"Week of Xbox Live" Day 3: All X1 Games Will Have Dedicated Servers + New Machinima App [Videos]
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktpqoJfTR3gLet’s start off the week with a look at how the friends list will work on Xbox One. Watch the above video where I walk you through how followers will work on Xbox Live. Don’t worry, the friends lists is still there…but we’ve also added the ability for you to have thousands of followers as well.
I explain more below (which I have cross posted on Xbox Wire) :
Xbox Live has always been about building an amazing community. When we first launched the service back in 2002, our vision was to create a premium online place where friends could come together to play games. With your support we’ve created the world’s largest, most-active gaming and entertainment community and now, as we look ahead to the launch of Xbox One on Nov. 22, we want to pause for a moment to celebrate our community and tell you about what we are doing to make it even better. With that in mind throughout the upcoming days in this “Week of Xbox Live,” we will share more news and information about what is coming to Xbox Live.
First, we want to thank you for choosing and for spending more time with us. In the last 12 months, we delivered more than 20 billion hours of gaming and entertainment on Xbox, over 17% growth over the previous year. We’re proud and humbled to be the top online gaming service – according to NPD’s August 2013 Online Gaming report, close to 50% more online console gamers use the Xbox 360 for playing online than the PlayStation 3.
With your increasing engagement with and growing community, we’re able invest in new features and future innovations that bring more amazing experiences to you and the community on Xbox Live.
Your New Friends App on Xbox One
Designed around you and your friends, Xbox One will have plenty of room for all your favorite people in the brand new Friends system on Xbox One. Your Xbox 360 friends will automatically be added to your Friends list. With Xbox One you can have 1,000 friends, connect with people instantly by following them and have infinite followers yourself. You can also see all of your Xbox One and Xbox 360 friends and their activity in your Activity Feed.
Similar to the other social media networks, Xbox One allows you to share the latest in games and entertainment with fellow gamers, friends and family, or even celebrities and gaming personalities by following people. For example, on Xbox One you can search for me by my gamertag and follow me to see what I share publicly, such as my latest game scores and achievements.
On your Xbox One, there are now more ways to connect than simply sending a friend invite. For example, the one-way follow model of Xbox One allows Xbox Live members to connect with the people they care about in an easier way than ever before.
Friends and Followers
So what’s the difference between a friend and a follower? They are all considered your friends on Xbox One, but the levels of privacy between the two are different. You can follow anyone you want and it’s completely up to them if they follow you back. You can also decide what information your followers can see about you.
When you and another gamer mutually follow each other, it creates a more interactive relationship that unlocks the ability for you both to see information like when each other are online, what achievements you earn in real time and what you’re up to on Xbox One.
The Friends app is also an awesome way to find out about new games and activities to take your Xbox One experience to a whole new level.
“A great driver in ‘Forza Motorsport 5,’ for example, could have a huge group of thousands or even millions of followers all tracking their performance in-game,” Rob Lehew, Xbox Live Program Manager, said. “Those followers can have this driver on their personal leaderboard so that they can constantly keep track of how they stack-up, and they can potentially connect online with the driver to get into a race with him.”
Your Gaming Community on Xbox One
Xbox Live on Xbox One was rebuilt from the ground up so that we could combine the hardware and the power of the cloud in completely new ways. Because of this, the new generation of Xbox Live puts you at the center of all your entertainment and games, with the community you built.
Along with the community, the gaming experience you know and love has evolved and gotten even better on Xbox One. A great example of this is Achievements. There are now two types of Achievements: achievements and time-based challenges. The former is similar to the achievements you earn on Xbox 360. Challenges on the other hand are only available for a certain period of time. What you accomplish during that timeframe will count towards unlocking the challenge.
As a nod to our stellar community, many challenges require a community to work together towards a common goal. Imagine, for example, a game releases a weekend objective that requires players to cumulatively secure an objective “X” number of times in a three day period. And every person who participates and helps build towards the challenge’s goals unlocks that Achievement and earns its reward.
Achievements only scratch the surface of what you can do with gaming on Xbox One.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti6UwRitOZUWe also continue to make major investments to make multiplayer gaming on Xbox One even better. The video above highlights some of the work our team has done to continue advancing multiplayer on Xbox Live. We are the only premium gaming service in the world to offer Smart Match, which makes it easier, faster and more enjoyable to get into best-in-class multiplayer gaming. Over time the system gets even better as it learns more about you and your friends. Plus no more waiting in lobbies – Just a better multiplayer experience. You can read more details on Smart Match and the Xbox One reputation system.
We have always been laser-focused on those who make our community what it is. This is the community that you built, and we could not be more excited to take this next step with you in the coming months. During the next few days in this “Week of Xbox Live”, we will continue to share news and more information about what is coming soon to Xbox Live.
Cross Posted on Xbox Wire
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnQmvHsv5Tc
By John Bruno, Lead Program Manager, Xbox Live posted October 15, 2013 at 6:00 AM
Hi! My name is John Bruno – I am a Lead Program Manager from the Xbox Live team. I’m especially proud of what our team has been working on with Xbox Live Compute, and I’m glad to finally be able to share more details with you as part of the “Week of Xbox Live!”
As you have heard over the course of the past weeks, Xbox One will benefit greatly from the power of the Xbox Live cloud. This obviously represents a broad Microsoft commitment that spans a number of scenarios, all intended to bring the best of entertainment and gaming experiences that our game creators have to offer. Xbox Live Compute represents one of the ways that games will be better on Xbox One. This service is specifically designed to enable game creators to utilize the scalable computing resources that Microsoft deploys within our regional datacenters, to enhance their game experiences beyond what is generally possible with the finite resources of a console. This sounds great, but what does it really mean for gamers and developers?
Well, for starters let’s talk about what the Xbox Live cloud is all about. Simply stated, it’s about massive numbers of high-powered servers running in Microsoft datacenters all over the world – all performing various computing workloads. At Microsoft, running hundreds of thousands of servers that power experiences like Bing, Skype, or Xbox Live is in our DNA.
So, why did we build Xbox Live Compute? When we were planning the next generation of Xbox Live, we spent a lot of time talking with game creators about ways to make games better. We realized that there was an incredible opportunity to bring together the resources and global scale of Windows Azure, with the game services of Xbox Live to build a cloud computing platform that was uniquely focused on gaming and game creators. Our intent was to enable developers to take advantage of server resources in their games without having to deal with the challenges that come with building, managing and running servers at scale. So, we chose to provide cloud features that allow the game creators to push the limits of their gameplay experiences and apply the bulk of their investments to game creation, rather than server and operational resources. In fact, we even give them the cloud computing power for FREE so they can more easily transition to building games on Xbox One for the cloud.
As you’ve seen since its debut, Xbox One is a powerful device, and it will do amazing things for entertainment and games. The challenge with the compute power of any consumer electronics device, however, is that the resources it ships with are finite. Building games that leverage the power of the physical device often requires game creators to strike the balance between the fidelity of the player experience and the available computing resources on the device. In essence, the richness of the game world they create is often limited by what they can do with the power of the device. With every generation of console we have seen the richness of the game experiences improve as the power of the devices improved. However, in this generation, we really want to help game creators draw on the ever-expanding power of our server infrastructure to drive continuous innovation in their game experiences – innovations that translate directly to better, more engaging gaming experiences. The really exciting part becomes evident when we consider a few things game creators can do when they use these additional computing resources in the cloud:
Higher fidelity game experiences – As I mentioned before, cloud compute can enable developers to offload computations for all sorts of environmental elements. In a typical game development scenario, the game creator needs to balance resource allocation across each area – world management, rendering, controls, networking, lighting, physics, AI, as well as networking and multiplayer. Balancing the local computing resources for all of these elements often results in developers making tradeoffs that result in more focus on core gameplay, and less on environments, NPC and other elements of world fidelity. However, when cloud compute is available to support the various computationally-intensive elements of the game, these kinds of tradeoffs become much easier for developers to make. Games can afford to provide higher fidelity worlds and deeply intelligent NPC AI all at the same time. These experiences could only be accomplished by leveraging the resources of servers.
Improved multiplayer game experiences – This is perhaps the most obvious example of what is possible with Xbox Live Compute – dedicated servers! If you have played a lot of multiplayer games, you know that playing on dedicated game servers has advantages over peer-to-peer gameplay. With server-based multiplayer gaming, not only can more players play the game (think hundreds of players simultaneously), the gameplay will be much more reliable for the players. No more host migration interruptions, suboptimal experiences for the host, home network NAT constraints, or player cheating! Additionally, Xbox Live Compute can be utilized to persist game state so that your squad can live to fight another day without losing any progress. A great example of a game that is using Xbox Live Compute for their dedicated server multiplayer experience is “Titanfall.”
Adaptive & evolving game play – Imagine the game you play every day improving each time you log in. Imagine joining a match in your favorite first person shooter to find new maps and game modes even though you never downloaded a game update. Imagine playing with your friend even when he/she is not online. When games are powered by Xbox Live Compute, they can be dynamically updated, tuned, changed, and improved continuously. Games will evolve and live on for greater periods of time, continually providing fresh content and new experiences. The flagship example of this application of cloud computing can be found with “Forza Motorsports 5, “and its Drivatar system.
On-demand compute improves game availability – With all of the potentially interesting things that can be accomplished with Xbox Live Compute, one of the most important things is that the resources (e.g. servers) are available when gamers need it most. It is the geographic availability of this service, and its elastic scalability that enables gamers to connect to an available server and play without experiencing busy or unavailable servers. This ensures that games meet the changing demands of their player communities for compute, and gamers experience optimal connectivity based upon their geographic location. Additionally, it means that game creators can be assured that the server capacity they need, in the appropriate geographies, will be there when they need it.
With Xbox Live Compute we hope to inspire a new era of innovation in game development and game experiences for Xbox One. We expect that this platform will help our development community build more of their games as services – games that are intelligent, immersive and continuously evolving experiences for the players – powered by Microsoft’s ever-expanding cloud infrastructure. This is only the beginning though. We are really excited for the opportunities that lie ahead for the platform, our development community and ultimately our amazing Xbox owners. Stay tuned though, as we’re excited to share more of the nuts and bolts details about how we’re bringing this platform to life.
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Machinima to Launch Exclusive Experience on Xbox One Worldwide on Nov. 22
By Matthew Cohen, Director of Business Development, Machinima posted October 16, 2013 at 6:00 AM
At Machinima, we’ve always enjoyed a shared vision with Xbox and we’re thrilled to participate in the “Week of Xbox Live.” Both of our communities are incredibly passionate about games and entertainment. Today, I’m excited to announce that Machinima will take our existing relationship with Xbox to the next level, with a new, highly integrated Xbox One experience that will launch on Nov. 22. This new and improved Machinima app will take advantage of the Xbox One platform capabilities to give gamers an unparalleled experience they can’t get anywhere else. With our Xbox 360 experience ranking as one of the most popular and highest performing apps on the platform, we are really excited about delivering even more compelling experiences with Xbox One.
Xbox, Snap Machinima!
One of the cool new capabilities of Xbox One is the ability to do two things at once, on the same screen. Xbox is calling this new feature “Snap,” and we are taking full advantage of it. With the new Xbox, you can say “Xbox, Snap Machinima” while playing a game and Machinima will launch on the right side of your TV screen. The ability to put both of these experiences on the same screen gives us the chance to do some really powerful things with your gaming experience. One of the first things “Xbox, Snap Machinima” will do is offer curated videos from our catalog based on the current game you’re playing. These videos will provide everything from game walk-throughs, game reviews, help videos and more. Additionally, we’ll offer an enhanced Snap experience, also known as “Machinima Wingman,” for a select number of Xbox One titles that will provide richer, custom-created and exclusive videos to complement gameplay experiences and offering everything from in-game help and tutorials to strategy videos.
Check out this video that highlights how “Xbox, Snap Machinima” works on Xbox One with a launch title exclusive “Dead Rising 3”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_vUf1C8b8 -
Aww man... I won't get mine till Dec 31 according to amazon... this is bout to be goat
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thats dope
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What launch games are yall Day One Xbox One buyers copping?
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I can't find anywhere to reserve it for day one ... but only game I'm worried about is 2k14
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funkdocdamc wrote: »What launch games are yall Day One Xbox One buyers copping?
Killer Instinct
Ryse: Son of Rome
Dead Rising 3
COD: Ghosts
Lego Marvel Super Heroes
Watch Dogs (delayed)
Peggle 2 (delayed)
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Dead Rising 3 BF4 COD maybe Rise
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Got mine reserved and paid off. Midnight release. Imma cop my ps3 shortly afterwards.
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DR3 & COD for me on launch.
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No BF4 wtf son
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what u mean bruh?
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Running across them giant maps gets old. Battlefield 4 is the most interesting looking Battlefield to me so far tho, i'm thinking about picking it up.
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IDK bruh. Ive had bad experience with it. I mean ? would hop in the vehicles and smash out leaving me to hike across this huge as map. When i get remotely close to a battle i get sniped and have to wash rinse and repeat.
