Preview – Xbox 360 Dashboard Update (August 2009)

User Ratings

Now here’s one I like.  Every single game and piece of content on Xbox LIVE now has the ability to be rated, from zero to five stars.  We’re not completely agreed on this, but I think it’s a great feature for when someone’s plopped down in front of their 360, and looking to get something new.  Maybe some DLC for a favourite game, a new Arcade title to try out, or an older Xbox Original.  It gives a rough idea of what’s popular, at the very least.  Of course, when at a PC, everyone should be getting their information from gamenorth.ca, so the whole feature is of limited usefulness.

There’s a couple little quirks I’ve noticed so far.  Sometimes it’s a little difficult to find ratings for the exact stuff I want to find ratings for.  For example, say I want to find top DLC content.  I go to Marketplace, Game Add-Ons, Top Rated, and there I go.  Simple, right?  Well, if I go one option further, to Browse, I can bring up a list of All Game Add-ons.  Twist this list to Top Rated, and there’s a completely different list.  Because it’s sorted by Game rating, and not by Game Add-on.  It’s a minor thing, since there’s a specific way to get what I want, but the whole interface feels a little confusing.

However, I do have a big complaint about the system.  I can go and rate games and content I’ve never played and never downloaded.  This just seems sloppy.  Microsoft tracks what games I’ve played by virtue of my Gamercard.  And part of that is a huge DRM list for all the content I’ve ever downloaded.  It would seem ideal to reference these things when deciding what I can and can’t rate.  Maybe that’s just me, though.  The system will be cheapened by it, especially for high-profile stuff.  And there’s going to be some dumb kid who plods through the game list, rating everything zero because he’s got nothing better to do.

Games on Demand

Not much to say about this one, as it’s currently disabled.  It will work exactly the same as Xbox Originals, as far as I can tell.  Same DRM restrictions (original purchaser on any system and any user on the original system can use the content) too.  Microsoft has clarified that it will NOT be doing same-day releases for disc and digital at this time, so this feature will be exclusively for older titles.

UI Improvements

Community Games is no more.  The XNA-based development system has been renamed to Indie Games, but is otherwise unchanged.  Some new price points are available for developers (from as low as 80 MSP) as well.  Coupled with the new rating system, hopefully it’ll be easier to find the Indie gems amongst the massage games.

I spend probably a little too much time looking at my Achievements, so the changes made to that system are most welcome.  The second item on the My Xbox menu now shows Achievement Progress, containing current Gamerscore compared to the maximum, current number of Achievements compared to maximum, and total completed titles.  Curiously, there’s no ability to navigate this list, so if there’s more than twelve on it, the last few remain a mystery.  This same area now allows a game to be launched, by scrolling over to it and hitting Y.  The feature’s been oddly slow to show up a few times I’ve turned my system on, taking as long as a minute before the option’s available.  Finally, the Achievement browser itself has been rehauled, and is now a text box above up to 24 icons, making navigation a little easier.  It does draw attention to how long the system takes to load up the icons for Achievements, and how it can only cache 30 or so of them at a time.

One of the advertised features is Streamlined Navigation.  This really amounts to just taking a couple of the harder-to-find features (Active Download and Redeem Code) and duplicating them in other parts of the dash.  I didn’t hunt down where these are, since I’m able to find them where the currently are.  Marketplace blade on the Guide, by the way.

There’s been a peak system added to Voice Messages.  So, during the recording of a message, if the system doesn’t detect any sound coming in, it’ll pop up a warning or insult or something.  Can’t have people not being able to send their messages about the white zone being for loading and unloading only.

It’s not on the list of features, but the general performance of the dash has been greatly improved.  As long as Xbox LIVE isn’t involved in the equation, a lot of the delays and pauses I’d grown used to have been reduced or completely eliminated.  Probably the worst of these was a 30-45 second pause when I tried to close the Guide after looking at a message or bringing up my Friends list.  This has been completely eliminated, which is just awesome.  But as soon as Xbox LIVE is in the equation, stuff bogs back down again.  It could potentially be my profile, or the beta itself, but I was getting little blips whenever I brought up a game.  Presumably so it could load rating data.  And going into elements of the Marketplace could take up to 30 seconds for things to appear.  I’m not sure Microsoft should shoulder all of the blame on this, but I did get the impression that the LIVE performance was a bit more herky-jerky than before.

System Settings

And finally, there’s been a couple changes to the System Settings option.  Console Settings have been simplified, so there are fewer immediate options, but everything I remember being there still seems to be there.

When browsing through the Memory area, each item now shows a time stamp showing when it was last modified.  Unfortunately, this requires drilling down all the way to a single item, which will take an awful lot of time if there are hundreds of saves or downloads that need to be managed.  Still, it’s a start.

Summary & Thoughts

So that’s what we’ll all be getting.  Or at least what I’m aware of, so far.  Sadly, all the NetFlix based streaming and features that are being added to the US 360 update are not going to be made available to us.  Because of that, this update is more of just a performance tweak rather than an update with new stuff people will be excited about.

The Avatar updates are a big question mark at this point, because they really come across as setting the base for nothing other than a massive cash grab.  I really hope I’m wrong about this, but it seems like we’ve been convinced to pay for gamerpics, dashboard themes, dashboard premium themes, and now Avatars are just the next step in getting 80 MSP out here and there for little doodads and gizmos.  User Ratings will only be as good as the community wants them to be.  There’s the potential for it to be a nice feature, but it’s also possible it’ll end up a mess of everyone rating hyped-up games a zero.  Games on Demand might be cool, but it’ll be more for people with space to kill on their larger hard drives, looking to fill gaps in their collection.

It’s kind of sad, but for me, the biggest and best feature is simply the Guide running a little better.  It might be because of the age of my account or the number of games I’ve played or have jammed onto my hard drive, but the performance increase really is stunning.

What does everyone else think?  Who’s looking forward to the update?

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