Microsoft has announced recently that the New Xbox One Experience (NXOE) is going to roll out to the general public in November, more precisely the 12th. This will usher in a new UI and of course the much requested/anticipated Xbox 360 Compatibility mode - which by the way is excellent!
Well I thought given the news it was about time I did a quick preview of the NXOE changes, albeit Microsoft are constantly supplying updates to those in the preview program to optimise the experience, so this is as close to what you can expect as I could get.
Impressions so far
One things for sure I didn’t realise how much of a difference the new UI has made until I went over to my colleagues house on Saturday to do the Halo 5: Guardians Limited Collectors Edition unboxing video; as he was running the older UI. For me the NXOE is a vast improvement in terms of visual appeal and I liked that the main Home screen has been designed in order to maximise the screen real-estate by going vertical as well as horizontal; so your recently used apps and games contain sub-menus.
Additionally you have a context pull out menu to the left that resembles the style from the Windows 10 Xbox App. This menu can be brought up at any time by double tapping the Xbox button and you can gain access to your friends list, party chat, power options (including turning on/off the Kinect mic for chat), notifications and snapped windows.
Snapped apps are also easier to switch between by means of a visual thumbnail which depicts what you are switching to. Also enabling snap will pause the game (rather than bring up the menu of the game) so this works a lot better when recording footage via the Game DVR app.
Settings
The settings menu has also undergone a makeover and it’s a lot easier to find the options you want. On the left side it lists the main settings categories and on the right you get larger thumbnail sub-options, including the ‘Ease of Access section’ which incidentally has a few hidden gems. One of which I discussed last week which was the Xbox One Button Mapping tool – see below.
The other one is the Narrator. Now I have to admit at the time of writing in its preview state this did not work, but in practice it will offer text-to-speech support for reading out aloud the text options on-screen. However what it also showcased to me is that it supports the Keyboard and by this I mean a PC keyboard.
So I plugged one in and low-and-behold I could use this to navigate around the UI! While this is not a major breakthrough as such, if you read between the lines it means that now Windows 10 is on the platform and keyboard support works, maybe a little feature such as PC to Xbox One Game streaming could be on the cards!
Note: In a recent update the Narrator option was pulled, so maybe this was not meant to be implemented yet, but either way it’s showed me a sign of possible things to come!
Avatars
Avatars are also brought back to the front in some regards, as you have the Avatars App from Windows 10 to play with; this is now embedded into your profile.
Likewise you can also see your Avatar in the new 'Community' tab (from the main interface) which pretty much works the same as the Windows 10 Xbox App’s Activity feed. However if you or your friends/followers add a message to the Community section you can see the Avatar displayed and by Avatar I mean your animated Avatar.
The Community tab is also where you will find your recent achievements earned, friends that you have added/followed, your friends activity and some community driven events to the side.
One Guide & Store
The One Guide & Store section have also been pimped, so I personally think the two options look so much more appealing and more importantly information about the latest Movies or TV programs takes front and centre.
Performance
However the biggest question is does the new Windows 10/UI improve performance and I have to state that it does! Navigating through the menus is certainly quicker, loading times and install times also seem quicker to, though I could just be imagining the latter. Either way it feels a lot more responsive than the old UI, even in its preview state.
From what I have taken from my experience is that Microsoft has done their very best to make the options that you want to access more accessible (without needing to navigate through countless sub-options first). It’s still early days and some refinement could be made before the public release, but on the whole I am certainly happy with the results.
You can see my fairly lengthy preview of the NXOE in action below. Hopefully you will get something from this, but to conclude all I can say is I’m excited for everyone to finally get the chance to use the new UI when it rolls out on November 12! Note this will likely be in a staggered format due to the scale of the update. For example you are looking at 1.2GB install at least! Plus each minor update has been 400-500MB, so be prepared for some waiting if you use your console in Power mode.