Inside the New Xbox Experience

Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the new Xbox Experience, which is coming on November 19th. They discuss the new interface and features, and their reaction is generally positive, citing graphical improvements, smooth file management, and better chat functionality. "The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, 'We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could.'"

Comments

Re:Install to hard drive?

[Ron_Fitzgerald]

And in true Microsoft fashion, the whole purpose of rip-tp-drive' here is to quiet down the stupid optical drive. But since the 20GB drive formats to 14.5 GB from the start, you really can only put 1 game on the drive if you have other content like demos/arcade etc. so you will need to buy their $160 / 120Gb drive. And this is just to quiet their loud drives.

This was the feature I was excited for but now that I have to put the disk in as well it means nothing to me anymore.