About a month after launch, I delivered a well-read and oft-debated rant about the Xbox 360 user interface, which - to me, at least - seemed a bit rough and unfinished despite the innovative and graphically compelling new dashboard. My exact words were that "the Xbox 360 doesn't quite rock - yet."
Well, it's been a year and Microsoft has released several dashboard updates. Has the 360 been substantially improved? How many of the criticisms have been addressed? Do some of them even matter now?
Keep in mind that these are my pet peeves, and yours may differ. Also, my original statement that the 360 had delivered "amazing experiences" still stands - if nothing, my appreciation for the console has grown with the arrival of games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Test Drive Unlimited and Gears of War. Even lesser trifles such as Tomb Raider: Legend and Gun were much more enjoyable thanks to the achievement system, which makes the Xbox 360 my platform of choice for most multi-platform games.
But let's take a look at how the console has evolved a little more than a year after launch. Here are the 10 things I flagged for improvement in December 2005, with a status report:
- A Purgatory zone. My initial thinking was that griefers will always exist, so why not make the punishment fit the crime? If you get enough black marks playing online, you'd be dropped into a pit with other annoying assholes and you'd have serve your sentence, get a firsthand taste of what you've been giving and maybe even earn time off for good behavior by playing well with friends who are not themselves incarcerated.
- Xbox Live profiles that can be stored in multiple places. This one still causes me grief. Basically, you have to manually reclaim your gamertag every time you switch consoles or shell out for a $40 memory card to make your profile conveniently portable. So there's a viable - and, for Microsoft, profitable! - workaround.
- A better shopping experience. As I predicted, the original Xbox Live Marketplace wasn't designed to scale. So they've replaced it! And Active Downloads, which were quite obviously cut from the original release, have been perfected so you can now queue up to six files and let them download in the background. Bravo!
- Purchased content is licensed for all of your 360s. This is going to become a big deal in the next 1-2 years, and you can say you heard it here first! For some reason, no one wants to talk about it. In fact, OXM recently published some incorrect information about how Marketplace purchases work. The fact is that your purchases are licensed to both your gamertag and your console. If your console fails, you must be logged into Xbox Live for your gamertag to access your purchased content on a new or replacement 360.
- Better overall usability. Clearly, still a mixed bag. Microsoft really should get an Information Architect on this project. I mean, should Active Downloads be accessed from Personal Settings, or your gamercard? How are they a "personal setting" - because you're a person and you're downloading files? (Actually, you've delegated your console to download the files, so you're simply checking up on what your 360 is doing - a Status section would be a better place for this!) Now Account Management, that's pretty clearly a Personal Setting - so naturally you'll find it under your gamercard. And how is Shutdown a personal setting? It's an on/off decision point and should be on the main menu.
- An easier-to-use Music Player. Overall, the player is great. Some minor tweaks have improved usability from the Guide menu and your music continues playing in most cases even as you launch and play games and return to the dashboard (but not when you shutdown and restart). You can even remotely access compatible music files on your PC assuming it has Windows XP SP2 and Windows Media Player 11 (which incorporates the previously standalone Windows Media Connect software). It doesn't have to be a Media Center PC anymore.
- Create and share our own Themes. To date, theme distribution has been entirely controlled by Microsoft via Marketplace, console kiosk or certified game disc. The closest thing that you, the gamer, can do is import a single JPEG to replace the backgrounds on all blades of your dashboard.
- Achievement icons usable as Gamer Pictures. Frankly, we just don't have enough gamer pictures, and those that we do have generally aren't all that good. We want to remember and brag about our favorite achievements, and this would be a great way to do it.
- Even better Gamer Card browsing. This is just a missed opportunity. Some games make it easy to browse your friends' accomplishments as well as those players who have the best standing on a track or level. Seeing who pwned the puzzle you just completed in Jewel Quest (and just how much you missed the mark!) never gets old.
- Original Xbox save support. There's good news and bad here. The good news is that a third-party has stepped up to create a gizmo - the Datel XSATA ($50) - that will let you transfer some of your original Xbox saves to the 360. The bad news is that it's a real pain-in-the-ass to use and will deter all but the most determined. Also, it doesn't transfer any saves that are locked (i.e., can't be copied from the original Xbox dashboard) such as Forza Motorsport and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, unless you've modded. So far Microsoft has completely ignored this issue, so there's little hope we'll be able to backup our hard-won progress from the first-generation of Xbox.
Maybe it's me (since I can't seem to convince very many friends or relatives to join Xbox Live), but it doesn't seem like griefing has been as big a problem this generation. Sure, the day after a game comes out, people figure out how to exploit it. But a few weeks later (after more recreational gamers like me are done honing our skills in single-player and we're ready to go online!), the company has patched the game and removed cheaters' ammunition.
The February 2007 Official Xbox Magazine (aka OXM) has a feature article on how Microsoft polices the Live space, permanently closing down accounts where they observe infractions or when there's a critical mass of complaints. First offense is often a 24-hour communications ban (no talk or camera) or lockout, but keep going and it will stick. Sounds expensive, and I do have to wonder if a Purgatory zone might keep costs down in this area. But ultimately, hey, the end result is the same: cheaters, bigots and annoying jerks won't stick around for long, and you can always avoid (though not block!) any individuals who diminish your online gaming experience.
I still think a Purgatory zone might be an interesting social experiment - it might actually become a status symbol for some, though it also could be seen as condoning bad behavior. Anyway, it's clearly not necessary to the success of Xbox Live.
But I really think the technology exists to make remote sign-in easier. Look at your Instant Messaging clients. You sign in at work, and it signs you out at home. When you return home, you can sign in again. Sure, you'd need to build in a certain amount of security so you don't accidentally leave your console identity (and any Microsoft points in your account) open over at a friend's house. But this should be the console generation where portability isn't a concern. If Microsoft can offer 1GB Hotmail accounts, they should be able to find a way for us to store our Xbox 360 settings online, too. It shouldn't cost us $40.
Overall, the store is somewhat easier to browse, though nowhere near ideal. Items that are marked as New aren't new since your last visit, they're just all of the past two weeks' releases. But it's still an improvement. Also, finding what you're looking for can require a bit too much guesswork, and favorite areas and games can't be pinned to the first screen.
The other big problem with shopping still isn't fixed: theme and gamer pic previews. Frankly, I can see this feature being shot down again and again by a savvy product manager since themes represent a small fraction of Marketplace revenue, yet an in-engine preview feature is a fair amount of work. However, I would expect that a year later, the folks who work at Xbox.com would be in lockstep with the Marketplace team and would sim-post the theme and gamer pictures to the Web site on the same day they are released. Heck, maybe even a day or two early - what's the harm?! Instead, we have to depend on dashboardthemes.com, a third-party site, for the best and sometimes more timely previews of themes.
Now, we hear, Microsoft is rumored to be working on a new version of the 360 offering HDMI output and a much bigger hard drive. If this is true, forget waiting for the inevitable red ring of death. You might actually find that you want to upgrade your console in the next year!
Unless Microsoft fixes this issue, upgrading or otherwise replacing your 360 orphans all of your purchases so that you must be logged into Xbox Live to use them. This can affect Arcade games, themes, gamer pictures, TV shows and even retail titles with downloadable content that affects your save game.
Not a big deal?! What happens if you lose your Internet service for a week? Go to a LAN party where you need a purchased multiplayer map, but there's no broadband? Want to play Oblivion with an expansion quest at your parents' house? None of the above will work on a secondary console.
Bottom line: Microsoft needs to fix this time bomb.
This is just a rough pass, but I would move Online Status to be a convenient toggle on the Guide menu, and provide an option to always autologin but be marked as offline. The only way to do this now is to set a password to block autologin to Live but allow your preferred gamertag to appear, then press the Guide button, go to Personal Settings, select Online Status and chose Appear Offline. Then you can login with your password. Ouch!
We could also use a better preview system for themes - not just before you buy them (as discussed above) but when you're applying them. You shouldn't have to click out of the theme browser to see what it looks like, then select your way back to the browser (four clicks!) if you don't like it or want to customize it further. But more on that in a minute.
However, adding music to playlists is still a pain. You need to first open an existing playlist, find the songs you want to add, then add them to the existing playlist and finally save over the old playlist, typing the exact same name without the help of autocomplete or an option to simply save over the currently selected list. It's both counterintuitive and a nuisance when all you want to do is add a few newly imported songs to some of your existing playlists. A great solution: After ripping songs from a new album, offer checkboxes for all existing playlists with the option to add all of the new tracks. And when you remove a song from a playlist, prompt to save the changed playlist over the existing list or to a newly named list.
Why can't we simply import and assign images for all four blades and the Guide menu to create our own themes? And then share them via memory card or ship them to our friends via Xbox Live? Or even mix and match our favorite images from themes we've downloaded or purchased to make our own truly customized (though not shareable) themes? If the goal is to make the gamer truly connect with his or her console, then there's so much we can do with just a little more freedom.
Look at how customization in Forza Motorsport drove viral interest in the game thanks to an easy to use but powerful car decoration system. The same type of thing could work for the 360 - truly the most customizable of the consoles to date, but it could easily be so much more.
On the usability side, the picture picker takes far to long to load with virtually no caching. We should also be able to create a page of favorites so we don't have to load the whole list to select one that we already know we like. This is another place where the dashboard just wasn't designed to scale well.
Thankfully, anything we can photograph with the Xbox Live Camera (within reason and community standards) can be made into a gamer picture that only our friends can see. But offering us the tools to make and/or import our own high-quality images would be better and could engage the interest of new designers who could deliver some awesome and worthwhile gamer pictures for sale on Marketplace.
But it seems like there should be a way to surf gamercards the way you can browse the Internet Movie Database and Amazon.com product listings. There should be a social browser for finding people you know and others who have similar gaming habits and preferences. Make it an opt-in setting, so you don't put yourself into the shark tank unless you want to. Mail is blocked from non-friends by default, so it's not like you'll get spammed. If not this generation (where there are already 5 million+ on Live), this will become imperative in the next one.
On the "plus" side, Microsoft backward compatibility has lagged significantly behind the promise that "most games" would be playable on the Xbox 360. So you don't need to worry about rescuing games, like Morrowind, that you'll probably never be able to play on the next-gen console anyway.
I still believe this is a huge oversight. Both the Wii and PlayStation 3 have ways to access or rescue save games from their past generation consoles. But it's not in Microsoft's best business interest to offer you a way to extend your existing library of games. So if you want this, you'll just have to bite the bullet and get an XSATA.
Instead, if Microsoft keeps the dashboard upgrades coming (packed with cool new features such as IPTV, which should be making Sony sweat very hard right about now) and continues to listen to its fan base (send your own feedback!), it might find a healthy niche this generation and, perhaps, will exert a big influence on future consoles to follow.
-=Gamewatcher
