Just like most beta’s out there, this news is highly unfortunate, and might not even be the actual specs…Although, i do believe that a company needs to start having a production line ready for the new or improved product a long way in advance of the actual release, as you’d like to have some stock on the shelves worldwide… i’m not into xboxus/is/es? but i’m still curious how this actually pans out.
I would vastly prefer to keep a disc player, however even if you have one the disc is just a one time install and you’re still hit with tens of gigs of downloads on a constant basis.
Dunno how game delivery and maintenance has wound up so broken.
There are tons of modern games i won’t buy because i don’t have a spare 14 hours to wait for yet another download to experience 3 mins of blowing some virtual brains out before i get bored and do something else.
Plenty of older stuff to stay amused and that’s what i stick to.
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You could consider any multiplatform game that has to make concessions to fit the game into the consoles memory. Much smaller levels joined together with lots of doors rather than an open world game is a common trick when memory constraints don’t allow for it. Most notable are those where older games in the serious are better in some respects, and where graphical advances have allowed for better detail, better textures etc., and they have had to take a step backwards with the newer games compared to the old. This will differ from engine to engine of course, but a recent example is the stupid amount of loading screens in Starfield.
Other examples of older games being better were listed in a video I watched the other day, which I’m trying to find the link to now. It compared older games in a series to newer ones, and showed how limited they have become in some aspects compared to what they used to be, and a big example of this is the open world nature of them, and how this has been curtailed in later additions to the series.
Two other examples that spring to mind:
Thief: Deadly Shadows
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Both of those titles have things in common. They both had far superior PC only predecessors, and both suffered from having portals between areas to suit the consoles of the time.
Thief: DS had these glowing portals between areas, whereas Thief: The Dark Project, and Thief 2: The Metal Age had huge, expansive levels with no loading screens.
Deus Ex: IW went down the same route, IIRC, but also doubled down on its “consolisation” with unified ammo, and an interface solely designed for a console controller. Look to the superlative Deus Ex to see the changes in its interface.
Both were victims of being developed for multi-platform, and the weaker platform dictated what the game would be like. Primary causes were memory size, and the interface to access the game.
Although in Deus Ex: IW you also had the horrible design choices by Warren Spector.
What for? All the games compatible with XBox Series X are coded to make use of the current memory amount, you would just have 16 GB free all the time. It’s not like on PC where you can increase detail and resolution (and even on PC you cannot push them to fully utilize high end hardware…)
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Imagine how much better they could be with more memory. What you have is a game written for 16GB. Don’t look at that as a “we managed to get it to work”, rather a case of “we had no choice but to get it to work”.
Other games running into trouble were Frontier, entirely dropping console development for Elite: Dangerous, and I believe Elder Scrolls Online.
For Frontier they were done with having to maintain two, perhaps three code bases, and just ditched the console version. ESO apparently can’t add new classes, or so I have read. If they’ve hit the buffers of what the hardware can support for an online MMO where new content is the life blood of the title, that doesn’t bode well for its future.
Both situations would not have happened, or at least been delayed for years, had the consoles had more memory, and didn’t require tweaked versions to work in 16GB, which in turn is shared memory with the GPU, which is frankly mind blowing that users have to deal with that now.
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I agree with you, I’m just saying that it would be pointless to increase the memory on the occasion of a mere refresh, since all the games are limited to what the hardware offers now.
It would be wonderful to have a PC version of MSFS able to use up to 32 CPU threads, 64 GB of RAM and 24 GB of VRAM, with increased TLOD and virtually no pop-in, no blurry textures at distance and no stuttering even in the most demanding situations, but it would not be profitable to develop 3 or 4 separate branches of code (one for XBox/low-end PCs, one for mid-range PCs, one for high-end / enthusiast PCs, etc…).
What’s most profitable is developing one that runs on all available platforms, and that means limited to the least powerful of them.
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It wouldn’t need branches of code, just taking advantage of resources if they are available. Examples are current GPU memory usages. I have a 3090 FE with 24GB of memory. I regularly see more than 8GB of memory usage, usually hovering around the 12-13GB range. If you have an 8GB card it won’t do that, but will use what it actually can access, all within the same code.
If you have a high specced PC, and a console that was designed 4 years ago, you write your code so that it can work on both, but will take advantage of the better hardware. You don’t write a hard ceiling for the lowest common denominator…that’s what Ubisoft does! 
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Elite Dangerous wasn’t even ported to current gen consoles. It only got PS4 and Xone versions. XSX would be more than capable of running Elite Dangerous Odyssey.
Possibly, and yet they didn’t go down that route for some reason.
There is almost no development on Elite Dangerous/Odyssey anymore. It’s on life support now unfortunately.
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