In a podcast with Windows Central Senior Editor Jez Corden and YouTuber Rand Al Thor 19, Xbox Platform Corporate Vice President Mike Ybarra discussed the future of Xbox.
During the 90-minute impromptu interview, Ybarra discussed the Xbox Fluent Design update and much more. Be sure to watch the full show.
The Xbox Two Podcast with guest Mike Ybarra
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One interesting piece of information Ybarra shared was planned new features to the Xbox Achievement system.
Since the invention of Xbox Achievements, games simply reward Gamerscore for tackling specific objectives, tallied into a single number. Ybarra noted that perhaps this isn't always the best way to show off a gamer's Achievements, particularly with the rise of e-sports, where an Xbox gamer might actually be contracted to play a single game all day every day, training for competitions.
While Ybarra was unable to go into details, he noted that the Xbox team is working on something that "fundamentally changes the concept" of Xbox Achievements, with the aim of highlighting gamers' histories and accomplishments, to complement (not replace) the gamerscore system.
From Ybarra:
Those are all small things that we can do to the system, and the team looks at them. They're in our backlog of things that we want to get done, but there's actually bigger, more bolder changes that we have in mind. Nothing that I can talk about now, but something that fundamentally changes the concept ... we are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody's gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on Xbox.
[W]e can do a lot more to reflect and let people show their gaming history and their status. Whether it's somebody who only plays multiplayer in Halo 5 at a professional level, maybe they only have 2,000 Gamerscore, you want to be able to celebrate that person. You want people to be in the know. This person doesn't play a lot of games, but they're world top ten at Halo 5. All the way to people [with over a million gamerscore]. It's that range that we really need to look at and celebrate ... we're going to go big in the area of letting people show off and represent their gaming history and the type of gamer that they are, far more than we do with Gamerscore.
It's fun to speculate about what this sort of feature could be. Some kind of Facebook-like procedurally-generated video of your best gamerclips and cheevos? A personal timeline full of game stats, kill-death ratios and biggest victories? Microsoft certainly has the data to play with when it comes to this sort of stuff, and it'll be interesting to see where the company takes it.
Be sure to watch the full podcast using the link below, and tell us how you'd like to see Xbox Achievements evolve in the comments.
Reader comments
Microsoft is working on new features to showcase Xbox Achievements
I thought this was supposed to happen when the XB1 first arrived? I'm all for enhancing the achievement system, though don't really care to see people 'Prestiging' normal achievements just because they play the same thing all the time. It's their choice to do so, but is that really the only future improvement that can happen?
It’s deeper than that. There’s already a scoring system on how many people have achieved a specific achievement and if it’s “rare”
Yet it is still not as strong as Trueachievements.com with the dynamic scoring. Hopefully MS will start integrating more of their functions down the line. Direct linking to their site or at least pulling data from their servers would be great, but I know that will never happen.
I am hoping that it will turn out to be deeper than what I suggested, though by the comments regarding same game all the time play I doubt it.
...yet still at the end of the day, for me it's all about that total gamerscore. I can't play one game for a month so I buy lots of games, all genres and I play them to increase my score. There's no such game as stupid game or with easy achievements, so far as it has achievements, I'm all in baby!
I have a strong feeling that they are going to break something that doesn't fixing (again...).