Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Ring will, today, get a first look at the latest Xbox update. This release is said to be the next major update for gaming on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC, and is designed to make the Xbox gaming experience more fun, personalized, and social than ever.
This new experience on Xbox One gives gamers more choice and delivers fun faster. Updates to Home, Guide and Community are available today, with updates to Avatars, Game Hubs, Profiles and more coming this fall. Windows 10 PCs will also receive updates to the Game bar and Gaming settings menu.
Here are the nitty-gritty details of some of the new features that will arrive for Xbox Insiders starting today and continuing throughout the next few months:
Customize Your Home: The first thing Insiders will notice is the new Home on Xbox One. This update is all about personalization and allows you to decide what you want to see when you turn on your console. The new look and feel is part of a design system called Microsoft Fluent Design; the look, feel, and movement of the dashboard has been updated to focus on speed, customization and expression—for you. This now creates an entire block of content that can be moved up or down—or removed altogether, should your interests or habits change.
According to Xbox, additional types of content blocks will also be added in the coming months. The team at Xbox is always pushing to make the Xbox experience faster and faster. In this release, they have eliminated the wait between Home, Social, and My Games and Apps by consolidating them into one dashboard experience. No more splash screens means fun arrives even faster.
Effortless Guide Navigation: With this update, it’s faster than ever to switch between tabs in the guide so you can join friends, broadcast, switch between apps, and get back Home. New tab flyouts make it easier to see more content quickly, too. The new Guide layout quickly gets you to the stuff you care about, so you never miss a moment.
It’s now even easier to switch between apps or get back to Home, and the new layout will enable you to quickly jump to different tabs using the left thumbstick, d-pad, or bumpers on your controller. Sign-in, Achievements, multiplayer (including parties, Looking for Group, and tournaments), People, Home and recent, messages, broadcasts and captures, and a new action centre (including settings) each have their own tab in the new Guide.
A More Immersive Community: Staying connected with Friends and Clubs is now better than ever. The community section has an entirely new Activity Feed layout, showing more content at-a-glance. When looking at feed items in detail, they are presented in an immersive, full-screen view—sharing the experience just as it was captured. Reading comments is now much easier since the comment window can be expanded to fill the screen. You’ll now be able to skim the feed quickly or lean back on the couch and walk through it in detail – it’s entirely up to you.
This makes it easier than ever to stay current with the games and friends you care about. Game Hubs, Profiles, and Clubs are also refreshed to make them more dynamic and engaging than ever before. Xbox are also making Improvements to Club discovery, to quickly display which Clubs you’re already a part of, and easily discover new Clubs to join. There will also be new titles that will be coming to Arena over the next few months, soon offering even more options for tournaments powered by Xbox Live.
Game Bar Gets Even Better: It will now be easier than ever, on Windows 10, to enable or disable Game Mode on a per-game basis by putting a switch directly in the Game bar. Mixer broadcasting with the Game bar will now give you more choices on the audio you broadcast; a new settings option will let you choose to broadcast game-only audio, or system-wide audio. Xbox have also added a new Xbox Live Network Troubleshooting option to the Settings menu in Windows 10, which will help you track down connectivity issues and optimize your online multiplayer experience.
This is just the beginning of some major updates arriving for Xbox gamers later this year. According to Mike Ybarra, the Corporate Vice President of Xbox Platform Engineering, there will be plenty of new features in the coming months across Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, Mixer, and mobile devices designed to make your gaming experiences all about you.