Gaming Everything
Microsoft recently published a couple of blog posts outlining how Achievements and Smart Match work on the Xbox One. You can find a summary of both features below.
Achievements
- Achievements are now more powerful and flexible
- Gamerscore will still be an important part of the Xbox One
- Gamerscore reconfirmed to transfer from the Xbox 360
- Ulock digital artwork, new maps, characters, and temporary stat boosts via achievements
- Video and music apps can use achievements as well to provide sneak peek content, early access, or subscription extensions
- Only games will give you Gamerscore
- Achievement types: achievements and challenges
- Achievement has you completing a goal or activity to earn a reward
- Unlock an achievement at any time
- Challenge: time-bound
- Can only unlock a challenge during its eligible time window
- Achievements and challenges are both officially considered Xbox Live Achievements
- Both inherit the following:
You can unlock them and win their rewards;
Once unlocked, they are saved to your achievement history;
They each have an icon to visualize the cool thing you did;
They often are associated with a Game DVR capture to show your friends that you are better than they are
Developers can release more of them after the game’s initial release (more on that in a bit).
There are also some notable differences between them:
- No Gamerscore for Challenges
- Challenges may cross titles, but achievements cannot
- Achievements cannot be shared across titles whereas challenges are allowed to span multiple titles
- Challenges can be unlocked by the community
- Community challenges are typically goals that exceed what a lone player can accomplish in the given period of time
- Ex: a game releases a headshot weekend challenge that requires players to cumulatively headshot 1 million baddies in a 3 day period; every person who participates and meets the challenge’s goals gets the unlock on his or her achievement history and reaps its reward
- Achievements system is cloud-powered
- Use of the cloud makes it easy and consistent to run challenges across all players of a game simultaneously
- It also makes it possible for developers to add new achievements and challenges after their game is initially released
- Games may now expose your latest progression toward unlocking an achievement right on the dashboard, even before you launch the game
- Quickly catch up on what your friends have been up with the achievement activity feed that keeps you informed about your friends’ latest unlocked achievements
- Check out video clips of that magical moment when an achievement was unlocked
- Easily discover upcoming challenges for a game at any time
- Your achievement history has been transformed into a more beautiful gallery of achievement icons that properly show off your hard-earned victories
Xbox One Smart Match
- System makes it easy for a title to create a match request and then “untether” you so you don’t need wait in the title while the match search is processing
- Can do other things in the meantime, and when the match is ready Xbox One tells you to pull you back into the title to play
- Titles can change their match model from traditional peer-based host searching for players typical in Xbox 360 to now completely untethered cloud-based
- Ex: low population title like a flight sim gam
- Can launch a popular shooter or sports title and see the “typical wait time” for different online game modes
- With Beacons in Xbox 360 you could set a toast to tell other friends of your desire to play a specific game online
- Smart Match on Xbox One goes way beyond that to help you tap into the full player population for a title, versus just the friends you know, and means you skip waiting in a match search screen in the title
- Social reputation model helps expose people that aren’t fun to be around, and also create real consequences for those few bad apples that continue to harass players
- Feedback mechanism simplified to be less of a “survey” and more direct feedback options, even linking things in like block or mute player actions into the feedback model
- All of the feedback from player’s online flow into the reputation service to evaluate a players online social reputation
- The more hours you play online without causing others to have a horrible time the better your reputation will be
- Most players will have good reputations and be seen as “green” good players you’d enjoy playing with
- Even those good players might receive a few player feedback reports each month and that is OK
- Xbox Live is looking to identify players that are repeatedly disruptive on Xbox Live
- Microsoft will identify those players with a lower reputation score and in the worse cases they will earn the “avoid me” reputation
- Looking at someone’s gamer card you’ll be able to quickly see their reputation
- Smart Match sees their Xbox Live rep too and when a person’s social reputation gets low enough the service will only match those low reputation players with similar low reputation players
- Before a user ends up at this extremely low reputation level, they will receive many different alerts reminding how their social gaming conduct is affecting lots of other gamers
- Reputation system will evolve as Microsoft tracks the feedback from actual players and titles
