Just a day after the Xbox team published two videos and detailed FAQs about Xbox Live’s Clubs and Looking for Groups features, Xbox’s Major Nelson has announced today that both features and more are rolling out today to the Xbox One and the cross-platform Xbox app as part of the Xbox Holiday Update. “With this holiday update, Xbox Live becomes even more social as we unite gamers across devices, giving you access to more people to play with that share your interests and more choice in how you play,” explained the exec.
All the new Xbox Live features that are rolling out today have been previously available via the Xbox One Preview program as well as the Xbox beta app on Windows 10 and Android devices. However, the Arena feature which was introduced a straightforward tournament system on the Xbox One Preview program a month ago will remain in preview for now. “We plan to keep Arena in Preview through the holidays to ensure it’s great when we launch it more broadly,” explained Major Nelson.
For those of you who didn’t followed our previous stories on new Xbox Live features, here are the highlights of this Holiday Update:
- The new Clubs feature allow anyone to create their own community of gamers on Xbox Live and share content, set up parties and communicate via text and voice accross Xbox One and Windows 10, iOS and Android.
- Looking for Group complements the new Clubs feature by helping gamers to find other people to play with on Xbox Live. Users will be allowed to set various criteria such as specific game modes, required levels or characters, languages and more.
- Group Messaging on Xbox Live is pretty self-explanatory and will let users pursue their group conversations across all platforms.
- The Gamerscore Leaderboard has also been revamped and will now be reset at the beginning of each month. A toggle has also been added to quickly access data from previous months.
- The Xbox team has also added a unique notification for Rare Achievements. Players who unlock them will discover a custom sound and a diamond icon highlighting it. You can see how it looks like in the video below:
- Lastly, The Xbox One virtual keyboard now features the Windows 10 emojis which will be accessible by pulling the left trigger of the Xbox One controller.
Last but not least, you can watch a walkthrough of all these new features in the video below:
According to Major Nelson, the updates have started to roll out to the Xbox One and the Xbox apps starting today. The Xbox app is preinstalled on Windows 10 devices but we’ve added download links for the Android and iOS versions below.
