My Xbox One X finally arrived yesterday (it was delayed by an inane shipping route, but whatever). When I saw it had been delivered, I used my lunch break at work to go try and quickly set it up so it would be good to go when I got home. I have an hour to use for lunch, and I live about ten minutes from my work, so realistically, I had about a 40 minute window to try and get it done. I was as prepared as I could be, having already transferred all my stuff onto a new external drive (this one), including the patches that I'd already downloaded for the One X Enhanced games. It's cool that they let you do that beforehand so your first day with the new toy isn't spent downloading shit, and I cannot say enough about how good of a job they do with the external storage on the Xbox. It was really easy to get that all ready to go.
I didn't have the time to really do the dumb, fun slow unboxing thing where I cradle each individual component like it's magical. Time was of the essence, so I ripped into the weirdly rectangular box like a kid on Christmas. I had a brief moment of panic where I thought that my shipment was missing a power brick until I realized the One X doesn't have a power brick. I shoved batteries in the Scorpio Controller (which is awesome, BTW) and then started ripping cables out of the TV. From my Google Fiber, I'm running the included HDMI cable into the One X. The HDMI out to the TV is a Monoprice cable, and I'm running the Ethernet cable directly to the Xbox for maximum internets. All of that bolted up very quickly, so I fired it up for the first time.
The opening video was actually pretty cool. It then went to your typical language/location selection, and had me sign into my Microsoft account. At the end of that, it needed its initial firmware update. This was the only real bummer of the process, because it took 5-10 minutes I didn't really have, but it was go time after that. Auto-detection of cable box/TV/surround sound all worked and linked up to the Xbox for power on/off control in no time. I made a quick hop into settings to make sure everything was 4K enabled on the Xbox, then double checked on the TV (Sony X900E, BTW). All good. I also briefly took a look at the TV calibration in the Xbox settings, and was already surprisingly close to where I was "supposed" to be based on prior overtinkering with the TV. Then I did what I did with my Xbox One when I first got it. I fired up the latest Forza game to see the prettys.
Tun 10 logo. Zooming car sounds (in full surround sound, wheee!) Mediocre opening video, followed by driver outfit selection. Just want to play the game. Free Play. It defaults to racing the new Porsche on Dubai, the setup you've probably seen already if you've seen Forza coverage. I just went with it in the interest of time, and probably shouldn't have. Frankly, it didn't visually blow me away. I don't know if it was because it was simply as high quality as I expected it to be, or if we're really reaching the level of visual fidelity where cars can't really look much better than they have in previously very pretty Forza games (probably both), but I honestly recall being more wowed by Forza 5 on the Xbox One than Forza 7 on the One X. At least in my first impression, I had Jeff's "eh, it looks good" sentiment to a degree and it kinda bummed me out, but we'll revisit that in a little bit. Having seen Forza 7, which looked both very good and maybe not as amazing as I'd hoped at first glance, it was time to quickly try and check out Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was already up there among the best-looking games this generation. It was an impressive visual showcase on the regular old Xbox One, so I was curious to see how it would look in all its 4K HDR glory. After an annoyingly long load time, I finally had my wow moment. I had left my game somewhere around Kitezh, so it loaded me into that. Immediately, this piece of ice cracked and echoed loudly through the surround sound as blindingly bright HDR reflections dazzled amidst a cornucopia of quality textures and graphics. It was a sensory explosion, and I'm fairly certain that my face there legitimately looked like the actors in the fairly lame One X "true power" commercials. Man, that game looks good. I actually had to dial back the HDR (which is a nice option that you can adjust), because looking at the sun in RotTR with the HDR cranked is like actually looking into the sun. Elated, and still blinking a little bit from trying to adjust to the brightness, I moved on to HITMAN.
Now, HITMAN is one of my favorite games ever. I was excited to play it in 4K HDR, but less so than the previous two games just because the visuals in HITMAN, while fairly high-quality overall, had this weird sort of artificial flatness to them. That is absolutely no longer the case. Paris looks fucking incredible in 4K HDR. This was my second wow moment. The lighting in that game is 1000% better, and I was wandering around so aimlessly staring in awe at the environment that I literally walked straight by a guard into an area I wasn't supposed to be and got blasted. Didn't even care. I'm still new-ish to the 4K HDR life, so I was blown away by how much more accurately represented moving from light to dark areas is, as it depicts the adjustment your eyes actually do when you go from indoors to outdoors or vice versa. Man, it's cool. Also, the glow of lamppost lights and the like in the darkness is so much more lifelike. Perhaps the best showcase of 4K HDR gaming is going to the staircase behind the helicopter at the edge of the Paris map and just looking around. That shit will sell some Xbox Ones to those who get to see it. It's seriously impressive.
Upsettingly, I had to return to work and did, but I was pretty positive about everything there, save some mild disappointment in Forza. I was really pleased overall that in 40 minutes, I was able to fully set the whole thing up, play three different games on it, and get a decent glimpse of its capabilities. The wait to get back home and play it was excruciating. I should have just taken the rest of the day (and today) off, and would have if I'd been able to get a better idea of when it would actually be delivered to give proper notice. The 9-day-long delivery window FedEx/USPS gave me wasn't exactly the kind of precision I was looking for, but hey, it got to me in one piece and was two days late instead of the possible seven they initially told me, so I'll quit bitching. Just...be more efficient and communicative, guys. Moving on.
I came home, wanting to give Forza another chance, so I did. My aim was to set up the most visually striking race. The Free Play menu is confusingly weird/bad, but actually has some decent options in it once you figure out how to navigate it. It took me a bit to figure out how to turn on the other environmental options on a track. I noticed that COTA had a night option, and given that I've actually raced that track at night, I couldn't resist that. This...was an improvement. The nighttime is appropriately dark, and you have to rely on your lights as you should. I started warming up to the game here from enjoying that race quite a bit.
Next up, I wanted to take a look at some rain, because reflections always look rad and Forza 6's rain races were really good. If you have rain selected as an option, in the second tab of the Race Setup screen, at the bottom of the page that you have to scroll down to even see, is an option to choose what kind of rain. It is a ridiculously dumb place to put it, to the point were 80% of the people who play this will probably never know it's there. That said, it's a pretty fucking cool feature, because not only do you get to set the environment, you get to set it to dynamically change to three different weather effects during the race, and you can pick what those are. I had some fun with this.
The setup I found to be the coolest was Suzuka Circuit in the rain, with part 1 of the race being Rain/Lightning, part 2 being Ground Fog, and part 3 being Summer Rain. It is all kinds of silly the way this actually works during a 3-lap race, because the sky hilariously goes from thunderstorm to sunshine almost simultaneously as you cross the line for lap 2, but it looks completely rad to watch it change during the race. For a longer race where it progresses at a more naturally feasible pace from torrential downpour to bright sunny skies, it's an impressive feature, and if you were showing this game off, I'd use exactly the settings above on at least a 5-lap race for ultimate effect.
FWIW, the game does look very good in that setup. The lightning and heavy rain are great, the skyboxes as clouds melt away are great in HDR, and the bright sunny skies glinting off the pavement look as cool as you'd hope. Oddly enough, that Dubai level they've used on every promo feels like a very poor demo by comparison. Funny I'd mention that, because after enough time dicking around with weather effects in Free Play, I finally started the actual career. Where does it put me? In Dubai, in that Porsche, which frankly kind of handles like ass and understeers. It's one lap of that, and then things get weird.
Next up, you hop in a semi truck sans-trailer for a ridiculous truck race. It is extremely dumb, and I actually kind of loved it. I suppose this is actually a thing that's done, but it feels so random here, especially as part of a supposed intro to the game. The final intro lap has you hop in a Motul GT-R and lap Suzuka in changing weather conditions, which was remarkably similar to the showcase race I'd crafted in Free Play. This part rules. They should have totally made it the first thing you do and showed this off to everyone, because it sure impresses and feels like peak Forza 7.
So, my impressions of Forza are ultimately positive, but only after some effort. I totally get where Jeff is coming from now. On a surface level, and in terms of their relatively tepid initial demo stuff until the third event, it largely fails to impress. And the periphery of everything that's not the actual race seems like hot garbage in terms of interface, weird dual-loading screens, etc. I will say that the structure of not being able to buy a LaFerrari immediately doesn't bother me at all. I hopped into a free '67 Corvette for my first race and had a blast, so it's not quite the old Gran Turismo "you have to drive this awful Sprinter Trueno first" thing, nor does it allow you to just immediately hop straight to the supercars and miss some good low and mid-tier cars, which seems like a good way to go. Thankfully, there's still a good game here, but you have to find it.
I repeated the same order as earlier and resumed playing Rise of the Tomb Raider next, fast-traveling about to try and see all the pretty environments. The game looks really, really good throughout. This weekend, I think I'm going to just try to traverse the map on foot from beginning to end just to see the whole thing. If nothing else, it would save on load times, which are baaaad. 4K problems, yo. (On a related note, your Forza driver guy hilariously kinda fidgets awkwardly during Forza 7's load screens, which is unintentionally perfect.) Once you get into RotTR, though, it's worth the wait and you'll walk around with a bit of childlike wonder, which is the best thing. I didn't spend that much time with it on a second go-round last night, but I'm looking forward to traversal time this weekend, which is probably the best way to play it anyway.
Finally, it was back to HITMAN. I had to do another runthrough of Paris, and I mean exactly that because I didn't want to take the time to play the actual mission again right now, but did want to see some more of the interior stuff, so I boldly sprinted around the whole place while everyone freaked out. The fashion show and the bar adjacent to it look pretty special in HDR. The bar especially looks cool, with the white lights giving off a soft glow that enhances the modern design. This is going to sound dumb, but it actually makes the place look and feel oddly real.
I then bounced from level to level to see which ones looked best on my awesome new setup. Surprisingly, Bangkok was the one other than Paris that shone brightest (literally). The sunset's reflection off of the windows is a sight to behold. It's like Mandalay Bay in the sunlight, if you've ever seen that. Also, looking over the water from the docks is no slouch, either. I had another eerily immersive moment where I found myself taking in the view from a balcony next to strangers and I relaxed for a second and forgot I was playing a video game. When I took notice of this, I promptly threw an innocent lady over the rail to ruin the moment. HITMAN.
I then decided to half-spoil things for myself on the new campaign by checking out some of the new missions just to see how the environments looked. They all looked pretty, but the Paris and Bangkok levels were still the two major standouts visually for me. I also inadvertently discovered way more about the "Patient Zero" campaign than I should have in the process. I'm not going to ruin it for others, but those actually should probably be played in order. I'm happy to report that it goes places and does some cool stuff to change up the typical gameplay. Anyone who enjoys HITMAN should probably pick it up to support newly-independent IO anyway, but it does seems like there's more here than meets the eye to where it's a worthwhile thing regardless.
Having had my gaming fun for the evening, and noting that it was already after midnight, I decided to just check out of few apps to see if they were working as the should. Specifically, I wanted to test the 4K/HDR Amazon and Netflix apps. They are working as intended, which means I can finally retire the TV remote, with no further need for the Smart TV functionality. One less remote. "One" X, indeed. With now a regular Xbox One in my bedroom and a One X in my living room, I'm all set on entertainment of many kinds, and I don't have to fumble between inputs and dongles and whatnot to do it. That's legitimately an underrated convenience. Also, running my cable through the Xbox somehow fixed a slight audio latency issue to my surround sound that I was having when I ran it directly to the TV. I don't know how that's possible, but it's a pleasant development and unexpected bonus.
That was my evening with the Xbox One X. I'm pleased to say that it does appear to live up to the hype as an impressive piece of hardware capable of producing some really beautiful stuff. Of my current Xbox One X Enhanced games, HITMAN seems to be the one that benefits the most. Interestingly, the load times actually seem better on the One X for HITMAN than on the regular One, although I can't say the same for Forza 7 or RotTR. HITMAN even seems to run with a better framerate on the 4K setting than the regular game did normally. I wouldn't have predicted it to be the best 4K HDR showcase, but it very well might be.
The best part is, things should only get better from here. I'm excited to see Forza Horizon 3 in all its glory when that patch drops, and when games start coming out that are specifically designed for the console and maximum 4K HDR effect, they'll be even more gorgeous. If you're on the fence about picking one up, you should at least go check it out on a proper setup, because it's hard to really explain or show on anything other than in-person. It's impressive, and I feel like I appreciate PC gaming more now having experienced truly quality visuals (though I'm still a console guy through and through). The One X delivers on its promise, and if you want to make a step up without going the PC route, I can't recommend it highly enough.
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