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
How Microsoft is fixing the new Xbox One dashboard
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.
