According to some experiences shared on Reddit, some people have been lucky enough to receive their next gen consoles ahead of the official release date. One such report was shared by Spead20 from Montreal, Canada (and you will see others highlighted if you scroll down that link). The Redditor claimed to have received their Xbox Series S a whole week early and naturally faces quite a few questions from the curious.
Among the first questions about the new 500GB console concerned the storage capacity left available for users to install their own games and apps. The answer was 364GB of free storage. Later on Spread20 installed "Witcher 3 (41GB) Halo 5 (97GB) and Outer Worlds (52GB I think)", which, by my calculation, would leave just 174GB free. As games industry watchers will be well aware, there are AAA games which could easily eat up all that space pretty easily (including DLCs and expansions). Moreover, the trend appears to be that games are getting larger in general.
The games installed by the Redditor reportedly ran very smoothly with "incredibly fast" loading speeds and game switching / resuming taking about 5 seconds. Another observation I noted was that the console ran very quietly.
Earlier this week Xbox News, which isn't an official Microsoft Twitter account as far as I can determine, showed that the new storage system in the Xbox Series X is so fast it is causing loading screens to glitch. It crowed that "On Xbox Series X, even without optimization, fast travel in The Witcher 3 is FAST."
It shared an animated GIF animation of fast travel in the game and explained that usually one would see a loading screen after selecting your fast travel location. However with the new console the "SSD is so fast that it loads the map before the load screen." CD Projekt Red is creating a next gen version of the game with “a range of visual and technical improvements — including ray tracing and faster loading times — across the base game, both expansions, and all extra content," so you should expect wrinkles to be ironed too.
Reminder: Microsoft's Xbox One X/S consoles are released on Tuesday, 10th November.
