New Achievement Animation

@theht: I've already explained why I "vastly" prefer them. I think that is a pretty big difference.

To everybody saying that the "Hold Guide" prompt is useless: who's the target audience, again?

DAT 1 is fan made

This.

Really? Some impressive work then. Also, why would someone make a fake boot animation? Internet you so crazy.

I prefer trophies because of the chime noise they use, I feel like a success. I also like the tiered trophies; I get that having higher point values is essentially the same thing, but there's something about the levels of trophies that feels more distinct or binary: here, you did something we consider pretty gnarly, have a gold trophy.

That said I don't know enough people that play video games IRL to really care much about trophies and I maybe compare mine to others' two or three times a year. But I do feel really good when I get one, and I've never felt that way with achievements, at least not since trophies dropped.

As for the sum total argument, I care more about achievements game-by-game than overall score when I'm comparing. I only glance at the level before deep-diving into the games we've both played and seeing which ones we've done that the other hasn't; perhaps I feel this way because, again, I don't know many game players and the ones I do know aren't the type of person to go out of their way for trophies, so it's more like comparing play styles.

In other words, the "hold guide" prompt exists so that when brain-dead football fans earn an achievement by watching the superbowl, Microsoft tech support doesn't want to have to deal with 100,000 calls asking about it.

Yeah, I guess this was the way to go.

My favorite thing about achievements is being able to see what your friend has done in a game that you're also playing. It really helps you to be able to talk about the game without worrying about spoilers.

@spaceinsomniac:

Because fuck people outside our own group!

Not quite. I think the vast majority of football fans could figure out the achievement system without specific prompts. I'm just saying that they're designing their system with the lowest common denominator in mind, and treating everyone like idiots, because of the handful of people who actually are idiots. See the video I posted on the first page for a better explanation. For another example:

Just because people like this stupid woman exist, that doesn't mean that there should be a sign outside Burger King telling customers that they shouldn't call 911 if they're unhappy with their service.

@spaceinsomniac:

I like how his examples are of basic gameplay features that people probably wouldn't have understood without the aid of the prompt. Hindsight is 20/20. Oh, and how he's completely ignoring how video games have become far more complex over the years, thus necessitating the more explicit hand-holding that we've come to see. I've heard a non-gamer express confusion over the FPS control scheme of "left stick to move body, right stick to move head" (about verbatim). This is more than non-gamers being pants-shittingly moronic; it's about the medium not being as accessible as we'd like it to be.

Not a big fan of how long the hold for details thing stays up, but I like it over all.

@isomeri: looks snappy!

I'm enjoying the xbox one animations there pretty cool so looking forward to them

@sentuamessage: me too, I mean, unless the world ends in November I'm locked in for Xbox One anyway! I've never had a console launch before, although my first console was a Genesis/Megadrive! With all the GUI and network capabilities I'm sure there will be lots of interesting glitches, crashes etc. on day one.

@isomeri: Ugh, really dislike the flashing. Otherwise it would be nice, fast and simple.

@video_game_king said:

It sounds like it's because the Guide button has changed from the 360. On the 360 tapping the guide button was for opening notifications and opening the guide. On the Xbox 1 (it sounds like) it's tap to go to the dashboard, hold to open/interact with notifications and double tap to switch between the snapped app/game.

If they didn't make it clear that viewing the achievement list/opening a party/game invite/responding to a message was now hold instead of tap, no returning 360 players would've realised and would've thought it was "broken".

I've just started up a game, the "X friends have played this game recently" notification pops up, I've got an App snapped to the side, and then I hit the guide button. What am I trying to do? Go to the dashboard? Look at a list of friends that played the game recently? Open my friends list to join their party? Trying to interact with the snapped app?

Microsoft splitting the Guide button out into tap/hold/double tap is great. There's been dozens of times on my 360 where the guide button hasn't done what I wanted it to and it's always been frustrating. The Giantbomb guys have also seen it when they're livestreaming a game with notifications that keep popping up and hijacking their guide button.

@chick3n: wow, a differentiation of tap vs. hold sounds interesting, hopefully not confusing! major nelson mentioned something about this on his recent podcast, but he said they'd taken away the complicated functionality of the guide button. I guess we'll see in a few weeks.

I'm so sorry, but I've wanted to post this for so long.

This gem actually popped up while the Xbox One still had the always online DRM.

That won't be an accurate representation of the final dashboard, leading up to launch they tend to change/tweak the UI (and boot animations). In-fact here is a recent video showing of what is presumably the latest build of the Xbox One dashboard: