Xbox One July update brings help for Achievements and ‘Likes’ on recordings

Microsoft gave viewers a peek at the continuing evolution of the Xbox One just ahead of its E3 press conference, but everyone should get to try out the new Snap mode for Achievements next month. That’s because the feature is a part of the July update about to start testing, along with a few other tweaks. In case you missed the E3 preview, there’s a video demo of the multitasking-ready new Achievements mode after the break, showing how it lets players track their progress while staying in the game, and even search for help on how to reach their goals.

Another change is helpful to gamers rocking a Kinect-less Xbox One, as double tapping the home button will pull up the Snap menu (since they clearly can’t say “Xbox, Snap (insert app here)” and choose an app to run in the side bar. Double tapping already served to switch back and forth between running apps, but now it has another use. There’s also a tweak to let people choose which language model their Xbox One responds to, even if it doesn’t match the country they live in, and support for game publishers to sell digital bundles and sic compilations in the future. Last but not least, the activity feed and Game DVR are getting some post-MySpace style social features. You can “like” your favorite recorded clips, or notes that pop up in the activity feed while you’re using the SmartGlass remote app. We wonder if those likes will ever cross over into other social networks or apps like YouTube and Twitter, but we’ll have to wait for the full release next month to know how everything works for sure.

Achievement Snap Mode and more coming to Xbox One in July http://t.co/F1hKHKADbZ

– Larry Hryb (@majornelson) June 13, 2014

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Source: Xbox Wire, Xbox (YouTube)

These are the biggest Xbox One games at E3 2014

Sure, you could spend the rest of your days playing Titanfall online, but what if you’d like to give your Xbox One something a little different to play? Microsoft’s message for this E3 was clear: games, games and more games. We took to the company’s booth this week to find out what you’d be playing this fall, and whether you like shooters, driving games or indies, you should be all set for first-party titles. How does Redmond stack up to Sony’s plan for the PlayStation? We’ll let you be the judge.

FABLE LEGENDS

For a lot of people, the Fable franchise has been heartbreaking from the word “go.” The series’ promise of ultimate freedom was never truly fulfilled and even the series’ creator, Peter Molyneux, has said the last was a “train wreck.” If the past three entries left you wanting, Fable: Legends might not change that. Instead of going for the series-typical action-RPG, Legends looks more like a shallow co-op romp than a lengthy single-player game where your actions determine your appearance (doing good deeds caused a halo to form around your head, for example). Three players work to take down waves of enemies and gather loot; even if you play solo, you’ll have comrades fighting alongside — they’ll just be AI-controlled. Where it gets unique, however, is when a fourth person plays as the villain. From there, you’re taking almost a tower-defense-style look at each match, and directing enemies toward the advancing heroes.

I thought this aspect was fun, but couldn’t help but pine for a traditional Fable game where I could kick chickens, have a wife (or husband) in every city and collect a trail of flies. A beta for the title launches this fall, and a full release is planned for next year.

SUNSET OVERDRIVE

Sunset Overdrive is absolute mayhem. Developer Insomniac Games’ latest takes everything it’s known for (colorful action, ingenious weapon systems and pure irreverence) and poured it into a game where you can fire explosive propane tanks at glowing orange monstrosities whilst grinding around on power lines and defending a vat of the energy drink from the monsters it created. In the multiplayer match I joined, there were countless explosions, particle effects and monsters on screen at the same time, and the game never once stopped being silky smooth as I bounced off of trampolines and onto roofs so I could rain hell from above with a freeze ray — even with seven other players. Granted, this was a very controlled setup in Microsoft’s E3 booth, so anything could happen when it launches this fall. While I’m confident that multiplayer should be a blast, I’m curious as to how the experience translates to a solo campaign. Insomniac knows how to tell a story though (just look at Resistance 3, for example), so I’m not too worried.

FORZA HORIZON 2

Not everyone wants to spend more time virtually tuning an absurdly expensive car’s engine than they do actually, you know, racing it. Forza Horizon 2 doesn’t force that, much like its predecessor didn’t. For better or for worse, Horizon 2 doesn’t immediately feel all that different from the first Horizon. I drove my bright red Corvette Stingray through the desert, carving out corners on cliffside roads, shunting anyone who came too close, while electronic dance music beats thumped in my headphones. Looking back, however, at least one aspect of my race stood out: I was encouraged to drive off-road. It sounds minor, yes, but seeing the suggested racing line (and my opponents) lead into tall grass changed the pacing of the competition a bit. We were all in low-slung, high-powered automobiles designed for racetracks — this forced us to slow down, and gave me a chance to overtake those who decelerated too much. And when I crossed the finish line in eighth place? A few fighter jets scrambled overhead, leaving multicolored contrails in their wake. It seemed a bit familiar, yes, but I was okay with it and I can’t wait to get behind the wheel this autumn.

ORI AND THE BLIND FOREST

Ori and the Blind Forest is one of the bigger pushes for Microsoft’s indie-game initiative, and it’s gorgeous. During my brief demo, I guided a charming, little white creature around a beautiful setting, hopping from platform to platform and launching fire attacks at pink and pulsing enemies. The PR reps on hand told me that all of the backgrounds are procedurally generated, meaning an algorithm assembles them, so if you go back through the same area three different times, you’ll see three different backdrops. Given that this game plays in the style of a classic Metroid or Castlevania where earning new abilities opens hidden areas in previously traveled areas, you’ll probably see the same scene more than once when the game launches this fall.

HALO: THE MASTER CHIEF COLLECTION

You didn’t think we’d keep Halo out of this, did you? Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC) packs four games onto one disc, some 100 multiplayer maps, a totally remastered Halo 2 and a whole lot more all into one $60 package this fall. Halo 2′s overhauled graphics don’t measure up to other recent shooters, but pressing the Xbox One controller’s “view” button brings the original 2004 graphics back, and you can see just how different the two games look. Better shadows, more detailed textures and, well, a lot more drama, come to light with the new visuals. Developer 343 Industries is remastering the audio, too if you’re into that sort of thing. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 3 and Halo 4 aren’t getting revamped, but that’s because they already looked pretty great running on the Xbox 360. I was told, however, that some post-processing effects have been added so they look a touch better. What’s more, the MCC is how you’ll access the Halo 5: Guardians beta this December, and Ridley Scott’s Halo: Nightfall live-action series after the collection’s November 11th release.

[Image credits: Microsoft]

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Ridley Scott’s ‘Halo’ project is a prequel to the next major ‘Halo’ game

In a way, director Ridley Scott’s Halo-themed project, dubbed Nightfall, brings Microsoft’s tentpole shooter franchise full circle. Master Chief’s galaxy-spanning exploits owe a giant debt to the filmmaker’s iconic tale of deep-space horror, Alien, and now Scott is helping establish where the franchise goes on the Xbox One. As 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross said during my meeting at E3 this week, working with him “kind of upped the bar” on the series, especially compared to 343′s last attempt at live-action, the Halo 4 lead-in Forward Unto Dawn. “Hopefully we get better each time,” she said. Nightfall tells the origin story for Agent Locke, a character Ross said plays a “pivotal role” in Halo 5: Guardians. As far as story, that’s as much as we know so far. Ross isn’t sure how many episodes Nightfall will span, but said that there will be five of them leading into Halo 5‘s beta timeframe.

She cited Forward Unto Dawn as a learning experience. But, without it, we likely wouldn’t have Nightfall.

“I think we had over 59 million views on Machinima for Forward Unto Dawn,” she said. “It was definitely the feedback that we got from all of our research studies that [the series] did actually make a difference” of how people experienced Halo 4. She said that the direct responses to the series makes it a lot easier to tell stories in the future. “Our books are on the New York Times best-seller list, but they’re not getting 60 million [readers].”

The episodic series was eventually released as a single film to home video, but didn’t quite satiate fans clamoring to see Master Chief on the big screen and all that that would entail. Ross doesn’t see the franchise heading that way, though.

“Fans keep asking for a Halo movie, and we feel that with what we have on Xbox One, TV suits us better,” she said. “We’re able to tell al larger story on a regular cadence; this is sort of our training wheels for Xbox One.”

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‘Halo: The Master Chief Collection’ has what you expect and a whole lot more

We told you that Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC) existed before anyone else, but thanks to the package being officially official, we now have a veritable truckload of details about it. When the game releases November 11th, just over 10 years after Halo 2‘s launch, it’ll pack remastered audio and visuals, four whole games on one disc, a staggering number of multiplayer maps and even a few surprises.

“We think about our fans,” 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross said during the presentation I attended at E3. “We’re going for the nostalgia play, but [MCC] is about providing a new way to play. For us that are geeking out on story, it’s about being able to connect to Master Chief’s past.”

The future, however, is the impetus for that past. Developer 343 Industries (Microsoft’s internal Halo studio) knows that there’s an entire generation of gamers that weren’t even born when the franchise launched in 2001, and the team doesn’t want people to avoid next year’s sequel simply because they aren’t caught up on the decade-plus narrative. The MCC serves to address that by putting Master Chief’s story all in one place to give context for next year’s Halo 5: Guardians.

“We want you to know the full story [of Master Chief],” Ross said. “We want to make it incredibly accessible and so that the pieces are aligned leading up to Halo 5.”

Where Halo 4 tucked a lot of its story within semi-hidden computers in the game, those will be unlocked from the outset in MCC, and Halo 2 is getting a series of those off-the-beaten-path narrative points, too. Those will serve as a “breadcrumb trail” to Halo 5 and also flesh out the tale of The Arbiter, the disgraced alien general. Blur Studio, the company responsible for some of Halo 4‘s TV spots, is also creating narrative book-ends for the prologue and epilogue of the MCC, which should help fill in the gaps for those who haven’t been following the franchise’s wealth of expanded fiction, too.

I was told that the game is expected to be sold digitally, but if all you want is Halo 2, you’re out of luck: 343 isn’t breaking the game into discrete pieces; you have to buy the entire collection as a whole.

MCC’s playlists in action

So as not to alienate returning players, every campaign mission from every game is unlocked at the outset — pretty great news for those who don’t want to slog through “The Library” from Halo: Combat Evolved ever again. This aspect consequently gave 343 the chance to introduce curated playlists that let you bounce around the best moments from all four games’ campaigns back to back to back. Want to play the last level of each game in succession? Do it. To be clear, however, these are put together by the development team, not the users. At least, not yet.

“It’s something [the MCC developers] started out trying to do,” Ross told me. “It may be something we get back in. It’d be pretty cool to send your own custom playlists to your friends; it’s just we’re doing a ton with this project already. At first, we’re going to get community feedback so it feels like there are more personalities than just 343 making [the playlists].”

MCC lead Dennis Ries agreed, but said it isn’t something he and his team can do right now — they’re working to get the base game out to fans this November. Any suggested additions at this point will likely come post-launch.

“That’s something that we know we can give to our audience,” he said. “If we have that opportunity, we’re going to.”

With 2014 being Halo 2‘s 10th anniversary, 343 is remastering it with even more care than it gave to the game’s forebearer. It’s a Halo 2 that’s been gussied up aurally and visually, with its roughly 50 minutes of cinematics getting entirely rebuilt by Blur Studio. Like its predecessor, you’ll also be able to swap between old and new graphics with a push of a button.

Some of Blur’s previous Halo work

This time out, though, there isn’t a brief pause as it happens; the trick is instantaneous. There was a live demo during the presentation where whoever was playing jumped back and forth between modern and classic graphics while popping off headshots, all without missing a single kill. The Xbox One’s horsepower advantage over the Xbox 360 is readily apparent here.

The love for the title that legitimized console-based online shooters doesn’t stop there, either. Six of Halo 2‘s classic adversarial maps got the remaster treatment as well, including “Lockout,” “Ivory Tower” and “Ascension.” If those get boring, there are still some 97 other maps to keep you busy: Every map that’s ever shipped for a Halo game is included in the MCC, even if they were exclusive to PC ports of the first two titles. Yes, you’ll finally be able to play online pistols-only matches on “Wizard.” I’m stoked too. The MCC flavors of Combat Evolved‘s maps use the PC version as their base, so while “Hang ‘em High” won’t look as good as something from, say, Halo 4, it will likely look better than it did 13 years ago.

Each Halo‘s online combat has been markedly different, however. To address that, 343 is isolating each release’s unique features to their respective title. It might sound disappointing that you can’t use a Halo 3‘s bubble shield on “Sidewinder” from Halo: Combat Evolved, but it’s probably for the best; each title’s maps were designed to handle those wrinkles. Keeping the entire online experience cohesive is a voting system similar to what’s been in previous games. Pick your desired game-type; pick from a Halo 1, 2, 3 or 4 map; murder; finish and repeat.

Keith David’s voice makes every video better

The inclusion of every game in Chief’s saga into the MCC might have a downside, though. Come 2017 and 2022, we might not see anniversary packages for Halo 3 and Halo 4, respectively, because they’re represented here. Those games, along with Combat Evolved Anniversary, are more or less being left alone in terms of remastering because they appeared on the Xbox 360 to start. I was told they’d run at 60 frames per second and get some additional post-processing effects, but that an overhaul wasn’t in the cards — especially since Halo 4 still looks incredible.

“The internal Halo 4 team all said ‘this is what it was supposed to look like on Xbox 360!’” Ross excitedly told me. “It looks amazing.”

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