The New Xbox Experience (NXE) has been out for a few weeks now and by now we’ve had time to really figure out what worked and what didn’t. So let’s get started, shall we?

Avatars

Let’s get this out of the way. Of all of the new features in the NXE, the Avatars – or Wiibles as some people are derogatorily referring to them as – are probably the most polarizing thing in the update. Some people really dig them, some people absolutely hate them. Personally, I don’t mind them. I like being able to, at a glance, see who’s playing with who on my friends list page. That lets me easily see who has a spot open and who doesn’t. Could this have been done just as well with the old gamer pictures? Possibly, but if you’d simply replace the avatars with Gamer pictures and Gamertags, it’s likely that it would just look like a mess.

The real issue with the Avatars is that you’re forced to make one. It’s not a difficult process and doesn’t take very long, but to the people who just want to get in and play games, this is too much for them. There are some who are even outright insulted by having to make an Avatar. What Microsoft could do and likely will end up doing is putting in an option to turn off the display of Avatars.

That said, I have to take this opportunity to call out the genre obsessed – READ: The Problem with Gaming’s Genre Obsession – “hardcore” gamers out there that only play Halo, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto: Lighten up! If you’re getting all bent out of shape over a cartoon representation of yourself, then you have some other issues you need to work out first.

Netflix

Streaming Netflix movies is one of the cooler new features of the NXE, though it’s only available to those in the US. If you have an Xbox Live Gold account and a Netflix subscription you can add the Netflix Player application to your 360 and link your Netflix account to it. After doing that you’ll have access to your Netflix Instant Watch queue. The video quality is great and the movie selection is getting better all the time. So this feature is a total win then, right?

Well, not quite. For whatever reason, you need an Xbox Live Gold account to be able to stream the movies. This essentially means that only people who are already paying for Live are going to be able to use it. Someone who is just getting an Xbox 360 and really isn’t interested in playing online can’t access this feature. This is a problem because it cuts off a pretty big section of the market.

Having to pay for Xbox Live and Netflix is a bad idea, but I do understand that you have to pay for bandwidth costs. So what should they do? The simple answer is adding two new membership tiers to Xbox Live. The first would be Xbox Live Silver Plus, which includes access to Netflix streaming movies for Netflix members who don’t want to upgrade to Gold. Microsoft could charge $29.99 annually for it.

Another opportunity for Microsoft would be in offering a solution for people who would only use Netflix for its streaming service, and not for its mail-in delivery service. People interested in only using Neflix Instant Watch could sign up for Xbox Live Platinum, which would give them all of the benefits of Xbox Live Gold as well as access to the Netflix Instant Watch library without the ability to receive Netflix movies through the mail. This could even allow Netflix to open up its Instant Watch library to gamers outside of the United States.

There is another small problem with Netflix on the Xbox 360. You can’t manage your queue from the Dashboard. Not everyone sits in front of their TV with a laptop, so this is something that they’ll have to address soon. If Microsoft plans to offer that third tier then they absolutely have to add this ability. Will they? Time will tell, but it seems to me that merging Xbox Live and Netflix is inevitable. Microsoft’s claim to fame has been that the Xbox 360 offers a seamless experience, and this Netflix implementation in its current form just isn’t.

Oh and there are other countries besides the US … Just thought I’d mention that.

Parties

For those people that play multiplayer games all the time this is an excellent feature. You can have up to eight players in a party and go from game to game together. The party also has party wide voice chat, which is something that hasn’t been done up until now. The brilliant thing about this system is that you don’t all have to be playing the same game or even doing the same thing. If you feel like taking a break you can do that and still stay in the party. There really isn’t anything bad I can say about this feature, it’s been a long time in coming, but worth the wait.

Game Installs

Here’s one that sort of came out of nowhere. With the NXE you can now install your games to your Xbox 360 hard drive. In theory this is supposed to speed up game load times and make the system quieter. In practice it’s a little bit of a mixed blessing. To get the noise level out of the way now, yes, the disc spins down completely so the system is much quieter. The only thing you’ll hear is the fan at the back of the system. I’d imagine that not spinning the drive all the time probably also has a positive effect on the lifespan of the DVD-rom drive in the system.

Game load times are all over the place though. Some games like Lost Odyssey load literally twice as fast from the hard disk as they do from the DVD, while others like Halo 3 actually load slower from the HDD. I have a theory as to why that is too. Some games offload a lot of data to the HDD and then also read from the DVD drive. Now if the DVD data is now on the hard disk it means that the game is going to two different regions of the hard disk to fetch data and it’s trying to do this simultaneously. There is only so much data you can pull from a hard drive at any given time and so it slows down.

Below is a video showing the loading time difference for Lost Odyssey between the hard drive and the DVD.

On the whole though, this is a great feature. Unless the game’s performance degrades significantly after the installation I will install everything to the HDD. Even if the game doesn’t load that much faster, at least it cuts the noise down significantly. My only real gripe with this new addition is that you have to have the game disk in the drive to start it. The reasons for this are obvious, but it would be nice if there was a way to register a game to a particular console so that you could just launch it like a Live Arcade game.

There are a bunch of other things that have been added to the NXE, like the Community Games which I haven’t mentioned here. Community Games is a feature in itself, so stay tuned for that. For now though, it’s time to call it a day.

To wrap it all up; The NXE is here and for the most part it’s a good update. Nothing is perfect and Microsoft could certainly make a few improvements here and there, but on the whole they’ve done a fantastic job with it. Hopefully they’ll start to update this more often and move away from the old spring and fall update schedule.

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About This Author: Filippo Dinolfo

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