Major Nelson

Get ready for another update—starting today, your Xbox has a few new features to make things easier and more fun.

The social features are being adjusted into one continuous stream of more interesting content where you can share videos and comments with your friends, much like other social media. You can even post simple text updates, such as, “I’m playing Titanfall tonight if anyone wants to join me.” You can also check these activity feeds anytime from SmartGlass.

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Keeping track of achievements on the Xbox One has been a hassle compared with Xbox 360’s guide functionality.  Currently, users must entirely exit the game or application they are …
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Despite the PC being the domain of mouse and keyboard, controller gaming has its place on the platform, especially within certain genres.  And to this end, the Xbox …
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The latest system update for Xbox One rolled out last week, bringing with it a slew of new features. First and foremost are the Gold benefits, including Deals with …
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Continuing with its stated goal of giving gamers what they’ve been asking for, Microsoft announced today that the Xbox One’s June system update will add functionality for external storage support and real names for friend identification.

Once the update arrives, Xbox One consoles will support up to two external USB 3.0 hard drives, provided the drives are at least 256 GB in size. This move will allow users to increase their storage space from the standard 500 GB available on the console’s internal drive. After plugging in a compatible drive, players will be asked if they wish to format it and given the option to make it the default device.

In addition to storing more Xbox One content simultaneously, external drive support will give gamers the ability to drop full games, downloadable content and apps onto external drives and take said drives on the go for usage on a friend’s console. Content can either be saved directly to external drives or copied over to them from the internal one. Digital content stored on external HDDs can be accessed on other consoles once the user has signed into Xbox Live. For retail games, the disc will have to be inserted in order to verify ownership.

Speaking of friends, real name support is aimed at making it easier for users to immediately identify who is who on their friends lists as those lists continue to grow up to 1,000 names in length. Microsoft is cognizant of the privacy concerns this move could potentially raise. The console holder will give each gamer the ability to choose whether all friends, some friends or no friends see their real name. Settings can be changed at any time and real names will not appear in-game.

Microsoft originally planned to support real name usage on launch day but ended up delaying the feature. Competitor Sony has supported actual names since launch on its PlayStation 4 console.

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Pre-loading is still on the way for Xbox One, Major Nelson has confirmed in a Reddit thread. This is the second such affirmation of the feature making its …
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External storage for the Xbox One is still on its way, confirmed Xbox’s Director of Programming, Larry Hyrb, who is commonly known by his moniker, Major Nelson. This …
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Major Nelson has just announced that the latest Xbox One system update will begin rolling out in a few hours. While we were already aware of some of the features coming with this push, his latest blog post details the full list of enhancements. You can check out the list, which includes friend list improvements, Kinect tuning, and automatic system updates, after the break.

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The February Xbox One system update was supposed to hit on Tuesday, but it sounds like there were some unexpected delays. According to Microsoft’s Major Nelson, it will still …
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Larry Hyrb, Xbox Live’s “Major Nelson,” commented on Reddit recently in regards to Microsoft’s plans to look into more competitive pricing for digital content on its Xbox platforms. He …
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