Play a Second Xbox One Game while Matchmaking (Digital Only)

“While Xbox Live is matchmaking, you’re untethered and free to do what you want, like watch TV or check out your favorite website or apps while waiting for your next game. If you’re playing digital games, you can even play one game while Smart Match prepares a second. This freedom to break out of waiting in lobbies and do whatever you want is what separates Xbox One from systems that don’t have a way to instantly switch between tasks.”

And this is why I'm going digital on day one. I guess a lot of these features would have been available to all before they changed their policies. Glad to hear a lot of them seem to be left in tact for those who plan to go down the digital route. Being able to play another game whilst Halo takes its sweet time matchmaking is dream come true.

Just out of interest, will features like this make you think twice about buying physical games? What else would you like Microsoft to do with digital to incentivise customers to make the switch?

I have never had to wait long for match making. So this has little impact on me. COD and BF have all ways gotten me into matches super fast.

@the_laughing_man: Fair enough. Those two games do have a good track record of getting you into games super quick.

I can see it working with Killer Instinct and WarFrame (If it comes over)

No, but I've already been buying digital games.

I do wonder how this will be implemented between games. I can imagine setting up a matchmaking request, then playing another game, only to be stuck trying to get to a save point if the game only features auto-save when a match is found. Will this push developers more towards saving anywhere in their game or better auto-saving implementations? Will multiplayer give players the option to boot someone taking too long to switch from their other game?

Well... hopefully matchmaking doesn't take so long during the next gen that I feel the need to start up another game in the meantime.

Doesn't this imply that matchmaking will take far longer than it should? And have we, as a society, gotten so impatient that we can't sit there for half a minute so a game can find people for us to play with?

It might work like an app or something, where you can close it and when you open it back up, it will be exactly where it was when you closed it. Windows 8 does this with its apps.

I can't remember what it's called, but Xbox 360 has that profile setting where you say you're looking for a match for a specific game. That part I would agree would be an app. I'm talking about actually switching between games running on the game-OS portion of the system. If it finds a match, you still need to finish playing whatever you were playing before switching over. It may be that the OS might save a game state.

Still very cool. I could play Pac-Man "all fucking day" :D

No, that won't make me think twice about anything, as I like physical property. I also have a way to instantly switch between tasks on my television. It's called the input button on my remote control.

And please don't post random quotes without providing a link.

If searching for a match takes so long that you have enough time to play another game then you have bigger problems on your hands. Also we've been able to switch instantly from video games to television for a very long time...its called a remote control just hit the input button.

@beyond_the_infinite: this. It is a pretty stupid and useless feature^^

Outside of MMOs I don't see this feature being of any use at all. It takes at most a few minutes for matchmaking, you could never accomplish anything in another game in that time.

It would only be useful if matchmaking time suddenly skyrockets this gen, which would be pretty weird.

i thought they showed software being suspended when you switch from game to TV.

Huh, thought this news was around for a while, even before E3. Regardless, I can dig it and as I much as I like digital games, my internet isn't exactly top notch for downloading either. Good thing they have background downloads.

How long do they expect matchmaking to take? Isn't it like....seconds, in most games?

Smart Match Lets You Know When Your Game is Ready

Once Xbox One is done.. it will prompt you with a simple toast—no matter where you are or what you’re doing— ..

Kotaku: Xbox One Offers A Possibly-Better Way To Wait For Multiplayer Matches

I can imagine switching to Dark Souls while I'm waiting, and then when the match starts I would be stuck fighting in Dark Souls without a pause button.

Also, this is my first post. Hopefully I don't look like an idiot.

Unless its an old or niche game.

This will be great in a year when everyone forgot about Killer Instinct.

I hope matchmaking wouldn't take so long that this would be a useful feature.

@vinny_says: Yes, but that's not quite what I'm talking about.

For example, you're looking for some Forza multi-player games. You set your app on the app-OS side to do the matchmaking. While you're waiting, you decide to start playing your Ryse single-player campaign on the game-OS. In the middle of a level, the app notifies you that it's found a Forza multi-player match that you can join. Now you need to get out of Ryse and into Forza.

That makes me wonder if there are any limitations on the digital game you are playing to enable this. Does the OS write a game state to the hard drive to do this? When we boot into the game we want to play multi-player in, is it fast or are we waiting through all those developer/publisher logos?

If I'm not playing a game at all times I WILL DIE

@jasonr86 said:

I don't mind waiting if it's worth it. Using party sizes, player skill etc. to create matches that always go right down the wire is what I dream of.

This is a really dumb thing to be proud about having. What I'm hoping is that they are secretly telling you that matchmaking will take longer than usual to make this feature worth having.

Sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

If nobody is playing that game in a years time it's probably for a reason. SFIV and Marvel continue to have populated online across every platform. (ok ok, not Vita

(You missed his subtle joke)

I would think that the game will pause automatically during the transfer. And welcome to Giant Bomb.

I'll probably have to apply this when i actually get the box. Say i'm playing Dead Rising 3 and in a party, Jo BLOW wants to get a battlefield match going but we are still waiting on people to get home from their job. I'll switch over to my digital copy of battlefield, which i'll probably get since i have Micro$oft Money in my account, get a lobby open, Invite Jo BLOW. Switch back to DR3, then when i see they are online i switch back to BF4.

Although this would require me having actual friends, :(

@bigjeffrey: Aw, that clown!.........

I assume it would be like a 3ds when you close the cover the game freezes and when you open it's exactly where you left it. Yeah you will still have to come back to it later to find a checkpoint.

Or maybe all Xone games will have unlimited quick saves which activate anytime you switch windows. Chaos Theory on xbox had quick saves back in 2005 and it was awesome!

I'm assuming this system is limited to only allow 1 multiplayer game at a time, that makes the most sense.

On PC, we call this alt-tabbing. It has been around for almost two decades.

Kappa

In my experience with the PC version of Warframe, there is no wait for matchmaking. You look at your map, see which missions have people playing them and click on the planet. That's it.

I guess it's a neat feature but I can't really see it being very useful.

Same. Maybe if I could watch like a youtube video or pull up twitter/facebook on part of the screen that'd be ok but I could never see myself doing this at all.

This will work better in some games than others. Basically any time you have a queue time longer than a few minutes (2 minutes?) then you may want to present the player with something to do while they wait. Whatever that is, it also must be "light" where the player can be interrupted without ruining much when the queue "pops".

The question becomes in this case: What is the console game that will have queues longer than 5 minutes? What is a console game you can do instead that is easy to stop/suspend?

This seems better implemented on a per game basis where the game designers themselves need to do this instead of going to an external game.

I think that this is a really great feature. It's always frustrating to wait in lobbies for less popular games and maybe never find a match. And @realph to your point yes features like this will make steer clear of disc-games and I'm pretty frustrated that Microsoft changed their stance on DRM.

Maybe you need help with your ADHD instead...jesus

I have had the exact opposite experience where I often can't find anyone to play certain missions and sit at the matchmaking screen until I quit out and go back in a bunch of times.

Depends what system you're in. The beginning area is a lot more populated than the higher end areas.

Yo dawg...

I'm a bit skeptical on the technicalities. Would this be real multitasking? Is the memory overhead really enough to do this? Considering how wishy-washy they have been on Xbox One features, it's a bit hard for me to believe that this will be as nice as it sounds now.

“While Xbox Live is matchmaking, you’re untethered and free to do what you want, like watch TV or check out your favorite website or apps while waiting for your next game."

Yeah, I can do all of this already. Nice that they're streamlining things, but it's not a gamechanger for me.

But wait, wasn't "the power of the cloud" supposed to help with all of this so you didn't need to wait?

Queues in online games happen when their design requires minimal thresholds so they happen as a downside of the design. Players already occupy themselves if queue times get too long where they start to watch TV or pull out a laptop or a tablet playing a bit of Angry Birds or whatever. Alternatively, players just abandon the game entirely if the queues are too lengthy where offering a mechanism to play some other game may just mean they play that other game instead of bothering with this "broken game with long waits".

Once again, this appears like Microsoft is trying to solve a problem that isn't much of a problem while ignoring or deprecating the real design and engineering challenge is elsewhere.

For most use cases this seems extraordinarily dumb to me. I guess if you're the kind of person who couldn't wait for matchmaking to do its thing without looking at your phone, this is for you? It just seems so rare for matchmaking for a game to take more than like 30 seconds. Sure, while it's theoretically more useful for older games where it can take a bit to find a match, but normally when matchmaking takes forever it's because no one is playing. Are you really going to want to wait like 15-30 minutes to get into something equivalent to a Prey match, or are you going to just get distracted with something else?

Actually, I wonder if this will affect how long the average matchmaking time is in general. Does it become shorter because people don't get bored of waiting and quit out mid-matchmake, or will matchmaking take longer because people start jumping out of queue/ignoring their notification after a full lobby is found, since now they're too busy/interested with whatever the other thing they were doing is. Presumably when you get the notification it's holding your spot in a lobby. So how long is it going to make everyone else wait for you to show up before it cancels your invite and finds someone else? How frequently do people start playing another game just to pass the time, only to ignore the matchmaking invite and play that other game instead of the one they were in matchmaking for?

It's neat that it exist and cool if it works, but lobby wait times are for sandwiches, restroom breaks and coffee refills.

Damn. Warframe is not fun in solo, when the population drops off is when I will stop playing. I wonder if the Playstation version will be able to play with the PC version?

I can't remember a game that had matchmaking take long enough to want to play another game during.

Sure maybe get up and get a drink when the lobby is filling up but play another game? Ehhhh. Its cool that it can do that, don't get me wrong, but i can't see myself ever using it, unless the matchmaking for next-gen is REALLY slow.

Seems like a cool thing to have but I'm not sure how often I will actually use it.

I'm pretty sure they were saying that from the first day they revealed the console. I mean from a technical standpoint it's cool, but if I'm playing my Xbox, then I have much better devices around me than the Xbox for checking websites and things, and unless I want to watch like a minute (and that's being generous) of a TV show or YouTube video at a time this doesn't really help. The only time I could see myself using this feature is if I was trying to matchmake for a game where the multiplayer was half-dead. It seems kind of bizarre that they've invented a feature which becomes more useful, the crappier your multiplayer experience becomes.

I need to play a game while I'm playing a game while I'm calling in airstrikes on another game from my iPad

SFIV and MvC3 aren't your typical fighters though; most other fighters get dramatically less popular a year or two after release. It speaks to the quality of Capcom's fighting games. SFIV single-handedly made fighting games mainstream again, since prior to that people had been playing SF3 and other old fighters for a decade.