Upgrading the Xbox One’s storage space became a non-issue when Microsoft added support for external hard drives a while back, but slipping a tiny hard drive inside the black box to reduce clutter and prune your power strip? Still a trick.
The Xbox One Elite Bundle, just announced Monday, offers a fairly typical solution but with an unusual perk. Instead of simply popping a 1 terabyte hard drive in the box, hiking the price and calling it a day, Redmond’s gone a step further and upgraded the classic cylinder-based drive to a solid state hybrid version. That means the drive has a small solid state partition (generally much faster than cylinder storage) on which it’ll store your most frequently accessed files, reducing metrics like load times as well as energy usage.
Microsoft hasn’t identified who the drive manufacturer is, nor what percent of the drive’s total is solid state, nor what the drive’s technical ratings are (with solid state hybrid drives, performance can vary considerably). It’s only saying the drive will allow players to “get to the action up to 20% faster from energy-saving mode.”
Another bundle perk: it’ll come with the Xbox One Elite wireless controller, the much-anticipated retool of the system’s already laudable de facto controller with interchangeable paddles, hair trigger locks, “high-performance construction” and the option to customize just about everything else. The Elite controller is due out as a standalone next month; this is the first (and only) version of the Xbox One it’ll ship with as a pack-in.
And if you’re weary of the regular Xbox One’s easily scratched, smudge-magnetic glossy finish, the Xbox One Elite will ship with a matte texture. Microsoft says it will sell the system for $499 in the U.S. exclusively through GameStop and Microsoft Stores starting November 3 (GameStop’s annual expo runs this week, thus the announcement timing).
The controller by itself, due a trifle sooner in October, is going to be pretty pricey at $149.99. So putting it in a bundle with a desirable matte-finish Xbox One that’s also sporting a superior solid state hybrid drive appears to be at least a modest money-saver, considering the stock Xbox One with half as much storage (a 500GB cylinder hard drive) runs $349, or $399 for the 1TB model.
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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics.
Sledgehammer Games/ActivisionFar Cry 4. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design Far Cry 3.
UbisoftThe Last of Us: Remastered. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure Uncharted series.
The graphics are so impressive,
TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game.Ashley Gilbertson for TIMEAlien: Isolation
Built from scratch, the Alien: Isolation engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of Alien film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work.
The Creative AssemblyAssassin's Creed Unity. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution.
UbisoftChild of Light
Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, Child of Light's hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts.
UbisoftDestiny
Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, Destiny's game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio.
BungieMario Kart 8
Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world.
NintendoInfamous Second Son
Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink.
Sucker Punch Productions Monument Valley
Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's The Fall.
UstwoGrand Theft Auto V
Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis.
RockstarTitanfallRespawn EntertainmentForza Horizon 2
Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere.
Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios80 Days
Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl 80 Days' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout.
InkleTomb Raider
Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006.
Square Enix
