"Revamped" User experience prioritizes sponsored content. Slow UI, arbitrary delays ...

OK, Christmas Morning. Kid opens it up. Lights up with excitement. Wants to "Play it now and show everyone Halo 5". Fat chance.

TL;DR; Me: "It's an expensive, inconvenient, and bandwidth-hungry internet machine that happens to play games once you find out where Microsoft put them, because of an ad-prioritized experience'."

Summary:

A gamer since 1986, I spent several frustrating hours, and many inconsistent days babysitting a child's brand-new Xbox One Halo 5 edition console. It couldn't even inherently play any games that came with it, because of outrageous installation and download
times. No pre-loaded Halo 5. Physical copies of discs made little difference in install times. Took over 24 hours of uptime to install NHL15 (DISC) and Halo 5 (DOWNLOAD). User Experience prioritizes advertisements and sponsored content over menu simplicity.

M$ is not out to make friends this time around.

Thoughts: Hey guys, what the happened to your UI? Did you replace your UX director with someone from marketing? I want to remove all this sponsored content, all this tile-ad-nonsense that has little to nothing to do with my experience.
I don't care about netflix, or APPS, and I don't care about a single headline. I wanted my nephew to play Halo 5 and NHL 15 out of box. Instead, 100GB later, we can't even find the menu to launch these games. WTH!?

Wii U and PS4 user experience is far superior. Those experiences are straight to the point, offline games run right out of box.

Why is the games list below the sponsored content and preview junk on the main screen? Why can't it be the default selection on the home screen?
Wouldn't that just make sense?

For every UI incarnation on Xbox 360 and Xbox one, you guys manage to put more steps in-between gamers and our games. For what? STOP IT. BAD M$! How many times do I have to tap / move my controller just to get a game to launch?

0. Changing a display name on my xbox changed my outlook account name too. Woah! Not cool!

0.0 Why do I have to have a Microsoft Outlook account just to use it? You are the only people who require an email address to use a computer. With the privacy conerns of nowadays, we demand local accounts, and offline access.

1. Only people in your marketing department want pop culture, sports announcements, or ads on an Xbox. You aren't a TV station. You are barely a search engine. Stop it.

2. As far as User Experience is concerned, Tiles are synonymous to classified ads, and you guys have the entire user experience bought and paid for by supported content.

3. We didn't buy a multimedia box, we wanted to buy a gaming console. Please, please Let us opt-out of the entire Microsoft UX. We just want to play games that happened to launch on your platforms. Don't punish us with ads and useless tiles for buying your
products. Tiles are a waste of an average user's time.

4. What happened to the days when a disc got popped in, the console would just launch it, and optionally ask to update? Why put extra steps in-between? AGAIN, WHY IS THE GAMES MENU AT THE LOWEST PRIORITY ON THE HOME SCREEN?

5. Child accounts don't inherit DLC from xbox live arcade games. Lots of reasons to just go back to my 360, and to spend $550 on something else.



6. The HALO 5 BUNDLE does NOT come with a physical disk. The games is NOT PRELOADED EITHER. Big mistake. The way things are going, I'm surprised all the collector's edition documents and models weren't ported to a f#$#$ng PDF to cut costs. It requires
us to download 60GB worth of data from the internet for that game. Holy Jeez!! It took over 12 hours just to install HALO 5.

7. Next game was NHL15. We had a disc. We popped it in, hoping it would run. It took us a couple of minutes to find the actual launch tile to open the DVD (HIDDEN UNDERNEATH THE HOME MENU, ONCE AGAIN). Once we launched it, the Xbox told us we have to INSTALL
the game, which took at least 24 hours, and required an additional 21GB worth of downloads to install. It's on a disc. Can't we just play it? Kid doesn't even want to play it online. He is 9 and just wants to play hockey.

8. I busted out my SNES with NHL95, and he liked that expreince WAY more than Xbox one. At least that worked right away. Take notes fron Nintendo Wii/U and Sony PS3/4. We don't want a PC, we want a gaming console. Put the nonsense in a different menu.


9. Why can't I use a 360 controller with a live arcade 360 game on the Xbox one? Don't become Apple and make everything exclusionary for profit.

Story:

The Xbox one purchased this month (Dec 2015) for my nephew was rife with supported content and game ads on the home screen. Useless references to apps, and media. Everything but the option to launch a game. After I got extorted for an extra $.50 charitable
donation for each child account I wanted to make (WTF, why didn't you lobby against that!?), I got bombarded with a completely useless home screen, with no tiles in sight referencing the games we owned. Where were our games? My nephew and I spend an hour foolishly
looking through the store (Because the word STORE disappears when you select it, and then you see
GAMES on the top) hoping to find our games. We only found the store, which I guess was your objective. Good job, M$.

Only a handful of xbox live arcade games were ported over to the One. "I maed a game with zombies in it" is not there, unfortunately. I paid hundreds of dollars for games on the market, only to see a list of 5 games you supported, including
the underwhelming and repetitive "Miss Splosion Man".

What of your XNA devs and the games they worked to support? A lot of those games were tons of fun!


Speaking of data caps, 20GB of updates just to turn the darn thing on is scary for anyone with a slow internet connection.

Sincerely,

Ticked off:

Gamer 28 years, IT professional 10 years, developer 2 years. Efficiency enthusiast, anti-advertisement advocate for things we pay for.

:)

 

Which version to get?

regular: all normal contents with no dlc if u want 5 dlc waste more 50$, premium: have all the regular content plus 5 expansion pack at no extra 50$ charge, that the different

 

Using Halo 5 disc to install content for my digital code

I borrowed a disc from a friend to install Halo 5 content on my Xbox. Now I have 2 copies of the game on my Xbox, one is the installed physical copy and one is the uninstalled digital copy. I was under the impression that I can install content from a disk
and then use the code on my account to play the game.

Is there any way to install the game without downloading the whole 50+ GB? Region is AU.

 

Yep. I hate this gen of Xbox.

 

It does have an "offline mode" you just have to select it...lots of people like seeing new stuff available to do on the home screen , but maybe there should be an option to turn it off , I just tell Kinect what to launch ...and you should probably post this
on the "feedback" section , MS dosent come here and read these threads...

 

I should point out that you have to install from the disc on the PS4 as well (PS3 too). The console(s) can't read the data off of the BD fast enough to be able to run a game.

Also, a lot of your beef should be directed at video game publishers for releasing "broken" games which require 2+GB's worth of updates.

Lastly, MS (or any commercial entity) isn't out to be your friend. They sell you products.