Things the Xbox One Does Wrong.

As much as I love my Xbox One it has had a very troubled past and continues to make mistakes even in its fifth year. Most of the console’s failures have contributed to its success eventually, but Xbox can’t forget these mistakes if they want to continue improving.

In this article I’ve written about the failures of the Xbox One from its inception to the current day, ignoring mistakes that competitors have also made.

• The Unveiling And The Backlash.

The Xbox One was unveiled in May 2013 and quickly became the laughing stock of the industry. Between it’s reveal to its launch date you couldn’t go a week without holding your head in shame at the next controversy that had popped up.

The first mistake was how they handled the reveal event. I remember scrambling to finish work quickly that day so that my colleague and I could get to his house in time to watch it. There was elation in the air as we watched the clock count down to reveal time and I snapped a photo to capture the moment.

What we were left with was disappointment.

Xbox’s event had around 10 minutes for the future of games on their console and instead spent most of the time talking about TV and entertainment integration. On stage they revealed the ugly looking hardware that looked like a repurposed VCR player. During and straight after the event, many gamer’s worries about the console were realised and none of the representatives did anything to answer any important questions.

At the time of the reveal these issues were all set to be permanently part of the console.

A middle finger to the less fortunate was that the Xbox would require a persistent internet connection to play and check that all of your “single use” games were your own.

Also, used games were no longer permitted, if you bought a disc it would only be able to be used once. Any chance of a resell would be controlled by retailers or the publisher of the game and details of this were very vague.

Though the new Kinect was an impressive piece of tech, it was a mandatory part of the console raising the price up to £430/$500. It’s no surprise that Sony executives were reported to be celebrating when the price was announced.

Xbox also decided that indie games would not be permitted on the console without a publisher that Xbox deemed successful enough. Though this issue went under the radar at the time I believe that it is one of the worst problems that the Xbox initially had. Especially since the Xbox 360 was the platform of choice for indie developers on console.

Throughout the months between the announcement and the launch, Xbox backtracked on all of these schemes and started to begin damage control. Even with the changes gamers were left feeling betrayed and many customers flocked to the PS4. To this day, the Xbox One is still suffering because of this.

• The User Interface.

When the Xbox One first launched, its UI was a total mess. It’s since had two major redesigns but problems still remain. The design was created during the days of Windows 8 and because of this we were left with a UI that incorporates tiles and clutter.

First of all, everything is hard to find. In the latest update it’s not even clear which tile represents the game or movie in the disc drive.

To get to an app or game that wasn’t recently used you either have to find “My Games and Apps” and scroll through until you find it or go to the “My Pins” section and select it (providing you’ve already pinned that game/app).

The worst culprit of design is the Xbox Store. Since launch it’s been tweaked but it still remains frustrating. For example, when searching for a game or movie you can type in the search box but the results shown as you type are always not what you want and sometimes aren’t even related. After finishing typing you usually have to select “view all” to find what you actually wanted.

When you reach the product page a very loud video begins autoplaying and to stop it you have to find the pause button. It happens to be above all the menu selections and is actually over the video, making it very hard to find for first time users.

One thing that Xbox really hammers at you through the UI is ads and suggestions. It’s very irritating that the design is already hard to navigate yet Microsoft insists on putting nonsense all over the screen. It’s very rare that they’ll be for anything useful like the Games with Gold for that month.

Thankfully the guide has improved a lot since launch and is actually a great part of the interface now. At launch however, there was no guide! The system took you home when you pressed the Xbox button and you had to go and find whichever app you wanted. For example, there was no minimalist version of achievements and so you had to launch the whole achievements app to view your score or details of an achievement you’d just acquired.

• Feature Downgrade

You’d think with a new console, improvements would be made on top of the previous generation. This wasn’t the case for the Xbox One. I’ve already mentioned the lack of a guide but this wasn’t the only thing that was missing at launch. Notable examples include, no option to change your online visibility and lack of support for voice messages.

Thankfully, updates have fixed most of these issues but many of these features should have been present from day one.

• Proprietary Headset Port

Since 2015, chances are you won’t have seen an Xbox One pad without a 3.5mm jack. Before this the pad only had a very weird port that was different to anything available meaning that your 360/PS3 headsets would not work. You’d almost excuse Xbox if they used the same port that the 360 used but they introduced a new one that they then released a £20 3.5mm adapter for in 2014.

• Install Times.

Every modern console now requires games to install to the hard drive. The days of reading straight from the disc are over and the days of 80GB installs have begun.

Xbox can’t be faulted for installs because everyone does it, but what they can be faulted for is the ridiculous amount of time it takes. On PS4/ Switch you’ll be waiting 5/10 minutes on average but on Xbox most games will take 30 minutes to an hour. When I first bought Halo: The Master Chief Collection, it took over 24 hours!

This could be the biggest ongoing problem about the Xbox One and at this point it may be best to wish for a fix in the next console.

• Original Console Design.

I had trouble even finding where to start with this. It is the ugliest device I have ever laid eyes on and I’ve owned an original PS3. It launched with a gloss finish that scratched within 5 minutes of opening the box and touch buttons that would frequently be brushed by people’s cats.

The Xbox is not only big (33.3cm x 27.4cm x 7.9cm) it’s unsightly and inconvenient.

It can’t stand vertically so you have to make room for it and the majority of its ventilation is from the top so placing things on it may cause overheating issues.

Its main USB port is plunged into the side of the console meaning the odd USB stick or hard drive might not fit in. To me, this design flaw is oddly reminiscent of the original iPhone and it’s hard to reach headphone jack which is a parallel I never thought I’d have to make.

At least one feature from the 360 made it over, but this is one that we really didn’t ask for. The power brick. Yes, in a console this massive it still requires an external power brick.

It’s only been around a year and a half since Microsoft refreshed the Xbox one design and yet the original Xbox has been completely swept under the rug. They even discontinued the product in September 2017 in effort to make people forget about it.

All I can say is “who can blame them”?

• Exclusive Games.

Many people would argue that exclusive games are a detriment to the industry but I beg to differ. I think that companies striving to have the best exclusives to draw people to their console will only increase the quality of games. It’s here where Xbox fails.

It wasn’t always the case. Back in the 360 days there were a vast array of exclusives (especially indie games as the Xbox Live Arcade Store used to be a strong platform). Taking a look at the changes since the Xbox One has been depressing. Of course Xbox always has Forza, Halo, Gears etc. but even then Forza is the only yearly title and the problem isn’t always established media but a lack of new intellectual property. When I take a look at Sony and Nintendo’s upcoming and recent exclusives I delight at the list.

Sony constantly push forward storytelling and action with games like Uncharted 4, the upcoming Spider-Man game and The Last Guardian. Whereas Nintendo excel in atmosphere and gameplay with games like Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 2 and Zelda BOTW. If we take a look at the Microsoft exclusives however, we see a different picture. In the last year the main exclusives were Cuphead, PuBG, Forza 7 and Halo Wars 2. And I can only think of Crackdown 3 and Sea of Thieves as upcoming games (All of these games are also available on PC). These were literally all of the examples I could think of for Xbox, but with their competitors I could sit here listing current exclusives all day. Nier Automata, ARMS, Nioh, the list just goes on! Just take a look at this graph!

Not only has Microsoft not pushed the boat out with exclusives but they’ve cancelled upcoming games for their platform. Of course, we never know what’s going on behind the scenes but when games like Scalebound and Fable Legends are polished enough to have gameplay trailers and they get cancelled, it really doesn’t look good for the company.

• Timed Exclusives.

Timed exclusives definitely play into my last point but I believe they deserve a separate category.

At Gamescom in 2015, Xbox invented the Timed Exclusive. They announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider would be an “exclusive to Holiday 2015”. This strangely worded phrase meant that the game would come to other systems eventually but it was unclear when.

Having an exclusive game be permanent is the kind of thing that drives other companies to provide something better but when the game is coming to their system later the only thing this creates is frustration and impatience for all gamers. The fact that they first did this with the Tomb Raider franchise was another nail in the coffin. The series has always been associated with PlayStation, regardless of the platforms it was actually was available on and so this seemed like an F-you to PS gamers instead of a reason for them to join Xbox.

Notable other timed exclusives include Day-Z, Hello Neighbour and PuBG. However, these games are already available on PC so who knows what “exclusive” really means anymore.

• Xbox Game Preview.

In essence I can see why this is a good idea and why plenty of people enjoy it but for me, early access on console will always be a bad thing.

Xbox Game Preview allows developers to sell their games in an unfinished state.

It allows mass feedback from players to guide the final release and can make the gamer feel like they are part of the progress of something they enjoy. All of these points are completely valid.

I may be the exception to the rule here but for me consoles mean stability. Of course this isn’t always the case but the main reason I don’t play PC is that I don’t want to have to deal which graphics card to get or whether I should turn on anti aliasing or something along those lines.

Because of their unfinished nature, Xbox Game Preview games often have problems that I would only expect from PC, like crashing or loading issues.

The most recent game released for the service is PuBG. It could be argued that this was the most popular game of 2017 so I can understand why Microsoft would want it on their console but the fact is that it runs terribly. Textures often won’t load in for minutes and you’ll frequently get frame rate drops as low as 15fps.

I may be being picky here and I deliberated for a long time whether to include this but I think it is worth mentioning regardless of the positives.

• Conclusion.

I love the Xbox One. I love the PS4. I love the Switch. I love them all enough to criticise them and hope that they grow and learn from their mistakes. Xbox One’s failures are equalled only by its strengths and the console has been on the incline for years now.

I’m optimistic for the future of the console and I’m certainly not going to put my controller down any time soon.

For a detailed look at the “Things The Xbox One Does Right” check out my other article here.