Party chat, achievements, and game hubs get a spring cleaning in Xbox One’s April update, now live

By Will Fulton April 6, 2015

April Update for Xbox One Out Now

Spring is in the air: The birds are singing, savvy news readers are sorting through what were and were not pranks, and the April system update for Microsoft’s Xbox One console has started rolling out, bringing a variety of new and improved features to make your X-bone experience even smoother.

Party Chat has been imbued with new icons and notifications to help set up microphones. The party app will now notify you when privacy settings or network problems are preventing particular party members from joining the chat, letting you troubleshoot the problem and get to playing much more quickly. The promised voice messaging and dedicated servers for party chat are still in the works, but have been held back in preview for the time being while all the kinks are worked out.

Game hubs, introduced in the previous update, consolidate all of the information and content of your favorite games into a single location. Now they have been integrated with the activity feed, letting you easily follow what your friends have been up to in their games.

Achievement notifications have been revamped as well. Now, in addition to the name and gamerscore value for each achievement, you will see a description when it pops up, letting you know what you did to earn it.

The What’s On area of the dashboard is now available for Xbox One users in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. There you can find popular games, movies, and videos, along with trending TV shows if you have configured your cable to run through the console with OneGuide.

Check out the full rundown of the April update over on Major Nelson’s blog or the Xbox Newswire. Head over to Xbox Feedback if you have an idea for a feature that you would like to see.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

Gaming

Microsoft pledges to bring Xbox PC games to Nvidia GeForce Now

geforce-now-og-no-text-1200x630

Microsoft has announced a 10-year partnership with Nvidia aimed at bringing Xbox PC games to its cloud gaming service competitor Nvidia GeForce Now as part of its ongoing efforts to win over companies skeptical of its potebtial Activision Blizzard acquisition.
This means that players can use Nvidia GeForce Now to play the Steam, Epic Games Store, or Windows versions of titles like Halo Infinite, Redfall, and eventually, Call of Duty through the cloud on GeForce Now. Third-party publishers with games on the Windows Store can also now grant streaming rights to Nvidia. This announcement came during a European Commission hearing where Microsoft tried to convince regulators that its impending acquisition should bne allowed.
Microsoft has been under a lot of regulatory scrutiny even since it announced its intent to acquire Activision Blizzard in January 2022. It's trying to win over industry peers with deals like this one with Nvidia. This week, the Communications Workers of America voiced its approval of the deal, and Microsoft has signed a binding agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms as well. Previously, Nvidia had raised concerns about Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition, but the press release announcing this agreement states that the deal "resolves Nvidia's concerns," and that Nvidia now gives "full support for regulatory approval of the acquisition."
Regulatory bodies in the U.S., U.K., and Europe are worried that Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard will hurt the game industry and sabotage Microsoft's competitors in both console and cloud gaming. Nvidia GeForce Now is seen as one of the biggest competitors to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate's cloud service offerings, which makes it surprising that it reached an agreement with Nvidia. However, this deal also demonstrates how Microsoft is willing to make concessions so that its acquisition of Activision Blizzard is approved.

Gaming

Your Xbox is becoming carbon aware with new update

Official Xbox art promoting energy saving, carbon awareness, and collective action.

While many fans are waiting for Xbox to reveal the release dates of Redfall and Starfield, or to even hold another game showcase of its own, Microsoft's first significant Xbox-related announcement of the year is about something else entirely. Xbox Insiders will have access to multiple new options to make their Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S more carbon-aware starting today.
To start, the "Shutdown (energy-saving)" power option will be updated to reduce its power consumption even further while still supporting overnight updates; in fact, your Xbox console will now optimize those updates by doing them "when the console can use the most renewable energy in your local energy grid." According to Microsoft, for every two consoles that are in this mode for 20 hours a day for a whole year, the carbon equivalent of a tree that has been growing for over a decade will be saved.

That isn't the only energy-conscious addition in this update, though. A new "Active Hours" setting is coming, which will allow those who choose the "Sleep" power option to boot quickly and support remote waking during set active hours, rather than it always being available. Surprisingly, even Xbox One owners will see a carbon-aware update with the addition of the "Shutdown (energy saving)" power option today, although Microsoft is still in the user feedback stage for that platform.
These carbon-aware updates are available to Xbox Insiders with an Xbox One, Xbox Series X, or Xbox Series S starting today, although Microsoft says these additions will come to all current-gen console owners "soon."

Gaming

Xbox Game Pass now runs on more PCs and Surface devices

Microsoft Edge gaming updates on screen in a room.

Microsoft is continuing its expansion of the Xbox Game Pass by releasing the ARMS64 version of the Xbox app for Windows. The company wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the Xbox app has been updated to run natively on Windows PCs and other devices running Arms, including the Surface Pro X and the newly announced Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5.

The expansion of the Xbox app means that you can not only access Xbox Game Pass on recent models of the aforementioned devices, but that the app is also supported on older PCs that were originally not able to support cloud streaming in the first place, including PCs running software as far back as Windows 7. ARMS64 gets its name from the fact that the old PCs are capable of running on 64-bit Windows -- so can the Google Chromebooks.