lots more content on the PS5 and the Xbox Series X,
including maybe some new hardware announcements
in the next few months hopefully.
So thank you very much for watching.
And now if you'll, excuse me, I'm gonna go take a nap.
- [Ken] An Infinite nap?
- No, I don't know what...
- [Man] That's called dead.
- That's dead, Ken.