Light Post Week: A Very late Comparison of the Playstation 4 Pro to the Xbox One X

This week I upgraded to both the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X (don't ask; I just couldn't make up my mind to upgrade to one). Here is what I have noticed, for the tiny portion of you in the Venn Diagram who are both in to tabletop RPGs and also own consoles with enough interest to read this!

For those wondering why I bothered: last year I moved the household to 4K HDR-capable smart  televisions, and the only device I have which can utilize this resolution at all is the Xbox One  S right now.

Initial Upgrade Experience:

PS4 Pro upgraded by having me connect the new PS4 Pro to the old PS4, and it proceeded to copy over all the relevant files on to the new system, which took about 2.5 hours (the old PS4 was a 500GB HDD edition). Contrary to information online, I was able to detach my external hard drive and plug it in to the new one (once it finished the transfer) with no issues. 

Xbox One X  basically required some OS updating and then moved my account over while online. I took about an hour to migrate all games off of my old Xbox's internal hard drive to my 2TB external drive, but once that was done it was plug-and-play.

So both experiences were not bad to perform the account/game migration, but Xbox One X was a little faster and easier.

The 4K Movie Experience:

Ps4 Pro is apparently not designed with UHD Blu Rays in mind so I didn't even bother. Xbox One X is specifically designed so you can watch UHD Blu Rays as intended. It works...when I insert one of the few UHDs I've shelled out money for, it plays, and looks good. Not like "holy cow" good....all those people talking about how shocking the upscaling effects are, or the UHD quality or the HDR and so forth are all apparently gifted with more precise vision than I am (or only recently discovered this high def phenomenon), but the resolution feels "right." One thing for sure...anything less than a 1080p Blu Ray feels like an awful viewing experience these days. I need to upgrade my Star Trek film DVD collection some day!!!

The 4K Gaming Experience:

PS4 Pro is more like a "PS4 1.5" incremental upgrade. It has more power, and can render and process the games better, but everything I've read indicates that the console balances between graphical performance and framerate for the best experience. The result is games which you can (usually) tell are more enhanced than 1080p resolution, and often with smoother running experiences. I found this most notable in Destiny 2 and Watchdogs 2, and Horizon: Zero Dawn continued to look great, but some other games (such as Star Wars Battlefront 2) didn't look all that improved. Overall my experience so far has been, "Hmmmm....yeah, I think this looks a bit better. Wait, what did I pay for again???"

Xbox One X is not an incremental improvement, it's a hot new blazing machine and it's not bashful about showing this power off. Every game I've looked at so far which is on the "Enhanced for XB1X" list isn't just noticeably better, they're all shockingly better....running at a smooth framerate at 4K resolution. Games like Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War 4, and Halo 5: Guardians are simply amazing to look at. Halo 5 in particular is so sharp that playing it at the higher resolution is a huge contrast graphically to  my prior experience.

The enhancements for 3PP games on XB1X are a bit dicier so far, but there's no denying the performance improvements. Most notable is all of Ubisoft's titles: I have not seen Ghost Recon: Wildlands like this before, with 4K native resolution, smooth framerates and all the graphical bells and whistles turned on (that game still vexes and tantalizes me at the  same time, though). I could not achieve this on my PC (and to ugprade my PC to get this would cost a lot more than the Xbox One X did!) Titanfall 2 also looks amazing at 4K. 

So: if you only need one console to provide a 4K experience, Xbox One X is it. Hand's down, it's the better overall experience for the "current gen" console systems. PS4 still has a lot of love, but for the foreseeable future, until Sony catches up, Xbox One X has effectively become my new top dog in terms of gameplay power and performance. 

Shifting from Pathfinder to D&D 5th Edition in 2014? Maybe...

As the D&D 5th edition public play test winds down (I'm going to start shying away from the whole "Next" reference since even WotC plans on removing it soon) I think I'll be spending more time messing with whatever the final September rules update looks like. I've been thinking about my choice of game going into the future, and while Pathfinder looms large, I concede that it's still a game which doesn't meet all of my own personal needs in a system.

What Pathfinder offers that I like is the following:

Established Player Base - I have more than twenty regular players and every Pathfinder group I run for averages 8-10 players in attendance. It's crazy popular (among players). Can D&D 5E win them over? This is really the main issue, as I see it.....if no one buys into the next D&D, then Pathfinder will stay whether I like it or not.

Metric Ton of Support Material - I can run any game I want within the limits of the D&D/D20 framework and Pathfinder provides the support. Pathfinder is well supported both by Paizo and OGL publishers. I sincerely hope the WotC guys realize that they need to have a decent product lineup next year.

Versatile and full of Verisimilitude - I have accepted long ago that I'm one of those guys who likes a little verisimilitude in my games. I also like a game system which can flex to my needs, and can handle all the kitchen sink nonsense I like to stick in my home grown campaigns. I shy away from game systems which are tethered too closely to one vision of fantasy, or one setting....I don't do published setting, I write them myself. Pathfinder is built for people like me, despite it's Golarion focus in the supplemental material...and Golarion itself is built to be pillaged for content in other settings, to be honest. For D&D 5E, it looks like Forgotten Realms will once again be the primary focus of campaign content, but I am confident the core rules will support my settings. I hope.

Tries to make the GM's life Easier in a 3.X edition - Pathfinder provides quick monster templates, quick NPC generators, loads of pre-crafted NPC stat blocks, and for people who are into it all the adventure paths and such. I personally find the effort to read and prep a published module to be worse than writing my own, but that's only because I try to scrape up premade stat blocks or use services like dinglesgames.com to help make the process easier. More below on the weaknesses of Pathfinder....so far, though, this is looking like an easier process across the board with 5E over Pathfinder and 3E combined. 5th is at least taking this hint from 4E in terms of "ease of access for DMs."

Pathfinder Mitigated Nit-Picky Rules - D&D 3E was notorious for (imo) things which were excessive in terms of a "rule for everything." I do not need to know what the alignment of a town is....though I might like to know what the town's actual rulership is like. I do not need seven hundred prestige classes; I have only seen maybe 20 prestige classes in action EVER, since 2000. A lot of 3.5 had nit-picky rules which could freeze up play quickly as people scrambled to remember how to do something right, or debate who's interpretation was correct. Pathfinder got rid of a lot of the really annoying little bits, or tried to consolidate them when possible....from synergies to skill rank calculation to grappling to stacking rules, PF tried to clear some of the clutter up and if not streamline it, at least make some of the outliers less problematic.

For 5E, I see far, far fewer nit-picky bits and this edition if anything seems to be trying hard to avoid that problem.

There are things Pathfinder does not do well for me. These aren't necessarily bad things, they just don't jive well with the restrictions of my time and energy:

Still Too Much Prep Time to Do It Right - D&D 4E did right for DMs. You could build monsters, NPCs and scenarios with some excellent guidelines and some very easy to understand procedures that were not tied to the same processes characters were designed by. This was a throwback to the old 1st and 2nd edition days, except with more structure. Pathfinder tries to do this, but it still pales in comparison; writing an adventure for Pathfinder takes no more or less time than any other edition, but properly statting it out is still excessive in the extreme if you don't try to find shortcuts...and in fact I hardly every bother to do so anymore. I mean....I helped my wife update her old swordmage from 4E to Pathfinder (making him an 11th level magus) and it still took about 3 hours to do this. Yikes.

5E so far shows no signs of this being a problem at all, with the caveat that we haven't really seen any details on customizing monsters or how to make NPCs (outside of making a PC and adding an N to the front).

Not Enough Iconic D&D - Pathfinder is mostly "D&D with a different name," but let's be honest, I like my beholders, mind flayers, displacer beasts, hook horrors, githyanki and grell. D&D 5th will obviously fix this matter, no questions asked. Yeah, yeah...I do use the unofficial Pathfinder conversions of those IP iconics....but I really like the simpler monster stat blocks of 5th.

Only Golarion - I actually do like reading about other campaign settings, even if I don't use them. Golarion is interesting, but it's the only supported setting now for Pathfinder and looks to remain such for the forseeable future. I like that D&D 5th will inevitably bring with it at least two or three additional settings that get supported, especially Ravenloft (I hope), Eberron or even Greyhawk.

Streamlined Rules - Pathfinder did try to consolidate and streamline some mechanics to 3rd edition, and did a great job of it by my accounting. However, it's still hampered by being 3rd edition, and that's a very demanding beast of a system. I am very proficient in running 3.X these days...or at least the PF version of such....but freely admit to wanting something simpler and a little less demanding of my mental fortitude. If I can avoid ever having another debate involving precise shot, or vital strike, or any other number of fiddly feats again...or combat maneuvers, or even whether or not a 12th level monk can wrestle a kraken down....ah, yeah that would be nice.

D&D 5th edition will fail miserably for me if it fails to do the following, though:

No Support Material Out the Gate - they need some modules, and they need enough content out soon to support all the campaigns that contain more than just the core iconic races. I've moved on long, long ago past the point where dwarves, elves and halflings are anything more than three out of many interesting potential choices for players and DMs.

No Skill System - Absence of a robust skill system, something which D&D has had since the mid-eighties, will make me a sad panda. I know there's a division between people on this....a surprising number of the new-school indie-drenched hip gamers frown on skills as limiting, just as much of the OSR community sees skill mechanics as counter-intuitive to Matt Finch's definition of what old school is. Somewhere in the middle of all this is myself and my players, who like skills and feel it adds to the depth of their characters.

So...a few thoughts on this. I think it mostly means that I may take some time to do some actual builds and discussions on what 5E's current playtest offers and how it compares and contrasts to what has come before. Time will tell!