A little less than a year ago (November, 2008), Microsoft rolled out its New Xbox Experience (NXE) to all Xbox 360 users. Some of us missed the old, blade-based dash, but the interface was an improvement. It was cleaner, faster, and brought with it a number of new features. Over the past years, those of us who’ve spent considerable time poking around it and growing accustomed to its nuances have found a number of issues. Microsoft announced quite a slate of fixes, tweaks and additions at its 2009 E3 show and in a couple weeks we’ll all get a chance to experience them.
What’s new? Not a huge amount, from the time I’ve spent with it. There’s a few tweaks that I’m quite fond of, and some minor additions that range from questionable to decent. I’m using a pre-release version of the interface, so everything I say might be totally wrong.
Parties
It’s a fact. Parties are just plain awesome. I can form a party with some friends and their friends to have a private chat channel in a shared game, or across different games. It kind of breaks the limitations some games try to impose on voice chat (Gears of War comes to mind), but being immune from screaming pubbies has its price.
Parties are getting a couple tweaks. First, when connection to a Party is lost, Xbox LIVE will automatically try to reconnect. Second, the whole process for inviting to a Party has been streamlined. I haven’t had a chance to try out the first feature, but it should be a solution for those weird, netsplit-like times when a Party gets fragmented into a number of sub-Parties. The streamlining seems straightforward enough. Previously, when I was both in a Party and a game and brought up my Friends list through the Guide, I could use X to invite people to the game, but had to drill down to their account to invite them to the Party. Now, X will automatically invite to both the Party and the game when I’m in both. Nice.
Account Management
There will now be a notification that pops up on Xbox LIVE when a Gold subscription is about to run out. Not a huge deal for those of us who have the thing set to automatic renewal (it used to be the only option, after all), but nice enough. There’s apparently a fix for expired Windows Live IDs, allowing them to be updated directly from Xbox LIVE. I’m going to assume it required hopping over to a PC previously, as I’ve never had this problem.
For those of us who are too cheap to get a memory card, but still want to port around their Gamertag, the whole Account Recovery process has been sped up, and features “increased reliability”. I had a couple friends who insisted on doing this, and I’ve basically cut off all contact, because it’d take forever. We’re not supposed to be using the feature this way, anyhow.
Finally, there’s a little tweak going in that shows Xbox LIVE Gold member status in the upper-left hand corner of the Gamercard, in years. Mine is currently showing a five. Not that it really matters, but there you go.
Avatars
We’ve all slowly grown accustomed to having a little freaky version of ourselves (or not ourselves, if we’ve got a vampire Avatar) looking back at us from My Xbox. The most common complaint? Need more clothes! And more stuff! We’ll be getting a bit of each.
There’s a new category of wearable items called Props. They’re things for your Avatar to hold and fiddle with. Some have animations, some just get looked at, but it’s another way to customize your appearance. Not a bad idea.
There’s also an Avatar Marketplace, which is currently only accessible from within the Avatar Editor system. It’s pretty empty at the moment, with a handful of things in there to give people the rough idea, ranging from 80 MSP for a shirt up to 320 MSP (!) for a remote controlled Warthog. Yikes. This will probably encourage more developers to want to do Avatar stuff for their games, but $5CAD for a little zippycar that doesn’t even do anything for me?
There’s no real documentation on it, but since it’s related, there’s an Awards option that has appeared in the Avatar Editor, as well as a matching Awards section under the Games blade on the Guide. Both are currently completely blank. I’m assuming this is where the Awardables will go, once that feature has been completely unlocked. Will they be related to Achievements, or based around something else entirely? It is a mystery!
Video Display Options
There’s really only one new option here: Display Discovery. Normally, the Xbox 360 (when using a DVI or HDMI connection) communicates with the display using something called EDID to figure out what stuff the display supports. Things such as resolution, sound and that sort of thing all use EDID. Sometimes the whole process goes wrong, and the dead wander the Earth. Or everything just looks and sounds like junk.
The feature seems to be the ability to turn Display Discovery off. This will allow certain resolution / sound settings to be forced. Clearly, this is a bit of an advanced option that requires one to know what they’re doing. But it should be a useful feature for those sorts who’ve been having trouble getting things working just right, especially with a computer monitor.
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Brad Petch has been playing games longer than most gamers have been alive. This does not mean he's good at them, or has good taste in them. Online interactions are not rated.