The Xbox One X is the most sophisticated home console ever made, with not just the highest end specs and hardware, but also some other pretty sophisticated technology and functionality. The aim, according to Xbox’s Mike Ybarra, is to make hardware enabling games so immersive, that people lose track of time when playing games on it.
“I always say to my game teams, ‘Look, if you provide Dolby Atmos spatial audio, high-dynamic range, 8-million pixels on the screen, people will lose track of time because they’ll be having so much fun. That immersion is really what we’re after,” Ybarra said in an interview with The Guardian. “When we created this box it was really about immersion more than anything else we wanted to do. I mean, you played Forza Horizon 3 on Windows at 4K, and we saw those images, and those things are breathtaking. When we set out, we started talking about these effects and how they impacted us. That’s immersion; it is part of the magic of the entertainment industry that we’re in.”
I… think that the principle of losing track of time because you were immersed in it is certainly a sound one, and one that seems to hold and apply, but… to my knowledge, the most immersive games have been the best designed ones, not the most technically remarkable ones. Games like The Witcher 3, Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Skyrim were all technically deficient in some way or the other, but ultimately became as immersive as they did because of the sheer scope of their gameplay. I hope Microsoft does not lose track of the fact that, while hardware and specs are all well and good, in the end, it is the games that matter.