Inside the New Xbox Experience

Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the new Xbox Experience, which is coming on November 19th. They discuss the new interface and features, and their reaction is generally positive, citing graphical improvements, smooth file management, and better chat functionality. "The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, 'We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could.'"

Install to hard drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

The *one* feature I was interested in, install to hard disk, they only mentioned in passing, saying that "We haven't had long enough with NXE to gauge how much of an improvement installation is over playing off the disc, but we'll take a look in the coming weeks."

Thanks, that was the whole reason I read the stupid article.

Re:Install to hard drive?

[Have Blue]

According to other reports load times are slightly improved, operating noise is significantly decreased, and a rip takes 6-10 minutes. You also need to put the original disk in the drive to play an installed game (so don't think you can just fill it with games from friends or Gamefly for free).

Re:Please...

[arkhan_jg]

FTA, I think you're going to be disappointed on both counts I'm afraid. The first thing you have to do is create an avatar which is then used prominently on the 'my xbox' and 'friends' pages - the friends list is now replaced by a collection of avatars.

From the sounds of it, the advertising is going to get even worse and more pushy and in-your-face. I wish there was a 'xbox live' proxy we could install that would filter out the ad images from the rest of the content. Hmm. I might try forcing it through a proxy anyway to see what it's doing, but I bet it's done over https.