The latest update to the Xbox One this month (for those in the preview program to begin with) will bring to the table some cool new features. One of which is the ability to broadcast party chat to Twitch (via the App) and additionally the party chat will now support up to 16 players (previously 12); plus you can control the audio output of the chat i.e. direct it to your headset or speakers.
Xbox Avatars App
On top of this you have a tweak to the Avatars App so you can now compare your Avatar style/props to a friend's.
You could argue that the above is a clever marketing ploy to entice you to part with cash, as when you compare items some of these will only be available as a purchase or by unlocking them by getting hold of a game.
Speaking of the store you will have heard by now that you will be able to purchase/grab the 360 backward compatible games from the Xbox One store, but this was not available to test at the time of writing. Even so, it will be a welcome addition because let’s face it, it’s a bit of a faff at the moment trying to grab one of the 360 Games with Gold titles each month.
Xbox OneGuide
Another nifty feature is the ability to access your achievements for a particular game via the OneGuide. The feature dynamically adjusts to which game you are playing, but basically it works by launching the OneGuide (double tapping the Xbox button on the controller), heading to the achievement icon and then viewing the current locked/unlocked achievements for the game of choice.
This is a lot easier to navigate than by snapping the Achievements App to your game window.
Xbox 'Record that'
However one of the best updates for me is the option to adjust the Xbox ‘Record that’ default time from 30 seconds up to 5 minutes. You can also get clips recorded at 15 seconds if needs be.
This way I can now record ample footage without having to result in using a snapped GameDVR App or the latter taking up a good portion of the screen. Now I can simply use 'Record that', jump to another location in the game and do some more capturing. The upload studio editor can then be used to trim the footage back, so it provides a lot more control over the gameplay capturing process than before.
I have showed the above in a series of videos. Sadly the later 'GameDVR' video was done using the Windows 10 streaming side of things so I could not showcase the new feature as well as I wanted to, but hopefully you will get the general gist of things.
When more features arrive I will update this article.
Note: Sorry if the audio output was low on the above videos, I'm not sure why the microphone was not picking up my voice as much. However I apologise in advance if you have to crank the volume up a touch when viewing them.