We made it for them Switch. We made it for them PlayStation 5. It’s only fair that we’re doing the same for Xbox. Earlier this month, Sony announced It would remove PS5’s little-used awards feature, which allowed you to give awards to others in multiplayer games. This spurred a thought exercise: What other features could be removed from popular gaming platforms without much fanfare?
The Xbox UI is pretty fine-tuned and has been refined over a decade or so. (The Xbox Series X/S uses the same user interface as the Xbox One; it’s universal across console generations.) Still, there’s always room for trimming. Here are the features Microsoft could remove from Xbox without causing much uproar.
Pin to Home
You can permanently pin any game to Xbox: just hover over the icon, tap the hamburger button, and choose Add to Home. Maybe there’s a use case I’m missing, but the logic behind it has always failed me. If you play a game enough times that you need to permanently pin it to your home screen, chances are it’s already on your home screen as one of your most played games. (The top row of the Xbox UI shows your six most recently used apps. Your game library is literally right there, too.)
game clubs
Every single Xbox game has what is called a Game Club, which you can access by viewing the game’s “Game Card” (in the menu that appears after tapping the hamburger button) and then tabbing to the ” Official Club”. Here you can see information about each game, from achievement lists to “What’s New” (which you can always easily get from your). Favorite gaming news site). You can also find a minute-by-minute count of the time you’ve devoted to this game in the Progress tab – good thing! So Game Hubs are not fully useless, in itself. It’s more that they unnecessarily obfuscate information you actually want, an aspect that becomes apparent when you consider how easily accessible it is on competing platforms like PlayStation and Switch.
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Skype
We’re good in the era of Zoom, but the ubiquitous specter of a video chat app from about five internet eras ago hasn’t gone anywhere. yes skype is very much on Xbox. My only question here is…er, why? It’s partly intended as a voice chat alternative I suppose, but pretty much any chat option is better, including Microsoft’s, right the recently added Discord integration (great for cross play).
break reminders
Of course, you can set up automatic break reminders in half-hour increments in the console’s Settings menu. (These notifications only appear when you’re playing a game, but the clock starts counting down as soon as you turn on your Xbox.) But come on, nobody wants their Xbox to behave like their parents. In addition, free time is more valuable than ever these days. If you can set aside a few hours to play games back-to-back, you’ll have more power.
The Events tab
By default, the Xbox’s main screen contains an events row that gives you a quick update on whether live service games are running active events or not. At the moment, the My Events tab shows details of events for Marvel’s Avengers
Xbox Assist
Xbox Assist is a built-in encyclopedia of FAQs, tips, and other system-level guides. For example, if you open the Troubleshooter menu, you’ll see a walkthrough that tells you how to start a game that’s giving you trouble booting, with an option to check the status of Xbox’s online services. However, you can’t open these guides at the same time as the part of Xbox you’re having trouble with, meaning you’ll either have to memorize the advice or juggle between two apps. Also, we all know the one place people go to for easy answers: Google. It’s much easier to have all this information at your fingertips Xbox support page in a web browser.
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