The New Xbox One Experience Is A Bug-Fest
The long-awaited update to the Xbox One User Interface (UI) is previewing this weekend and initial reports are that it’s basically a collection of bugs. Comments on the Xbox forums indicate that the Xbox One experience preview has severe functionality issues, with Forbes reporting that the updates make the console virtually unusable.
Ever since the release of the Xbox One, many users have complained bitterly about its Windows 8 style tiles and its generally cluttered and confusing UI. This weekend, invites have gone out for an opt-in preview of the updated interface. The new update does seem to address these issues. The whole UI looks far more streamlined and a great deal prettier, but there is a significant price to pay for this cosmetic enhancement.
An official post on Windows Central contains a massive list of broken functionality arising from the update. It would appear that the Xbox One experience will work for everything except games, live television, automatic downloads, and pretty much every other key area of functionality. The “workaround” in almost every case is said to be a hard reset of the console.
Forza 6 is experiencing screen discoloration and bugs associated with the use of third party steering wheels, while a whole tranche of games including the Borderlands expansions, Destiny: The Taken King, Elder Scrolls Online, and Saints Row IV will not launch at all. Xbox One apps such as ABC News, WWE, BlinkBox, and TWC TV are also reportedly failing to launch. Further to this, downloaded games are becoming stuck in the download queue and automatic downloads from Xbox are said to be hanging or simply not working. The officially recommended “workaround” for these faults is to hard reset your Xbox One, which isn’t really a workaround at all.
It’s understood, of course, that the major reason for the preview is to allow Xbox to identify and fix these bugs in advance of the official launch later this fall, so nobody was expecting a perfectly smooth experience. Having said that, however, it’s probably fair to say that the sheer extent of critical faults is unexpectedly high. The opt-in nature of the Xbox One experience means that users can decide to opt back out, presumably when they decide that they once again wish to actually use their consoles. It’s probably fair to say that the frustration of all these bugs probably negates the benefit of an early look at the new UI. So, rather than breaking your Xbox One, here’s a video walkthrough of the new experience with Larry Hyrb.
[Picture via Getty Images/Kevork Djansezian]
