Xbox Live has been the defining feature on Xbox 360 as millions of players hop online every day to play games with friends and strangers from all over the world. That will remain the same on the Xbox One, but Microsoft is introducing some new features that will make Xbox Live even better.
As previously revealed, the core of the new Xbox Live multiplayer experience is centered around reputation. As you play online, people will be able to rate their experience with you, and your reputation will go up or down accordingly. From there, you’ll be paired with other players of like reputations so you no longer have to play games with the less savory folks in the community.
Another big change coming to multiplayer is dedicated servers and cloud processing. For the former, Microsoft says that every online game on Xbox Live will now be hosted via a dedicated server. That means less lag and less cheating all around. As for cloud processing, Xbox One developers will be able to offload some computations, like AI processing, onto Microsoft’s servers to increase performance.
Finally, the Xbox team will be introducing some major changes to achievements on Xbox One. For starters, achievements lists are no longer static. For the life of the game, developers can introduce as many achievements as they want. Some of these new achievements may even fall into new categories, like Challenge Achievements or Community Achievements. For example, a developer may introduce an achievement in a racing game that challenges the community to reach 5 billion miles driven. Once that goal is reached, every player that participated will receive the achievement.
Xbox Live has always been a great online service, but Microsoft looks to be finally turning it into a great online community with the Xbox One. For more on that, check out the Xbox team’s breakdown of the new Friends App for Xbox Live.
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