For me Halo 5 was a letdown simply because the AI in the campaign was poor which made the gameplay less fun, despite a lot of work being put into the player movement. Watching many documentaries on the making of it's hard for me to discern whether this was by poor design choices, lack of time/effort put into it, a combination of the two, or just completely botching on executing their vision. All I know is that the result was that the scale of battles was larger with more enemies on the screen and more action, but each enemy being a lot simpler in its behaviours and none being all that much fun to fight. I know they wanted the Spartan teams as a feature in the game so that meant scaling up battles to fit the AI help you'd be getting. And then at that point I guess they scripted as heavily as they could given the CPU resources they had left. But if the CPU was better they could have made the routines more varied and potentially used better path finding algorithms for coop companions, etc. That's just a case study and that's my concern for Halo Infinite. I want the enemies to be fun and varied to fight and I hope that their design choices don't hamstring it in the same way Halo 5 was, especially since it has to still support OG X1, S, and X1X.

Battlefield 4 on X1 and PS4 look arguably better than both Killzone:SF and Ryse. But since its a 60 fps game, it had to pull back on polish.

But now thinking as a user, not as the company, what if they hadn't announced it for specific platforms and said it was coming 2020. Would you want it for X1/X1X as well as Scarlett or just Scarlett? Would you prefer to be able to play it on hardware you already have or prefer to have them go all out on the design and implementation of the game without the ties to 8th gen hardware?

Sorry but quality Sony also had MS beat hands down this gen, it isn't even a point of opinion and preference. General public acclaim and reviewers would give the edge to Sony.

We are missing your point simply because you are wrong and won't accept it. Pemalite have gone the length to explain everything to you but you dismiss as "just better graphics that are easy to implement on the better HW, not being hold down by the baseline". Devs won't develop two maximized, well polished, quite different games to have the best possible on X1 and Scarlet at the same time. They will just like this gen, make the game work on X1 and them just give a pixel bump for Scarlet.

Sure you can have a significant difference between the two versions, but the more difference the more money expended and that is something third parties don't like very much. There is a reason for all the complains of parity between versions, and although people thought it was MS bribing the devs the truth was that they made a game that worked on both HW and them just gave some small touch ups, nothing extraordinary.

The more you keep expecting X1 baseline for games and that it won't impact the port on Scarlet the more you'll be disappointed.

Halo 5 as a title has allot of inconsistencies in general. Although the game may output at 60fps, it's certainly not a 60fps game... It would have been better off being a 30fps title.

Even the Xbox One X enhanced version of the game doesn't fix it, there are still short draw distances for objects and shadowing, some character animations only update at 15-30fps, some texture animations are only 10fps... I could go on.

And that is before we touch on the topic of Req points wrecking the game.
I thought Halo was far more enjoyable when you actually had to employ strategy to gain and control points on a map that featured power weapons/vehicles/power ups... Or work hard to kick the enemy out of an area. - Now it's all loot-box filled and it added absolutely nothing to the gameplay.

Scripting wise I think 343i did well, could have been better if we had more CPU time of course... And Warzone might have benefited from even larger multiplayer population caps for a map.

Ryse was certainly limited by 7th gen technology, hence it's tiny scope, closed in levels and the ball-and-chain known as CryEngine.

Killzone: SF used an engine that wasn't hamstrung by 7th gen constraints and didn't look to bad... It was an early title in the Playstation 4's lifetime, so it didn't showcase the best use of the hardware... That didn't happen until Horizon: Zero Dawn which is an absolute stunner.

Battlefield 4 with it's Frostbite engine on the other hand... From a visual perspective comes up short in many rendering aspects when compared to what the Decima engine was showcasing, it too was hamstrung by 7th gen constraints.
Frostbite did have it's advantages being a 60fps engine though with it's insane draw distances... And games like Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5 now that they have left the 7th gen constraints behind took a step up in the visuals department.

EA has constantly iterated Frostbite constantly, always improving and refining at a rapid pace, adding new technologies and rendering techniques and it's paid off, it's one of the best game engines out there.

It's actually interesting... The PC doesn't have the hardware leaps like consoles do, we get yearly updates... Yet it's blatantly obvious when the umbilical cord of a console generation gets cut as the baseline takes a step up and visuals, games and so on take a leap forward... So it's baffling when people try to argue that older console technology doesn't hold anything back. It certainly does... And the Xbox One is the low-end baseline for this entire generation.

As an owner of every Xbox platform, I would like for the Xbox One/Xbox One X cord to be cut as soon as possible, thus I have a preference for it being Scarlett exclusive from an end-user perspective... I want to be wowed.

But that is coming from someone who will jump on Scarlett on release day... Provided certain hardware features are met.

I think some people here are expecting WAY too much from 9th gen.

I expect nothing more than a continued focus on 4K, ray tracing and HDR (with a little bit of 60fps here and there).

Ah! and faster loading times. That´s it.

While Halo 5 does have lower frame rates on distant enemies, its a 60 fps game because the game itself is moving at 60 fps and latency reflects that. I think the pop in bothers me more than lowered frame rate of enemies.

The imbalances in MP is just in Warzone mode. The standard PvP modes just lets you use aesthetic items.

Your complaints about Halo 5 are really design choices or maybe the engine simply wasnt able to handle choices made a long the way.

Ryse was a linear action game by design. I dont believe the Ryse planned for 7th gen had much in common with final X1 project. Also the 360 was capable of larger world games than that, such as Crysis games.

I havent played enough Horizon to really have an opinion. But it appears to me the core gameplay was feasible on 7th gen.

I agree consoles can hold game design back to a degree because developers are focused on where the money is. Ideally developers would create game solely for great PC specs, but that wont happen for obvious reasons.

Halo Infinite was built for X1 first, so the project is too far in development to suddenly become a truly amazing 9th gen experience, whatever that is per se.

MS has a bunch of studios, I would like to think some of them are creating the mind blowing 9th gen experiences we desire.

I wont debate who makes quality. What critics want in games is not what I or many other gamers necessarily want. The most popular games are gameplay focused, not narative driven.

I'm simply saying games can be crossgen and still offer ompressive visuals on superior machine. Hence, the Scarlett version of game can have 9th gen visuals even if a 8th gen were to exist.

Developers could use Scarlett as the lead for a game and get a 3rd party to strip down a game for 8th gen. Forza Horizon 2 on 360 for example was a very similar product using an older engine. CoD games came to Wii thanks to stripped down ports. I'm sure you could of other examples. Some games will also scale to previous gen easier.

Ultimately. Im just saying most project could function on the previous gen hardware. You're focusing on potential exceptions.

While Halo 5 does have lower frame rates on distant enemies, its a 60 fps game because the game itself is moving at 60 fps and latency reflects that. I think the pop in bothers me more than lowered frame rate of enemies.

The imbalances in MP is just in Warzone mode. The standard PvP modes just lets you use aesthetic items.

Your complaints about Halo 5 are really design choices or maybe the engine simply wasnt able to handle choices made a long the way.

Ryse was a linear action game by design. I dont believe the Ryse planned for 7th gen had much in common with final X1 project. Also the 360 was capable of larger world games than that, such as Crysis games.

I havent played enough Horizon to really have an opinion. But it appears to me the core gameplay was feasible on 7th gen.

I agree consoles can hold game design back to a degree because developers are focused on where the money is. Ideally developers would create game solely for great PC specs, but that wont happen for obvious reasons.

Halo Infinite was built for X1 first, so the project is too far in development to suddenly become a truly amazing 9th gen experience, whatever that is per se.

MS has a bunch of studios, I would like to think some of them are creating the mind blowing 9th gen experiences we desire.

And here you contradict yourself.

If Ryse on X1 doesn't have much in common with the 7th gen version, then there were limits crossgen would put and impact the game.

If Ryse was very late on the development on X360 (since it release on the launch of X1) and could be changed to be totally different than 7th gen, Halo Infinite could as well.

And if you think they are creating mind blowing 9th gen, not crossgen, you are accepting that being dedicated to Scarlet will have better result than being crossgen.

You have to decide if there will be impact or not making it crossgen.