This article is a continuation of Xbox One Hardware – practical primer
Microsoft is introducing some upgraded software with the Xbox One. Aspects of the old software like the dashboard have been improved visually and functionally, and there are plenty of additions to the Xbox brand. This software (specifically the operating system) is on the front lines of the Xbox One experience – it’s the first thing consumers will see, making it incredibly important. Essentially it’s the part of the system being used the most, and therefore its practicality and ease of use is key.
Dashboard
Xbox One Home screen – Xbox Wire media assets
The new dashboard of the Xbox One is a medley of both the 360’s latest dashboard, and Microsoft’s Windows 8 layout – the “metro” style. Various square tiles make up the “Home” section, with some tiles revealing new information. Some of this circulating information involves user information, such as the current disk game inside the system, recently played games and a wide variety of apps. The other information involves newly-released and popular music, movies and TV shows from the Xbox’s marketplace. Most of these links can launch almost instantly, thanks to the increased RAM devoted to the operating system, making this universal all-in-one dashboard a user-friendly experience.
The homepage will be personalized to the specific player logged in. Log in can be done via facial recognition on the Kinect.
Sliding to the next section of tiles to the left or right (which, of course, can be done with a controller or Kinect) will provide more in-depth sections of the previewed areas in tiles on the main screen.
Pins
Xbox One Pins – Xbox Wire media assets
Nearly anything can be pinned to the homepage, creating its own tile that can be instantly accessed without having to browse through multiple pages and sections. Overall, the new dashboard seems to be a much more seamless improvement from the cluttered menu-swiping of the 360.
Snap Feature
Xbox One Snap Feature – Xbox Wire media assets
The in-game Xbox guide has been done away with. If the guide button is pressed on the controller when playing a game, it will pause and zoom out to the main home page. Other apps can then be launched while keeping the game active. The game can be switched back to almost instantly. This showcases the powerful multitasking capabilities of the Xbox One. Microsoft calls this the snap feature. They give examples of the practicality of the snap feature, such as “quickly jump[ing] from TV to a movie to a game. And then snap[ping] them side by side to do two things simultaneously. Music and games. Skype voice calls and live sports.”
This constantly re-uploaded video from September (because it is continually taken down by Microsoft), shows a leaked beta version of the Xbox One dashboard, the seamless transitions and some of the multi-tasking, showing it off in the real world as opposed to an on-stage tech demo.
What does this mean for the consumer?
Microsoft clearly wants to include every type of media possible in the Xbox One. So they want to limit the time it takes to navigate through and explore these various types. A fast dashboard can be the perfect glue to help hold Microsoft’s ambitious universal-media plans together. If switching between the different offerings is sluggish and tedious, gamers are going to be less likely to explore beyond the homepage and the games themselves. Introducing gamers to new technology like this successfully means making it seamless and polished.
Multitasking seems obvious for what Microsoft hopes to accomplish media-wise. Why should gamers be restricted to one app at a time? Certain apps just naturally work together, like music apps (Xbox Music, Last FM) and games, so why not allow them to be combined?
Friends List
The Xbox One’s friends list has also been upgraded, taking some pages out of modern social networking playbooks. First off, the number of friends available has been increased tenfold, from around 100 to 1000 (friends can be added from the Xbox One, as well as the Xbox 360). Like Twitter, there is now a “follow” feature on the new friends list, allowing you to keep up to date on what friends are playing, watching or listening to. The number of followers a person can have is unlimited, but elite lists of friends can be prioritized to keep up-to-date with them specifically. And, depending on the game (Microsoft uses the example of a “great driver in ‘Forza Motorsport 5′) players can have their in-game stats tracked by their followers.
Reputation System
For those gamers less inclined to play fair, the Xbox One is said to be useful in rooting out pesky players and isolating them. Micheal Dunn, the program manager at Xbox Live explained the “crazy algorithm” used in the Xbox One’s new reputation system.
With the new community-powered reputation model for Xbox One, we want to help you avoid the players you don’t want to play with. If you don’t want to play with cheats or jerks, you shouldn’t have to. Our new reputation model helps expose people that aren’t fun to be around and creates real consequences for trouble-makers that harass our good players.
Dunn goes on to explain how the reputation system is organic and constantly evolving to improve a user’s experience when playing with random people online. The more people play, the more they help the online community evolve.
Matchmaking
Xbox One Smart Match – Xbox Wire media assets
Using that reputation information, along with “skill, language, age and even your specific gameplay style,” the new Xbox One matchmaking system will pair up users with the best possible gaming candidates, and help keep gaming sessions fresh by not constantly pairing with the same people, explains Mike Lavin, Xbox Live senior product marketing manager.
Lavin also explains how Xbox One’s multitasking capabilities play a role in matchmaking. Multitasking will help alleviate the ire of an impatient gamer waiting in a lobby to find a match. “While Xbox Live is matchmaking, you’re untethered and free to do what you want, like watch TV or check out your favorite website or apps while waiting for your next game,” said Lavin. If the user is heavily invested in that second app, the Xbox One matchmaking system will alert them when a match has been found.
What does this mean for the consumer?
With so many online players herding to the Xbox One in November, there needs to be a way to categorize them and give those users who play by the rules the best possible experience. The new reputation system seems to do that, provided it can handle the large number of people from day one. If the system works as planned, the online experience (for those who don’t cheat or continuously swear online) will be satisfying and entice them to continue playing online.
Recording Gameplay
For the first time on an Xbox console, the Xbox One will have recording functionality built in that can capture live gameplay, eliminating the need for a third-party recording device, as explained by Xbox One chief architect Mark Whitten in a Q & A with IGN. The Xbox One will be constantly locking in the last five minutes of gameplay, to provide the user with instant replays of “magic moments” they would’ve otherwise missed. The user can then access this locked-in content at the home page to browse through it. The DVR also allows developers to create automatic recording triggers. So when a player does something in the game particularly notable to the developer, like finding a secret area or unlocking an achievement, the DVR can automatically record the gameplay of the moment.
After key moments are saved, they can be edited on the console using the “Upload Service” app. Clips can be cut and shortened and voice-overs can be added via Kinect or the included mic.
The actual resolution of the recording doesn’t matched to the game’s resolution, but is set by the DVR at 720p resolution and 30 frames per second.
Of course, what would this function be without social networking capabilities? Polygon explained how these recorded and edited videos can be shared with friends, kept private and will be able to be uploaded to social networking sites “in 2014.”
What does this mean for the consumer?
For the average gamer, those oh-my-gosh gaming moments are usually confined to their own head, and they’re left telling the thrilling tale to skeptical friends. But with this DVR functionality, those stories have much more weight and evidence behind them.The average gamer seems to have the most to benefit from this technology.
For those who have made a career out of recording thei gameplay and uploading it to places like YouTube and Twitch TV, the DVR’s limited resolution and basic editing software may be a turnoff. They already have ample technology to record and edit their own videos with better quality. And the five-minute recording cap would eliminate those hoping to record full walkthroughs and “lets plays” of Xbox One games.
The DVR functionality may end up being a smaller, friend-focused video sharing platform, as opposed to a competitor to the more major players like YouTube.
Note that an Xbox Live Gold membership is required to use the DVR function.
Notable Apps
Xbox Store – Xbox Wire media assets
Microsoft is bringing plenty of new apps to Xbox Live, many of which are already on the Xbox 360. But there are three notable apps specific to the Xbox One that utilize its new software.
Skype
Skype on Xbox One – Xbox Wire media assets
Microsoft is bringing the Skype video messaging service to the Xbox One in a big way. Utilizing the Kinect camera, users can now video-call their friends on Xbox Live. The upgraded Kinect camera, according to Microsoft, can take video calls in “full 1080p resolution (providing you have the right broadband speeds).” One-on-one calls, as well as group video calls, are possible with the new app. And during a video-call, the snap feature (as discussed in the dashboard section), can be used to watch a movie, play a game or use virtually any app alongside the call.
Twitch TV
Back in June, the game-streaming website Twitch TV announced its integration into the Xbox One, bringing the ability to broadcast games directly to Twitch from the Xbox One. Microsoft revealed the partnership at the Xbox One’s reveal back in May, and demoed its use live, which is shown in the video below (ending at around the one-minute mark).
TV on the Xbox One
TV on Xbox One – Xbox Wire media assets
Microsoft has added the ability to hook up cable and satellite boxes to the Xbox One through the new HDMI port. With this new feature, users can watch TV through their Xbox, which according to Microsoft “makes switching inputs seem almost pre-historic.” The TV app provides a stylish guide displaying TV show and movie schedules and even a user’s most-watched channels (which can also be pinned to the homepage).
Enter the Cloud
Ryse on Xbox One – Xbox Wire media assets
Microsoft has been talking a lot about the integration of the cloud into the entirety of the Xbox One experience. Microsoft claims to have a network of 300,000 servers, to become a viable and reliable way of storing various user data and even improving a game’s processing capabilities.
For instance, with cloud computing, Microsoft claims the power of the Xbox One can be increased by offloading some of the cumbersome calculations the console would normally be doing to the cloud.
Matt Booty, General Manager of Redmond Game Studios detailed the cloud’s processing uses in an interview with Ars Technica.
Things like physics modeling, fluid dynamics and cloth motion [are] all prime examples of effects that require a lot of up-front computation that could be handled in the cloud without adding any lag to the actual gameplay.
This new addition of the cloud to the hardware of the Xbox One essentially allows it to evolve over time, and become more powerful.
Xbox Director of development Boyd Multerer gave a general summation of the cloud to IGN:
We have an ever evolving, powerful world [in the cloud] that we can tap into […] this is not going to be as static a console as we’ve seen in the past.
Cloud computing also means that online gaming can now be run on dedicated servers, as opposed to player-hosted servers. This means that the health of an online match’s connection is not dependent on the internet connection of the player hosting it; instead is run off of a Microsoft server (if the developer wishes to take advantage of it). And with Microsoft’s plethora of servers, it should be able to handle the amount of gaming happening in the online community.
What does this mean for the consumer?
Cloud computing offers exciting new horizons for the power and fidelity of Xbox One games. But the recurring theme of this foundational technology is that developers for the Xbox One have to choose to take advantage of it. Microsoft can boast about the absolute limit of this technology and its variety of uses, but that only represents what is possible based on a developer’s goal.
Also notable is the fact that an internet connection is required for cloud gaming. Microsoft has stated that internet is not required to use the Xbox One (a turnaround from their original policy), but those without Internet will be severely limited if a game relies heavily on cloud computing. It is unclear whether developers would be able to allow a game to be played offline, while still having cloud computing available to those with an internet connection.
Finally, dedicated servers have been used by companies who develop heavily populated online games like Call of Duty, and they’ve been proven to be a much better alternative to relying on people’s internet connections. Hopefully, Microsoft’s servers will stand strong when hit with the initial rush of new online gamers when the Xbox One is released.
Verdict
Xbox One console – Xbox Wire media assets
The mission statement of Microsoft regarding the Xbox One seems to call for a more universal entertainment experience. When the Internet originally found out about these plans, they reacted with hesitation and even some disdain. But Microsoft has proven that it has a clear vision of its plans for the Xbox One. It has the content and the software improvements, both aesthetically and in ease of use. When the Xbox One is released next month, gamers should find it easy and even enjoyable to carouse the ever-growing multitude of media available at their fingertips. However, for those without an internet connection, their Xbox One experience will be severely limited. Many of these features will be unavailable to them.
Next up: the Playstation 4
