MICROSOFT has given gamers a tour of what they’ll see when they boot up their Xbox Series X for the first time.
In a video posted to YouTube on Monday, Xbox’s Malik Prince and Harrison Hoffman took viewers on a walkthrough of the upcoming console’s dashboard.
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The dashboard is the “home” area from which you launch games and apps, and is the first screen users will navigate when they power up the Series X.
Additions include colourful new dynamic backgrounds that change their shape and texture as you scroll through your apps, the video shows.
A revamped guide, or “over-game menu” as Harrison calls it, gives you quick access to things you might want to do while playing a game.
“This includes being able to quickly switch between your games and apps, check out your notifications, take a look at your messages,” Harrison says.
“[The guide gives you] all that at your fingertips without disrupting the game at all.”
The Xbox Series X and a second, digitial only version called the Xbox Series S are out next month.
“With both these consoles we’re talking about faster load times, higher frame rates and richer, more dynamic worlds,” Mallik said.
As well as the home screen – which looks the same on both the Series X and S – the hosts showed off a handful of games on the new system.
Gears 5 and Dirt 5 look stunning on the Series X despite being last-gen releases, with improved textures and frame rates.
Microsoft unveiled the User Interface (UI) of its new consoles back in August.
“This new user experience will be effortless to navigate, accessible and inclusive for all gamers,” the US company said at the time.
“You’ll spend less time waiting, more time playing, and you’ll always be connected.”
Among the changes are a brand new design that looks sleeker and neater. Highlights include new fonts and tiles with rounded corners.
Customisation is also a key addition, with the new UI allowing you to easily add and remove tiles from the homescreen.
Microsoft has also added Customer Profile themes, which change the background of your interface. You can select those in your settings.
According to Microsoft, the update makes the UI “faster in every way”.
Home now loads over 15 per cent faster when you boot your Xbox, and it’s a third faster to load when you’re returning from a game.
For the Xbox One – which also gets the update – the changes are relatively minor, but the UI will alter gaming as we know it on the Series X and S.
It’ll introduce Quick Resume, a new feature that makes jumping into and out of games easier than ever.
The tool allows players to reboot the console without saving and then almost instantly start the game up again from where they left off.
Microsoft introduced a similar feature with the Xbox One to resume a single game at a time from a suspended state.
The Series X and S, however, will have the capacity to resume multiple games from this state.
Quick resume will also allow players to quickly switch between games without saving. The process takes roughly 10 seconds, Microsoft says.
The Xbox One, of course, does not have the computing power to handle this, and so Quick Resume does not feature as part of its update.
