Here's What's Included In The Xbox November 2020 Update

I really like these new features, Especially the HDR feature..

Didn't know about this family settings for Xbox. I definitely need to research more about that as my son gets more into gaming. Need to find out if there is a way to enable voice chat, but only for people I've approved as his friends. He's got a few friends that play Minecraft/Roblox, and it'd be nice if he could talk to them (but not anyone else).

Adding my Wife to the console so she can help me out in Overcooked 2

Looking forward to the new dynamic backgrounds. Shame I don't have an S yet though. Waiting until I can walk into GAME and buy one, then carry it home in a Herons or Oops shopping bag.

Nearly 10 years later and they still haven't added back in local accounts so I don't have to set up an email address for my 7 year old so he can play on the Xbox as himself.

2 consoles later and we still don't have features the 360 had. 😔

All good looking features. Though the one I still really want is something to better monitor/manage quick resume. And, of course, also the quick resume update that makes it work with the games that disabled it.

@AJDarkstar PS5 could use it for HDR/non-HDR though since it switches out of HDR for non-HDR games.

"To make it easier to see which of your games have been optimized, we’ve added an 'X|S' badge to their tiles in My Games and Apps, in both the Games and Full Library views."

But those were there the day I got my Series X (10th November).

Where's the Series X goes to a black screen every time it gets turned on for the first time that day fix.

@AJDarkstar interesting. So they're just mapping the video into the full size header regardless. Sort of auto hdr, but instead of guessing where range values should be, it just sets everything to sd ranges.

Otoh I've noticed weirdness on ps5. Audio hiccups at moments on the short wire setup, and full dropouts on the long cable even with amplifiers in the chain. Xsx otoh doesnt have the drops. It did originally until i added more amplifiers on the wire in just after the consoles. Then xsx was fine. Ps5, still has too-often occasional drops and frequent audio hiccups. Even a fiber optic cable wasn't helping.

Must be update day because I updated my Switch and I'm updating my X1!

@AJDarkstar I remember some controversy with rdr2 hdr. I don't remember what was wrong with it though. I didn't have an hdr display at the time.

It's not patched, so if the option was there before, it should still be there. But what was bad about hdr in it?

Maybe i should shimmy the cable in the back...i know it's not the rest of the cables on the one setup since xsx isn't having that particular issue... But the long cable run setup, both consoles were blinking out.... Boosters fixed xsx, but I'm mostly running yakuza there, and that's not hdr, so it's possible an hdr game would push the bandwidth like an ps5 is doing. I know on that setup both consoles have been wonky at times on it, so it's something about the length and signal chain still. I have a booster now after each console before the first switch and that fixed xsx, but not ps5. I put a booster between the 2 20ft runs from switch to switch....ps5 still intermittently drops. I tried expensive exotic fiber optic cable... No fix. I'll try another booster at the end of the line before the last switch, but if that isn't it, I'm out of options for that location i think. the weird one is the closer setup. It's only a 6ft cable from an ps5 to the final switch. No video drops, but occasional audio drop. I do have psvrV2 still on that chain though... Maybe that's related.

Heh, I've been using rest mode with mm running (no external hdd though) and it hasn't been particularly catastrophic, but I've had several system crashes while playing. Even after a full reboot....

Then again rest/instant on in xsx isn't that great either. I don't use it due to the fan running always, but occasionally i do for downloads. Yesterday i left it in instant on to dl borderlands 3 which bought on the sale. I started it up later and the controller went unresponsive for minutes at a time several times. Then when i went to fight shiv, the screen blacked, somet sounds played, and the system shut down. Happened in fh4 once too. Needs some Nintendo stability on both machines i think! (Then again my switch did a crash that shut down and wouldn't come back up again until some miracles happened during launch window with SF2. Seems like a launch tradition!

I just with they return the newsfeed of my closest gaming friends in the app. I loved seeing what activity they did and which achievements they got...

@AJDarkstar That's so strange....it's not like HDR was new when they did RDR2 at that point, X and Pro had been out for a while and other games did it right by then. Bizzarre that one of the top budget games couldn't manage to fix it even in a patch.

PSVR1 is the famous one for being a pain....the breakout box didn't support HDMI 2.0, so no 4k or HDR support through it. The V2 box fixed that (excellent planning by Sony as usual where the left hand has no idea what the right foot is doing - see also PS5 PSVR support) But it's always possible it's not reacting to PS5 well. It's not the problem with the long cable run setup since I took it off on that setup, but the audio hiccups could be it (it certainly isn't cable length.)

And yeah, I never had a problem with the long cable run with the 1080p setup. I changed it all over in Sept when I upgraded to 4k/HDR and had tons of blackouts, both consoles. I tweaked and tweaked until I finally got stable output, using 1X and 4 Pro to test....but I wasn't playing for long durations, just 15 minute tests or so where it previously blacked out. But apparently I never got it right still. 4k60HDR doesn't love runs over 20ft....and worse with all the switches. But apparently, on PS5, even 4k30HDR isn't too happy. Which is weird...shouldn't it be using half the bandwidth? That shouldn't strain the bandwidth at all. Could be a wonky switch, they're all new and don't have problems with Nin Switch at 1080p though.

I think Borderlands 3 is a buggy mess on XSX right now. I tried it again. Shiv battle played fine, but upon victory it stalled for like 140 sec again before continuing normally - it seems like maybe it's problems with whatever online features it's tapping or something? Weird. It didn't crash to off, but I thought it was going to. Rest/instant on mode might not have been involved in that yesterday, after all. Seems borderlands goes crazy all by itself. Though I did manually run the OS update after that, so it could be something the big system patch fixed.

I've had a few weird XSX issues. The one seems to be OS level. It did it in borderlands, but also in FH4 and Yakuza sometimes, if you hit the Guide button and bring up the menu, then get out, then try to go back in, sometimes it just doesn't respond. The game inputs work, but it won't bring up the menu again...you can keep pressing, press and hold...nothing, it's as though you didn't hit it...then eventually the shutdown/reboot screen comes up like it finally recorded the presses as one long press. I've noticed that frequently. I've had 2 or 3 shutdown crashes. Borderlands, FH4....might have been one other. PS5 has crashed more. There's some noise in the audio over HDMI at times when the UI is displayed. Could be hardware interference. It doesn't affect gameplay. I had the machine the first week go REALLY weird after being in instant-on, then in eco mode for a few days...all sorts of things weren't responding and were acting weird. A true reboot was needed (apparently eco isn't truly causing a full reboot either....it's sort of in between instant-on and off, but it's still not rebooting when you restart. I bet it's doing a "quick resume" for the OS! - so if you have glitches requiring a reboot, eco mode won't fix it, you have to actually select "restart."

Both systems are showing some roughness for now. But XSX is mostly glitchy roughness with Windows-type software glitches, though that was before yesterday's OS patch. PS5 just feels incredibly unstable in general in the OS right now.

Makes sense, XSX is literally Win10 so it'll have all those annoying Windows bugs but is still a far more mature OS than PS5s. MM got a patch the other day, but I'm not sure what it did. It definitely didn't stop the crashing, that's for sure....

@AJDarkstar It's just amazing when a big company releases a top tier game at top budget and gets a major visual setting wrong....and then still doesn't fix it! This is the company that's had their trashy b-grade game be the top seller for almost a decade....

I haven't disabled HDCP....I'd tried that once on 4Pro when troubleshooting without effect. I thought it had to be on for...some feature other than video to work. But maybe not. I'll give it a try. I don't expect that's the problem in this case - if the signal is getting weak enough that HDCP is being renegotiated, the signal is weak enough that it's going to get dropped anyway, it might just make reestablishing the link faster when it blinks out without HDCP. I have noticed the 15ft cable does take longer than the 10ft cable to reestablish (longer as in, if I split the signal to both, the shorter cable is back up and running while the other one is still blacked out - same display model. Just 5ft can make that kind of difference.... HDMI REALLY sucks horribly.)

Haha, yeah, Windows is going to be Windows, and the bugs from X1 that never got ironed out just carried over. I expect the hard crashes are due more to driver failures for the hardware than the OS itself though. Windows-proper, since Vista, shifted to minidriver "plugins" explicitly to fix the problems with nVidia/ATI drivers crashing Windows over and over. That made life a lot better than the chronic BSOD era of 98 and XP but made a mess of drivers on Vista until they all got brought up to date. But I'm betting XBox, since it's standardized hardware, bypasses the minidriver (yes...the meme...the pun.... ), and goes straight to the hardware like Windows of old. Makes sense, but also brings back the old BSOD games until AMD gets their drivers ironed out for the new hardware.

PS5 being a buggy mess makes sense. They reinvent the wheel every time, and system software has never been Sony's strong point (their DVD players and VCRs were always a total mess, and every one was unique...) It's inconceivable how Sony can be so disconnected internally. They operate like a telecom carrier, it seems. The fact that the monolith was designed by a designer in complete absence of any hardware information as to what the housing was being designed for is rediculous. Who says "you, over there, design me a chassis for custom electronics" and when he comes up with a design says "oh, that's just too huge for the hardware" - how is the chassis not designed for the hardware rather than having one team design hardware, another team design chassis, and when they're both done put them together and say "sure I guess it fits!"? They ultimately make a decent console, and decent games, and decent batteries that only explode some of the time, but it baffles me how they can actually turn a profit at all with how clueless uncoordinated they appear to be.

@Kefka2589 Yeah, that sounds AutoHDR related, probably. I haven't tried any 360 BC games yet on the XSX, though FF13 trilogy is on the list to get back to!

@Kefka2589 Oh yeah, I haven't tried it with Auto HDR yet. I should do that! That's a game that definitely should benefit from it.

I was so hyped when they announced that series at XO18 I bought the whole trilogy the next day digitally at full price. And then like 3 days later they cut the price in half for Black Friday.

I played it at launch on PS3, super hyped, and was among those woefully dissappointed. It's actually a really good game, and I'd say the fact that there's fixed numbers of enemies, it has the most strategic combat of any FF game - everyone reaches every enemy at the same level, after all. But it's not what any of us expected from a new FF at the time. And Snow is freaking annoying. Wesley Crusher Hope is obnoxious, and Lolli...err...Vanille is a painful trope. But they kind of grow on you the second time around. I have to get back to that and play through again and really get into the two sequels. I played the first part of both sequels. IMO they actually fixed most of what felt wrong about the base game and make some really great FF games. Plus Snow, and even Hope unexpectedly become cool. Definitely one of the best "Xbox exclusives" I have to revisit.

Also, if you want a real treat with 1X enhancement, and I haven't even tried auto HDR, try the original Assassin's Creed. IT was the best in the series anyway...and looks absolutely new on 1X/SXS. It uses the PC textures and seems entirely modern as a result.

@Kefka2589 If Microsoft charged $70 for FFXIII Remastered (Console exclusive) the internet would praise Xbox's great library!

And yeah, AC1 was AC. AC2 started going off the rails but was still AC. Then after that Jade Raymond left and the series went off the rails and became UbiSandbox Creed. They're good games. But they have little to do with AC beyond the aesthetic and some shoehorned Templar story.

@AJDarkstar True. Then again, it's only GTA....it's not like latency...or connection stability matters much

HDMI is a trainwreck. Always was, from day 1. It's a video transmission format designed by lawyers based not on it's effectiveness for transmission but on it's DRM. And then it has the silly versioning that isn't really backward compatible but they pretend it is. And then they keep compromising it by shoving more data through it endlessly. The fact that anyone had to invent "fiber optic converters embedded in the cable ends" to work around the horrendous UHF attenuation problems is the clearest sign of a total failure I can think of. 2.1 shouldn't be trying to re-use this stuff. It should be a new format. 4 twisted pairs just can't shove 48Gbps through them like that....we're ending up with like 8foot real world limits on cables with 2.1. That defeats the whole point of cabling. It's ultimately an analogue transmission of a digital format, which was never smart. For 1080p it was ok, you could hit 35ft or so with no problem. 2.0 never should have happened. It should have started a new format at that point.

Sony hates doing the same thing twice...they want each thing to be a clean break from the thing before it. It scores marketing points....but the engineering demonstrates why it's a bad idea. But Sony's always been weird. Minidisc, Betamax, UMD, SACD. They've always done things odd ways. Usually to their own detriment outside PS though.

@Kefka2589 Oh, yeah, back in the 70's and 80's Sony was THE electronics company. Somewhere along the way they screwed up badly. They went premium and started pricing themselves out of the market, doubling down on smaller and smaller niches. And then those Korean giants just wiped the floor with them. Truthfully, Sony would have gone bankrupt before PS4 went big had Japan not had a state policy of funding their national treasure companies. They pretty much failed on the electronics front. Which is a shame. They had good stuff...but then they just tried to see themselves as a lifestyle brand that could charge any price. They're still a name in TVs and low-end audio. Cameras through buying out Konica-Minolta (and then going niche with it.) But that's about it. They do have a lot of niche industries they're in though. Chips and batteries, displays, etc.

Even in the 90's I remember walking into Sears and you could get a nice feature loaded VCR from Magnavox, or RCA, or Toshiba, or a half dozen other companies, all good ones, for like $95-120. The comparable Sony unit would be sitting on the other shelf for like $247. Just because it's a Sony.... (And probably because they were bitter about VHS eating Betamax alive )

@Kefka2589 Yeah the short of it is that Japan doesn't allow big Japanese companies to go bankrupt if they're deemed important. There's a scary reality that a LOT of Japanese corporations are really state subsidized and are otherwise operating from the red and fully insolvent.

Then again in the States we don't officially subsidize - we just have quiet backdoor taxpayer money shuffles..... I bet half of the NYC financial firms have been in the red since the 80s. So the only real difference is Japan is honest. Because Japan. We lie through our teeth while the public exists to funnel their wealth into corporations.

But yeah, the Sony fandom loves the units shipped figure. Sony always wins the war! They may have leaked money like it was uraniaum at Fukushima, but it doesn't matter, they moved more units! Even when Sony themselves openly said it was so bad they'd have shut down PS if PS4 didn't take off (and MS would have shut down XB if Phil didn't sweet talk Nadella after X1 didn't take off.)

Hirai single-handedly saved Sony. Between PS and Sony Pictures, their money makers were in the toilet, they were selling off real estate like it was candy.....it was bad. Real bad. Hirai turned it around...and then inexplicably walked out. ahem. "retired." Well, ok, Don Matrick single handedly saved Sony. Hirai helped a bit though. If X1 hit the ground strong instead of dying at E3 before preorders opened, Sony would have been done with PS, almost guaranteed.

@NEStalgia I work for a unspecified bank back in the day. And the Government asked us to purchase one of the failing financial businesses because they didn’t want another Enron. They gave us money as well to do this. The hilarious thing is that my position was fairly entry level but everyone knew what was going on. Yeah, it happens here to. (We sold it as soon as we could but at least the people didn’t lose their savings. )

P.S. the whole reason I got back into X box after Mattrick was FF XIII BC. O.O to me it’s the Xbox of Final Fantasys; everyone likes to rag on it but there is some incredible mechanics to it.

@mousieone LOL on both fronts. That's just depressing how we're a full-on Socialist Utopia masquerading as a free market....even if I already knew it

And also the BC. Over on Push Square there's devs (that may or may not be Sony employed currently, and was apparently once MS employed) going on about how BC has no value, the data shows few people ever use it, they download games and play them for five minutes but never run them and it all exists as good PR and marketing but has no real value in the market and every company knows it - time moves on, #dealwithit. And here we have you saying you bought XBox Specifically for a BC series for a series that everyone claimed to hate It's a fun dichotomy here.

@NEStalgia pfft statistics are manipulatable. If no one buys old games then why is Mario All Stars a thing? A sought after thing actually. I mean it’s no extra bells or whistles just a bunch of old Mario games, it’s emulated, and it selling fine. Kind of makes you wonder about that “old games don’t sell” tag line.

Truth is Remasters often sell pretty well to. (They can not but oft times they find new users) look at the Bioshock collection? FF games on the Switch? It really just depends on the game (and price) in my opinion. Of course, no one is going to buy pretty pretty princess remaster but a classic sure. And now with the advent of better software/hardware a lot of things can be done without the devs lifting a finger. X enhancements coupled now Auto HDR, and better hardware, are making remasters of these games, so all the publishers have to do is set the price. And I’m pretty sure the BC team has some more auto tech up their sleeves like that double frame rate they are trying.

Speaking of FF XIII it rarely goes on sale in the digital store, why is that? Square Enix just forgot or is it because it’s actually making money at that price point. I have a feeling it’s a bit of both.

@Kefka2589 All of the above

Yeah I wondered where all that data that he, and Jim Ryan were talking about came from. If it's PS Now, they'd have to know that PS Now is the problem, not BC. It's not from PS3's PS2 BC because that wasn't even an online essential console. Maybe he's talking industry data from publishers looking at XBox data. But whether the game in question is played much BC depends on what the game is, and if the game also has a remaster out there. And are we talking about Western pubs like EA games, or things like JRPGs that are timeless and rarely remastered?

I always go on the defensive whenever I hear anyone settle on "the data proves X" - Data can prove anything you want it to prove, you just have to get a data sample that confirms it.

The guy over on PS I believe works both 1st party and for the Sony side of a multiplat AAA currently. It sounds like he also worked at MS at one point (and really disliked their product and work environment) - but that also sounds like it was some years ago at the end of the Matrick, early Phil era and may be a somewhat out of date viewpoint given all the recent changes at XB. He's also said that they internally acknowledge Game Pass loses money - but that's a narrow view of "loses" - if that was back when there were few subscribers, of course it did. And even if it still does, a direct loss on one business venture that generates gains across others is only a paper loss. The activity expense generates revenue overall (I.E. leading to more unit sales hardware, unit sales software, subs, etc.)

I like the guy, he has a lot of good insight, but he does have an unusually strong anti-MS, pro-Sony bias, in fairness probably earned by being an employee under Matrick (I'm assuming), that kind of ends up leading some conversations into an appeal to authority that since he's an experienced industry figure, anything he says is simply indisputable fact backed up by statistics. Debate is more or less cut off because he has the data and the inside view and nobody else does. You can't argue against data you don't have access to using data you can't have access to. I don't think he means ill, he seems like an upstanding, friendly guy, and a good POV to have. But the conversations kind of inadvertently go that way. It gives it a Polygon or Rockpapershotgun vibe at times....

@mousieone Yeah, the automation of BC is such a huge win. The manual effort has always been the bottleneck...why would a publisher put a bunch of effort into bug fixing ancient games like new? But to automate it is free money (unless it takes money from new games.)

That's odd. XIII went on sale right after it launched (and right after I paid full price) - I've seen it a few times maybe a year and a half or so ago....but you're right, I haven't seen it since. I assume it's actually making money. It's the only modern console to buy the FFXIII trilogy on. And probably the only one it will ever be on unless PS Now streaming counts. Nobody's going to port Crystal Tools, ever, since those 3 games are the only ones using it, and they're not the most popular games... (XIV Online used Crystal Tools but they rewrote the entire thing for UE with Realm Reborn.)