It’s been a busy and exciting summer for everyone at Team Xbox. Back in August we gave you a first look at the fall update for Xbox One, and we showed off the new Home, Guide and Community tabs. Since then, we’ve been working with Xbox Insiders to gather feedback, test and refine new features that we’re releasing worldwide starting today. As gamers, we like to play and watch content the way we want, with the people we want. With this update, our fans asked for more personalization options and we’ve put more control in their hands. Here’s a rundown of the new features.
You can personalize your “Home” more than ever before: You can…
- Make Home uniquely yours. Add your favorite games, friends, Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Game Pass, and more directly to your Home screen with a new concept that we call blocks. Once you’ve added blocks, you can remove or change the order of the blocks as you see fit.
- Have up to 40 pins! All these pins will appear in the Pin block on Home, as well as the Pins flyout in the new Guide!
- Easily discover new things, such as friend activities, leaderboards, LFG posts, tips, quick links to Game Hubs, across both your console and Xbox Live at the top of Home.
- Choose dark, light, or high-contrast theme option in Settings.
You’ll experience a fast, powerful and convenient Guide:
- It’s now faster and easier to move left and right through horizontal tabs with the left thumb stick or bumpers.
- When you bring up Guide while in an active party or broadcast, Guide will automatically open the party or broadcast section by default for faster access to controls.
- New “Friends in games” flyout informs you of friends playing the same game.
- Game invites will show up in the Multiplayer tab of the Guide.
- The new Tournaments section in the Multiplayer tab of the Guide provides a quick portal into the official and community tournaments that you’ve joined. Enjoy more Xbox Arena tournament options with the addition of new titles.
Don’t worry about missing any actions when you step away from your console:
- With the enhanced notification system, when your Xbox One is idle, time-sensitive activities and status are visible from far away.
- The screen-dimming functionality has also been updated to better prevent screen ghosting, both when the screen is dimmed and when it’s showing notification snapshots of what’s happening on Xbox Live.
- The newly redesigned Game Hub Welcome tab now features a summary of all the great content around the game on one page.
- Profiles now enable faster access to recent activity. You can now easily manage who sees your activity feed content through the “Others can see your activity feed” privacy setting.
- See more content at a glance with new Community feed, and view screenshots and game clips in an immersive, full-screen view.
- Transfer your games to an external drive so you can connect it to your new console and play immediately. Just unplug the drive from your current console, plug it in to your new one, and you’re ready to go.
- Existing Xbox One owners can back up their games and console settings to an external drive so that they’re ready to be applied to the new console during setup.
- Copy your games and apps over your home network from one console to another via network transfer.
- Bulk transfer will allow you to select and transfer as many games as you want all at once.
- You’ll be able to download 4K content for some games ahead of time to your Xbox One or Xbox One S, so that you’re ready to transfer Xbox One X Enhanced games to your new console on day one.
- You can easily discover Xbox One X Enhanced titles in the Store, and developers can optimize game delivery by making sure that 4K assets are installed only for Xbox One X.
- You’ll be able to sort and filter your Installed and Ready to Install games library to find Xbox One X Enhanced titles.
Discover and Create Engaging Content:
- The Mixer tab on the dashboard will now display broadcast previews so you can see what’s going on in popular streams before you join them.
- If your bandwidth supports a 1080p broadcast, we will upgrade it automatically for your Xbox One family of devices.
- The Broadcast & Capture tab in Guide is also now more deeply integrated with Mixer. Once you start a Broadcast, a new flyout will appear that includes your profile stats.
- You can also use a USB webcam to broadcast yourself alongside your gameplay on Mixer, or to have a 1:1 or group video chat with friends using Skype.
- GameDVR will now be able to capture up to 4K/HDR screenshots and game clips on Xbox One X, and you’ll be able to capture content directly to an external hard drive.
Other big features include…
- You can get personalized tips & help, smart notifications, community tips, & troubleshooting through the new Xbox Assist App.
- You can also change your console language to select right-to-left languages – Arabic & Hebrew – in the Xbox Settings menu.
- You will also see a new Microsoft Store logo and name in the Xbox dashboard, providing you with a simpler experience when you download and buy the latest products and content from Microsoft and its partners, including hardware, games, entertainment, apps and more.
It’s been an incredible journey for the entire team at Xbox as we worked to bring you this update. Thanks as always to our fans and Xbox Insiders for the valuable feedback. Be sure to keep letting us know what you think at Xbox feedback. We’ll have even more great features coming very soon! See you on Xbox Live.
Mike Ybarra
Gamertag: Qwik
Twitter: @XboxQwik