arne360

Tomorrow, the first major update of the Xbox 360 Dashboard will be released over Xbox Live. Less than two weeks ago, a few sites and blogs (like TeamXbox, Gaming Age, Joystiq and Kotaku to name a few) were able to get to chat briefly with the Group Marketing Manager for Xbox Live, Aaron Greenberg and/or Jerry Johnson, Xbox Live Group Product Manager. Major Nelson also had a chance to record a podcast with Aaron as his guest to go over a lot of the new features from the Spring Update, amongst other things. Major Nelson then took some time and went over to on10.net to give Tina an overview of some of the major features in under ten minutes. In addition, GameVideos.com has posted a video walk-through of the update as well — it’s well worth the watch even at the twenty minute runtime.

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The current iteration of Xbox Live has really spoiled me in a couple of ways. On the original Xbox and Xbox Live, it was nice and important to know who on your friends list was online and what game they are playing. So of course with the Xbox 360 release, Xbox Live tells you that information and then lets you know what they are doing in the game: what level or map they are on, often what particular activity they are doing, status about their character/persona, the score of the (sports) game they are playing, or, like with Oblivion, their level and current health.

Which brings me to wish that Final Fantasy XI was able to pass along similar information. I’m guessing that, along with the fact that you couldn’t really award retroactive achievements, there might be some technical reason that stands in the way of reporting that type of information back to the dashboard or Xbox.com friends lists. The thing is with PlayOnline was that I knew whomever was online on their friends list was playing FFXI. Now when I see them on “PlayOnline Viewer” I want to know details! FFXI or, unlikely, TetraMaster? Why isn’t it the mysterious Final Fantasy XI entry/icon which only shows me as playing it the day I installed it. I also want to see what their character name is, what server they are on and what jobs and levels they have active at that moment. It just seems… to fit… and satiate my curiousity about people I didn’t know were playing MMOs/FFXI.

I’ve recently been reading Elle’s blog, Circlets, since she was linked to by Major Nelson. She is a writer for the Xbox documentation team. A few days ago she wrote an entry about the privacy settings for Xbox Live that you can find on the Dashboard. It isn’t the first thing I would think to read about in a manual or search out for, but now that she posted it, I was interested in the details.

Besides the usual opt-in/opt-out marketing options, there were two things that caught my eye. The first was the “Played Games” option, which lets you show or hide your Played Games list from whoever is looking at your Gamercard. The other option is for “Member Content.” Elle comments that this option “doesn’t have a lot of use right now, but it will as people create content to share with other people. You can choose whether you want to see the content.” It will be interesting to see how that comes into play in the future.

One of the most requested things I’ve seen on the boards, apart from Backwards Compatibility updates, has been adding a multi-user chat “room” to the exiting one-to-one chat on Xbox Live.

When rumors of the update to the Dashboard started circulating a few weeks ago, every few posts was either specifically expressing hope for or requesting the addition of a voice chat feature that would let you have multiple people join in.

Looks like the folks on the Xbox Development Team have noticed the same thing and have addressed why one-to-one chat is the only option available on their Xbox Team blog.

Finding out that the minimum broadband requirements are 64kbps upstream and downstream for all Xbox Live functions and games was a pretty interesting piece of info to come out of it… I know nothing about games networking, but that seems like a pretty small bandwidth requirement and it’s a testament to how the networking has been optimized for online considering all the games work pretty well online.