The third-party developers seem to have nothing but praise for the console, from small indie studios to huge well-known outlets, there's no shortage of positivity from developers in regards to the power and ease of development for building on the console.
Here are some of the things developers have been saying about the Xbox One X.
Super Lucky's Tale Paul Bettner of Playful Corp.
Super Lucky's Tale is an upcoming Xbox One X action platformer that calls upon the golden age of colorful characters and vibrant environments. Paul Bettner of Playful Corp. heaped praise on the Xbox One X to Gamespot, calling it "super over-powered" and hailed the developer kit as the "most advanced" the team had used.
From a developer's standpoint, [Xbox One X] is the most developer-friendly console we have ever worked with. Not just because the hardware is super over-powered — which it is. [I]t's like a high-end PC crammed into this tiny little box. The tools and support we had developing the game is the most advanced it's ever been. And I think that's because Microsoft hasn't necessarily been reinventing [with every new console], they've been refining and making it more powerful. This is the best version yet of the Xbox."
Crackdown 3's Gareth Wilson of Sumo Digital
In separate interviews with Sumo Digital's Gareth Wilson (via Metro and OXM via WCCFTech), Wilson praised the Xbox One X at the expense the PlayStation 4 (PS4) Pro, calling the power difference "night and day." Sumo Digital is developing Crackdown 3 for Microsoft, which features Terry Crews, tons of explosions, and a gun that shoots black holes.
To be honest the [Xbox One X] dev tools we got were great. They pretty much allowed us to get it up and running at 4K straight away. It's a beast, actually, that machine. It's so much faster than the PS4 Pro. Comfortably faster, especially in terms of running things in 4K. There's no question it's more powerful, the question will be whether third parties make use of that full power or not.We've got something like 15K simultaneous props moving around in our game [Crackdown 3]. Now the Xbox One X just eats them for breakfast. You can just go and go and go with it. Once we start making games that are optimized for that platform, it's going to be badass. I don't mind saying that it's significantly more powerful than the PS4 Pro, and we've worked with PS4 Pro. It's way more powerful. It's a night and day difference."
Assassin's Creed Origins' producer Julien Laferriere and Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot
In seperate interviews with We Write Things and Gamespot, Ubisoft has been keen to praise both the power and positioning of the Xbox One X. Assassin's Creed Origins' producer Julien Laferriere hailed the Xbox One X's capacity for rendering at 4K, while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot praised Microsoft for ditching Kinect, and focusing on raw power instead.
Assassin's Creed Origins takes the stealth 'em up to ancient Egypt and leverages RPG inspirations from the likes of The Witcher 3 to breathe new life into the aging franchise. And having played the game myself at E3 2017 on an Xbox One X dev kit, I have to say, it's probably the best looking game I've ever laid eyes on.
Our friends at Microsoft were kind enough to build the Xbox One X. It's a really cool machine. What it enables for us is we built a dynamic resolution system. What that does on Xbox One X is it enables us to render the game in full 4K. The world we crafted on 4K is amazing. That's just one of the things we can now do on Xbox One X.We did a deal with Microsoft on Assassin's Creed: Origins, which is taking really good advantage of the power of the machine. We like very much what they are doing because instead of having a Kinect or something this time the industry went after more power for the machine, so more immersion, better AI, and overall better games. We like that because it means the industry will grow because the better the experiences, the more people want to have it. We think it has a good potential. If Microsoft is really behind it, it can do well.
Path of Exile and Grinding Gear Games' Jonathan Rogers
Path of Exile is an upcoming Diablo-like game from Grinding Gear Games. It's probably more accurate to call it a Diablo II-like, as it focuses more on that classic, dark, realistic horror imagery than the somewhat comic book-style horror of Diablo III. Path of Exile will get a 4K 60 frames per second (FPS) version on the Xbox One X, and having seen it myself, I'd say fans are in for a treat. Grinding Gear Games' Jonathan Rogers hailed the speed at which the company was able to get Path of Exile up and running at 4K on Xbox One X.
Bringing a PC game to Xbox, Microsoft makes it really easy ... in terms of tools. So it really just comes down to making the gameplay good. And especially on Xbox One X, two hours after we got the dev kit it was running at 4K, 60 FPS. That thing is very powerful. It was that easy. I think we were expecting it to take a little longer than that, but no, it was a cinch.
Killing Floor 2's Dave Elder, senior graphics programmer at Tripwire Interactive
Killing Floor 2 is a Horde-like first person shooter where players battle waves of freakish monsters, leveraging all sorts of environmental traps to aid them. Up until now, Killing Floor 2 had been a PlayStation exclusive on console, but it's making the leap to Xbox One X.
Dave Elder of Tripwire Interactive praised the deployment time on the Xbox One X to WCCFTech, stating that it took just four hours of programming time to get it running on the X. Killing Floor 2 uses some NVIDIA proprietary technology for certain aspects of its engine, which means the best version will always be on PC, but it looks as though the Xbox One X version will be the definitive version on console.
Xbox One X was a very smooth and easy platform to develop for. It took very little engineering effort to get our base Xbox One game running on the Xbox One X. It took maybe four hours of programming effort total.Killing Floor 2 runs at native 1800p, fixed resolution (no checkerboarding) on Xbox One X. We did experiment with true 4K rendering, but the frame rate drop was a bit too significant. 1800p provides the optimal balance between visual quality and performance in Killing Floor 2. We don't have a specific frame rate target for Xbox One X, although the game does run at higher frame rates than the base Xbox One, even at 1800p resolution. We will be using Ultra textures on Xbox One X. We are also increasing the resolution of our shadow maps and shadow draw distance.
Titanfall 2 and Respawn Entertainment
Titanfall has a storied history with Xbox, with the first game being a console exclusive to the Xbox One back when it launched in 2014. Titanfall 2 launched last year to a huge amount of praise, but the sheer volume of quality multiplayer shooters that launched during 2016's holiday season effectively derailed Titanfall 2's chances at reaching the big leagues. That doesn't mean Respawn Entertainment won't be supporting the Xbox One X, though.
Speaking on NeoGAF, a Respawn developer known as "DKo5" described how Titanfall 2 looks on the Xbox One X, noting that, using dynamic scaling, Titanfall 2 has hit 6K resolution at times.
When it comes to X1X [Xbox One X] it means there are times it'll render at higher than 4K and then downsample to whatever resolution the X1X is outputting to. It is truly glorious on a 4K display. This quote will come back to haunt me, I'm sure, but there were times on Wargames last time I was testing where it was rendering at ~3200p (6K?) internally. The internal render resolution is dictated by the GPU load, so obviously there are no guarantees as to how often it renders at particular resolutions, but essentially we're using 100 percent GPU all the time."
Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Monolith design director Bob Roberts
Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an upcoming Xbox Play Anywhere title, meaning that you can purchase the game once, and get it across Xbox One, X, and Windows 10. Monolith has been quick to praise the Xbox One X, noting the speed of the development kits, while stating that on consoles, Shadow of War will look best on Xbox One X.
Yeah, it's a crazy powerful box, it will be the prettiest possible version of the game. We have some devkits which also load a lot faster, while in development it's extra nice to load a giant world in a matter of seconds so we can iterate faster. But it will also have faster loading times for players, I think that one of the big things in this console generation is that we got a lot more memory, but in a lot of games I played loading times got longer rather than shorter. It's nice to see them push on this side of the technology.
ARK Survival Evolved and Studio Wildcard's Jesse Rapczak
ARK Survival Evolved is a popular dinosaur hunting survival simulator from Studio Wildcard. The game has been in an extended Game Preview on Xbox One, but it's expected to launch fully in August 2017 and will get a patch to boost it on Xbox One X later in the year. On the Xbox daily show (via WCCFTech), Studio Wildcard's Jesse Rapczak had a huge amount of praise to hand to the Xbox One X, claiming the best console version of ARK would be on Microsoft's six-teraflop monster.
It's amazing. It's basically like Epic settings on PC, we're targeting 60 FPS. We recently introduced variable frame rate, but on Xbox One X with the extra horsepower, you'll notice less variation in your frame rate even in busy situations.The PS4 Pro also has improved frame rate when compared to PS4. Before the XB1X, it was the best console version of ARK, but it's hard to argue with [the Xbox One X's] six teraflops. Having the same frame rate in our game isn't really possible, there are a couple reasons for that: the Xbox One X not only has a faster CPU than PS4 Pro, it also has a lot more RAM. I'd say there's a 50 percent performance difference.The Xbox One X is great. Everything from the devkits is so much easier to develop for. It's faster in all sorts of ways, especially for us developers it's easier to iterate. In terms of horsepower, it's just phenomenal, it is expensive but when you think about the price for a similarly specced PC, it doesn't [seem] unreasonable at all to me.
Final thoughts
The vast majority of developers commenting on the Xbox One X seem more than happy with the strength of the console and the technical capabilities of the developer kit, the power of which Microsoft has been keen to emphasize.
The Xbox One X is without any shadow of a doubt the most powerful video games console ever made. Designed to get the most out of 4K displays, the Xbox One X should be able to bring about true PC-like gaming performance to the living room at an affordable price.
All signs are looking extremely positive for Xbox's attempt to retake the technological crown, which has up until now been sitting pretty atop Sony's PS4 line. I'll leave you with a quote from Xbox head Phil Spencer:
Give devs the best tools and platform we can, don't dictate creative or tech decisions, good things will happen, trust.
List of Xbox One X "enhanced" games
