Microsoft has elected to make almost every system function an app. This might make more sense from a development point of view, enabling more rapid updates – and for Microsoft’s sake, let’s hope so – but Xbox One’s debut user experience is stuttering, clunky, and a serious challenge to Xbox Live’s long-held status as the premier console service. Bluntly, they take too long to load, don’t offer the functionality that Xbox Live was built on, and are, inexplicably, badly handled by the OS.
The most perfect example of Microsoft ruining its prior work is Achievements, and the number of hoops you have to jump through to view them. Rather than the quick tap of yore, you have to spend several seconds holding the button down. This, incredibly, then reboots the Achievement app – even if it’s already running – in order to display some challenges, which you have to skip past to view an Achievement list built not around charmingly crafted icons but a slew of previously-released screenshots, which take several seconds to appear and then have to be selected to show what you did to unlock them.
By the time you’ve discovered what you unlocked, you’ve stopped caring. That’s assuming you even knew it happened in the first place, as the app is online-only and offline play silently adds your tally to a register you have to go online to view. Thus, what was once a strength of the platform is either blocked entirely or hidden many layers deep, an ignominy previously reserved for Xbox Live Indie Games.
The party system, another former highlight, is similarly broken. It now insists on inviting every member to each game launched. The Friends list, which also grinds ponderously to life where previously it was available instantly from the Guide menu, doesn’t show if people are in parties, gives no option to join them and no longer shows the biographical detail that enabled you to identify people. It not only fails to match Sony’s smart Real Name feature but actually takes a step backwards from its implementation on 360.
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Missed game invitations aren’t stored, but lost forever.
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You can’t view or manage storage, a spectacularly poor decision given that the 500GB hard drive will be approaching capacity by March. The overall sense is of a design handed over to the team behind the similarly unloved Windows 8 interface, rather than anybody who has used an Xbox 360 regularly or had any familiarity with its strengths.
There are no core-friendly abbreviations, no way to cut through all this partially-featured, tablet-based guff and get to the features you want. Press the nexus and you’re just returned instantly to the dashboard. The only “shortcut” is to use Kinect, an improved but still fundamentally unreliable input that’s incapable of solving the problems that the interface should never have had in the first place. The only functional, speedy part of the whole affair is the comprehensive and well-explained Settings menu which, not coincidentally, is primarily text-based and can be accessed at almost any point from the Menu button. Not unlike the old Guide menu, in fact.