"Chat changed because the system is now able to do more than one thing at once"

Speaking with Polygon, Xbox Group Program manager Jeff Henshaw confirmed what Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb alluded to in a Reddit post earlier this week; Microsoft is aware with the air of discontent surrounding the Xbox One's chat functionality and is looking at ways to improve the feature.

"Chat changed because the system is now able to do more than one thing at once," Henshaw explained. With the Xbox 360, he said, the console is mainly preoccupied with running the game, and all other features must fit around that primary function. With the Xbox One's three operating systems running simultaneously, things can get a little more complex.

"Parties can become more robust things over time," Henshaw said. "Right now it is a basic collecting point to prepare to go play a game." This new system hasn't been all that well received however, so how is the company going to go about making the service more user-friendly again?

"I technically don't get to make the announcement of how they're going to change," Henshaw clarified, before continuing, "but the ways that you can envision them changing are we have this very powerful, very robust, vibrant application environment on Xbox One. You've heard us talk a lot about the multiple operating systems and how the apps run in this heavily-Windows influenced and Windows-based environment. That's where you see things like Skype, parties, IE, Sky Drive, this long list of cool, new things that you can do in this application environment while the game is running that wasn't possible before.

"I envision parties, now I'm not the parties feature guy, I'll influence parties a little. But I envision parties becoming an increasingly high-fidelity, increasingly full-featured, increasingly... collaborative or corroborative to provide you with more things to do while teams assemble, more things to do while you wait for the game to start, whether it's review leaderboard statistics, compare your standings.

"We have the platform that enables that to happen," he finished. "So I think the sky's the limit in terms of where we take it. The key was getting the platform launched that enables that innovation to take place. That platform is now launched and the innovation has begun."

Have you tried the new console's chat functions? The process of setting up party chat certainly seems more convoluted than it was before, so how would you like to see it fixed?

Posted: Dec 06, 2013 7:19 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.oxm.co.uk/67649/microsoft-on-why-xbox-ones-chat-functionality-differs-from-the-xbox-360-and-how-itll-improve-over-time/