The best free games on the Xbox One

The free-to-play business model is a rapidly growing phenomenon in the gaming world. Once quarantined to the PC and mobile, these new pricing structures are proliferating quickly, and altering expectations on even the most rigid of platforms. Consoles were once exclusively home to big-budget full-price games, and now the entire market is being turned on its head. The Xbox One is now home to a number of free-to-play titles, and today I want to give those games their due. Let’s jump in, and explore what the free-to-play model has to offer the Xbox One owner.

Killer Instinct

ULTRA COMBO! This classic fighting franchise has finally returned to the limelight, and this time it’s a free-to-play release exclusive to the Xbox One. Originally developed by Double Helix, its acquisition by Amazon left the dev team unable to offer continued support. Instead, the folks at Iron Galaxy stepped in, and now season two of Killer Instinct has begun.

Without dropping one red cent, you get to play as a rotating cast of free fighters, and you can slowly unlock more content from playing the game. Alternatively, you can buy in-game currency with real money to speed up the unlocking process, or simply buy an entire “season” worth of content for $40. It’s a pretty solid deal — especially compared to the traditional Capcom-style pricing model that fighting games have been burdened with in the past.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

Pinball FX2

If you like pinball, Zen Studios has a treat for you. With Pinball FX2, you can play dozens of tables featuring some of your favorite franchises. From South Park to Star Wars to The Walking Dead, Pinball FX2 sports an incredible amount of variety, and rewards skilled play with a superb leaderboard system. And if you know other pinball enthusiasts, you can compete asynchronously against each other for the top spot.

When you download the core client, you automatically get access to the Sorcerer’s Lair table for free. If you only have a passing interest in pinball, this table is more than enough to satiate your desires. If you’re a hardcore pinball fanatic, you can choose to buy single tables or combo packs à la carte. For example, The Walking Dead table is $3, and the Avengers Chronicles four-pack is just $10. Now that everything is delivered digitally, collecting pinball tables is actually an incredibly affordable hobby these days.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

   

Powerstar Golf

Up for a few holes of golf? Take a look at Powerstar Golf from Zoë Mode, and you’ll find a stylish golf game with a lot to offer. As you play, you can unlock new clubs and balls to improve your stats, and turn your character into a real pro. This persistent golfing experience tracks how well you’re doing, and easily allows you to challenge your friends to beat your score at any time. If you’ve got a competitive streak and a penchant for golf,Powerstar Golf is exactly what you’re looking for.

For free, you get access to a hole from every course. You can play as much as you like, earn experience points, and unlock new persistent gear. However, you’re going to need to pony up some cash if you want to do much more than dabble with the mechanics. You can buy any of four courses for $6 a pop, or you can invest $20 for the “full game unlock” combo pack. There has been plenty of criticism aimed at the lackluster free-to-play aspects of this game, but if you enjoy the core gameplay, it’s well worth the investment in the paid content.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

Project Spark

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own video game before, you need to check out Project Spark. This free-to-play title from Microsoft Studios gives you the power to create your own gameplay experiences, and download the bizarre and incredible creations of other people. Much like LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft, this game is all about creating new things, and sharing them with the world.

Without spending money, your options are pretty limited. You can earn in-game currency by playing and creating, but by all accounts that process is very slow. For $40, you can invest in a starter pack that offers a substantial amount of variety, but you’ll probably still run into paywalls here and there. Microsoft sells “Spark tokens” in chunks ranging from $5 to $100, so don’t be surprised when the game leans on you pretty hard for an influx of cash

Powerstar Golf

Up for a few holes of golf? Take a look at Powerstar Golf from Zoë Mode, and you’ll find a stylish golf game with a lot to offer. As you play, you can unlock new clubs and balls to improve your stats, and turn your character into a real pro. This persistent golfing experience tracks how well you’re doing, and easily allows you to challenge your friends to beat your score at any time. If you’ve got a competitive streak and a penchant for golf,Powerstar Golf is exactly what you’re looking for.

For free, you get access to a hole from every course. You can play as much as you like, earn experience points, and unlock new persistent gear. However, you’re going to need to pony up some cash if you want to do much more than dabble with the mechanics. You can buy any of four courses for $6 a pop, or you can invest $20 for the “full game unlock” combo pack. There has been plenty of criticism aimed at the lackluster free-to-play aspects of this game, but if you enjoy the core gameplay, it’s well worth the investment in the paid content.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

Project Spark

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own video game before, you need to check out Project Spark. This free-to-play title from Microsoft Studios gives you the power to create your own gameplay experiences, and download the bizarre and incredible creations of other people. Much like LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft, this game is all about creating new things, and sharing them with the world.

Without spending money, your options are pretty limited. You can earn in-game currency by playing and creating, but by all accounts that process is very slow. For $40, you can invest in a starter pack that offers a substantial amount of variety, but you’ll probably still run into paywalls here and there. Microsoft sells “Spark tokens” in chunks ranging from $5 to $100, so don’t be surprised when the game leans on you pretty hard for an influx of cash

Powerstar Golf

Up for a few holes of golf? Take a look at Powerstar Golf from Zoë Mode, and you’ll find a stylish golf game with a lot to offer. As you play, you can unlock new clubs and balls to improve your stats, and turn your character into a real pro. This persistent golfing experience tracks how well you’re doing, and easily allows you to challenge your friends to beat your score at any time. If you’ve got a competitive streak and a penchant for golf,Powerstar Golf is exactly what you’re looking for.

For free, you get access to a hole from every course. You can play as much as you like, earn experience points, and unlock new persistent gear. However, you’re going to need to pony up some cash if you want to do much more than dabble with the mechanics. You can buy any of four courses for $6 a pop, or you can invest $20 for the “full game unlock” combo pack. There has been plenty of criticism aimed at the lackluster free-to-play aspects of this game, but if you enjoy the core gameplay, it’s well worth the investment in the paid content.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

Project Spark

If you’ve ever wanted to build your own video game before, you need to check out Project Spark. This free-to-play title from Microsoft Studios gives you the power to create your own gameplay experiences, and download the bizarre and incredible creations of other people. Much like LittleBigPlanet and Minecraft, this game is all about creating new things, and sharing them with the world.

Without spending money, your options are pretty limited. You can earn in-game currency by playing and creating, but by all accounts that process is very slow. For $40, you can invest in a starter pack that offers a substantial amount of variety, but you’ll probably still run into paywalls here and there. Microsoft sells “Spark tokens” in chunks ranging from $5 to $100, so don’t be surprised when the game leans on you pretty hard for an influx of cash

Warframe

Looking for something a bit more traditional? This multiplayer third-person shooter from Digital Extremes is worth checking out. Join up with a team of friends, and blast and hack away at the enemies to your heart’s content. This sci-fi shooter has earned acclaim on the PC and PS4 since 2013, and now Xbox One owners can enjoy the game as well.

Warframe does allow you to sink anywhere from $5 to $150 at a time on in-game currency, but don’t feel like any of that is required. You can play the game without spending a dime, and thoroughly enjoy yourself the entire time. Offering $150 chunks of currency definitely feels a little gross, but it comes with the territory. Game devs just can’t stop themselves from catering to the whales among us.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

Xbox Fitness

This isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think of free-to-play games, but Xbox Fitness is a neat package on offer from Sumo Digital. With this title, you can get fit in the real world with instruction from well-known exercise trainers like Jillian Michaels, Tony Horton, and Tracy Anderson.

The pricing model for Xbox Fitness is a little wonky, mind you. If you’re an Xbox Live Gold member, you currently have unlimited access until the end of the year. Starting in January, you’ll need to pony up for both a subscription and and Xbox Live Gold membership for continued unlimited access. Individual workout programs can be purchased à la carte with prices ranging between $9 and $60, but the “Gatorade Sports Performance Football Training Camp” routine is available at no cost.

• Download for free on Xbox Live
• Find out more on IGN

I’d buy that for a dollar

Free-to-play is still a rapidly evolving experience — especially on the new consoles. Consumer expectations, development costs, and platform limitations make the business side of this extremely complicated. Even so, you can’t really argue with a price tag of zero from the consumer end. The extremely low barrier to entry can expose everyone to entirely new genres, and that’s worth the time investment. If you don’t like it, simply delete the game, and forget about it. If you find something you like, you get to choose exactly how much money you’re willing to spend on the entertainment. There’s a lot of potential for the model on the PS4 and Xbox One, and this is just the beginning.

If there’s another free-to-play game for the Xbox One that you’d like to recommend, let us know in the comments!

Xbox One readies shift to 20nm – but can a smaller node help it match the PS4’s performance?

Ever since the Xbox One and PS4 were unveiled as being based on 28nm technology, it’s been clear that both Microsoft and Sony would transition to smaller nodes as soon as those technologies were ready for prime time. It now looks as though Microsoft may make this jump before its rival. A sharp-eyed member of the Beyond3D forum picked up on the LinkedIn profile of one Daniel McConnell, an SoC designer at AMD, which discusses how he, “Successfully planned and executed the first APU for Microsoft’s Xbox One game console in 28nm and a cost-reduced derivative in 20nm technology.”

So what could it mean for Microsoft’s console to make a quick jump down to 20nm? In theory, such a shift could give Microsoft several advantages. Power consumption and die size both come down modestly at 20nm, which improves yields and price structure. The system chassis could theoretically be redesigned with new features or MS could target a cheaper model with certain capabilities removed. In the past, both Microsoft and Sony have used these periodic revisions to target modest improvements to storage capacity, performance, peripheral hookups, or other similar options.

The current Xbox One SoC – a 28nm APU made by AMD

But I think there’s an interesting question here, that strikes at the concept of what a console actually is and what Microsoft can or can’t get away with doing. For decades, consoles have been presented as fixed units. Sure, the external shell and some of the I/O hookups might change over time, but an Xbox 360 purchased in 2005 should be just as fast as an Xbox 360 bought in 2014. Consoles have been inviolate, even as PC hardware shifts fairly rapidly.

As Microsoft looks at its plans for a 20nm die shrink, it has to be asking if there’s a way to change the Xbox One’s design to better match the PS4. And it probably can — as we’ve previously discussed, there are two unused GPU partitions on the system that would give it a significant GPU performance boost. It might also be able to increase the size of the shared ESRAM cache.

The problem, though, is optics. Early adopters of the Xbox One can’t be particularly pleased that they bought a now-useless doorstop in the form of Kinect 2.0. No one is going to be happy if Microsoft rolls out a new version of the Xbox One (Xbox 1.5?). And the company would risk bifurcating its dev teams between haves and have-nots. For a company whose message has already been badly diluted and confused, the presence of two different types of console would be problematic at best. Furthermore, McConnell’s profile makes it clear that Microsoft chose to drive engagements that would minimize costsover increasing performance in future iterations of the SoC.

Xbox One internals [Image credit: iFixit]

We’ve toyed with the idea of upgradeable consoles in other posts, but after the problems the Xbox One has had with brand and message, I think shifting the system’s design now would only confuse and frustrate users further. 20nm die shrinks are also expected to be relatively modest, with the following 14/16nm technology delivering more raw performance and the bulk of improved thermals.

What about DDR4?

One intriguing option Microsoft might take would be to outfit the console with DDR4. There’s been a great deal of discussion over whether or not the Xbox One’s quad-channel DDR3 memory bus is a problem for most games, with some general consensus that it likely is. Microsoft could close this gap, at least in theory, by upgrading to a faster form of DDR4. 8GB of DDR4-2700 or even DDR4-3200 would improve memory bandwidth by 25-50%. The question, however, is whether games could be programmed to run equally smoothly on both sets of hardware.

Again, that’s problematic. If memory bandwidth is really the issue, Microsoft might wind up having one console that can run 1080p safely, while the other is stuck in 900p territory. Is it possible to build a resolution toggle into games? PCs certainly have done it for years, but it’s not clear if this is possible on the console side.

Microsoft could theoretically swap out the DDR3 on the Xbox One for DDR4 without changing any of the underlying specs, but I suspect this will be difficult. DDR3 and DDR4 have very different latencies and matching the two well enough to make them identical at the design level might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Assassin’s Creed Unity locked to 900p @ 30 fps, due to Xbox One and PS4′s weak CPU

Ready for yet another Assassin’s Creed game? Too bad! Ubisoft is releasing Assassin’s Creed Unity$59.96 at Amazon on the Xbox One and PS4 later this year, but it might not be the next-gen experience you’ve been hoping for. A Ubisoft representative caused an internet uproar earlier this week when he explained that the game is currently limited to 900p at 30 fps on both consoles. Sub-1080p game releases are slightly disappointing in general, but the specific wording around this game lead many to believe that the PS4 edition is being intentionally hobbled for the sake of platform parity.

In an interview at Video Gamer, Ubisoft’s Vincent Pontbriand explains the large amount of AI computation required for Assassin’s Creed Unity is what’s impacting performance the most. The CPU — not the GPU — is the bottleneck here. If that’s true, that certainly explains why both versions of the game are running at a lower resolution and frame rate. While the PS4 does have a superior GPU, both consoles are using very similar AMD Jaguar CPUs.

The crux of the issue comes down to the way Pontbriand explained the limitations. Specifically, he said “We decided to lock [both versions] at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff.” To some, that was PR-speak for “The PS4 is being hobbled to make it look on par to the Xbox One version.” However, that doesn’t actually seem to be the case.

Read: Xbox One vs. PS4: How the final hardware specs compare

In a statement made to Kotaku, a Ubisoft representative unambiguously states “We did not lower the specs for Assassin’s Creed Unity to account for any one system over the other.” Considering that Pontbriand claims in the original article that the engine could run at 100 fps on the current hardware if the bottleneck around AI computation wasn’t in the mix, I believe Ubisoft’s denial. This seems like a legitimate limitation of the CPUs in the current crop of consoles — not a back-room business deal.

It is notable that it’s the relatively wimpy Jaguar CPU that’s being scrutinized, and not the usual my-GPU-is-bigger-than-yours argument that has dominated Xbox One/PS4 hardware spec debate so far. If developers are already running into issues with complex CPU-limited tasks, then it doesn’t bode overly well for the rest of the eighth generation.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a recurring issue for this generation of consoles. For many developers, there is a choice that has to be made between next-gen graphics or next-gen gameplay. Ubisoft is obviously willing to sacrifice frame rate and resolution in favor of drastically improved AI, but that seems to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many gamers and members of the enthusiast press. Frankly, it’s just disappointing to see so many games fail to hit 1080p60 in a world where 4K televisions and high frame rate video are proliferating so quickly.