![]() ![]() There's only a mild amount of truly "next-gen" content available to the press ahead of today's embargo. But with one major performance outlier as of press time, and some concerns about its value compared to Series X, I wade into the Series S half of this review more reluctantly than I'd like.Ībove all, both Xbox Series consoles have something in common. Sometimes, that pans out exactly as advertised, especially with first-party software like Gears 5 and Sea of Thieves. We certainly haven't seen a "next-gen" gaming machine this small and quiet since the cartridge era, and in some ways, its emphasis on "next-gen, but lower-res" is a smashing success.īut as of press time, I can't definitively confirm that the $299 Series S locks onto Microsoft's inherent promise: same gameplay as Series X, with the kinds of downgrades you can't perceive on a 1080p TV. Meanwhile, the X's diminutive cousin/sibling/homeboy, Xbox Series S, is remarkably efficient for its size, price, and power draw. This is a remarkable $499 machine. It's sleek, it's powerful, and its high-end games currently load at higher speeds than my own $1,000-plus testing PC can manage. I've already said glowing things about Xbox Series X in preview form, and rounding today's "review" corner doesn't change them. Thus, when I think about what each Xbox Series console gets right, it's usually in the form of, "I'd rather use a new Xbox for that." It's as if the engineers behind these consoles took Spencer's "Xbox on all the things" philosophy as a challenge, to beat most other hardware options in usability, power, and price. After weeks of testing each, I can safely say they were built to compete not just against other platforms (particularly Sony's PlayStation 5) but also against other Xbox-compatible devices like computers. This is where Series X and S become more interesting. The folks at Xbox seem like they're fine with that: play how I want to, so long as it's in their playground some of the time. Between my powerful PC and my Android smartphone, I can already play plenty from the Xbox ecosystem, especially first-party games (with help from the aforementioned Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service, that is). Like other power users at Ars Technica, I don't technically need either new console to play Xbox games. Windows 10 PCs, a cloud-streaming service, consoles old and new: they're all largely compatible with the same Xbox-branded software these days, and a single subscription service delivers over 100 games on each of them. As a public-facing Xbox figure, he's emphasized a major company philosophy since taking over in 2014: open up "Xbox" access to as many devices as possible. This is arguably a very good thing and a direct result of Phil Spencer righting the ship as the chief of Microsoft's Xbox division. This year's newest Xbox consoles, Series X and Series S, are the least imperative devices in the history of the Xbox ecosystem.
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