The New Xbox Experience arrived this morning. The next time you boot up your Xbox 360 console and sign in to Xbox Live you'll be forced to wait about three minutes as new firmware that drastically alters your Xbox 360 dashboard is downloaded and installed.
Microsoft has suggested that the firmware revamp is so comprehensive that it almost makes the Xbox 360 feel like a new machine. After spending an hour or so exploring the new functionality, I have to agree.
The most compelling of the new features is an innovative partying function. Xbox 360 players have long been able to easily find each other and engage in voice, video, and text chat communications, but the new party feature allows up to eight players to stick together in their own little groups as they play games, chat with one another, and even switch between titles. They can also view each other's photos as a group using the new Photo Party application, and in the future Microsoft says that they will be able to watch downloaded movies as a group as well.
Part and parcel to the community Microsoft is trying to foster is a new avatar system meant to help players express their personality. Similar to the Wii's Miis, Xbox gamers can now create and customize their own virtual representations of themselves by selecting facial features, clothes, and hair styles. They can then take a snapshot of the avatar's face and use it as an official gamer picture or employ their digital doppelganger as a game character in a handful of titles.
It's fun, but it is an undeniably simple distraction. Most players will likely forget about their avatars soon after having created them.
Of course, there's more to the new firmware than just community enhancing functionality. The Xbox 360 dashboard has been completely reconfigured, transformed from a simple system of text filled tabs into an attractive carousel of graphical icons designed to provide quicker access to regularly used applications and games. Players can now rapidly find downloaded games and demos, locate and watch movies and videos, easily access spotlighted content and tutorials, and almost instantly view all of the achievements associated with every game they've played.
This being a launch of what amounts to a new Microsoft operating system, there are, not surprisingly, a number of bugs that need to be ironed out. While trying to access certain videos and community created games I received error messages stating that my system “couldn't retrieve information from Xbox Live.” Plus, there were some rather longish loading times associated with opening various pieces of content. These are obvious and simple issues, the sort of thing one would expect Microsoft to fix with patches in the coming days and weeks. Still, I'm interested to see if any serious glitches are reported over the next few days.
The last new feature I tried worth calling out is the ability to download disc-based games to your hard drive simply by pressing the Y-button on the dashboard title screen. I gave it a whirl with Fallout 3 and it installed in about five minutes. Playing the game from the hard drive noticeably shortened load times and kept the Xbox 360's ridiculously noisy CD drive dead quiet. Great improvements, both.
It's just too bad that the number of games players can install will be limited the size of their hard disk. Fallout 3 took up six gigs of space, which means folks with a standard Xbox 360 Pro (the majority of Xbox owners) will be limited to less than ten games installed at any one time. Still, at least they now have the option of running games from disc or hard drive, which isn't the case on competing game consoles.
Overall, the New Xbox Experience earns a big thumbs-up. The changes and improvements are significant enough that it almost felt like I was tinkering with a brand new platform. And, aside from a few release-day bugs, learning to use the new dashboard was painless and intuitive. I'm not sure it's revolutionary enough to draw many new players to Microsoft's hardware, but it ought to make existing users quite happy.
