Microsoft rolls out 12-person Party Chat on Xbox One

Being called the New Xbox One Experience, this update is not coming until November, but has been available to certain Xbox One Preview Program members for a couple weeks.

And that also applies to the Xbox App on Windows 10, which now also supports up to 12 people vying for vocal real-estate in the forever polite and cordial verbal discourse that makes up socialising online whilst playing games. Xbox One users will be able to use the controller to pin apps and games to Home, launch recent games and quit apps.

An improved Game DVR experience now allows you to watch game clips and view screenshots in full screen mode, as well as stop and start recordings. The menu itself has become easier to use, by updating for “quick access to common actions”.

As part of new settings in the Guide users can now turn off and restart their console straight from the Guide.

You can check out a few of the new menus and experiences below. There are new black toast notifications, which are fairly nice, as well as a new Xbox Accessories app and new keyboard look. There won’t be any system update since the change is on Microsoft’s end, which means no download required. “And yes, more invites are going this week”.

The changes will be entirely linked to the server side of the platforms, and it seems that the feature will not be applied on mobile devices or on the Xbox 360. We will scale to a lot of folks soon. Microsoft wants to get feedback from an initial group of testers, then roll out the update to larger groups for additional feedback over time.

The feature is enabled on New Xbox One Experience Preview as well. For the lucky ones that were chosen, a brand new update is now available for you.