Microsoft, in a blog post, revealed yesterday its plans to roll out Update 1905 for the Xbox One. This update is said to be full of new features for Xbox Insiders, Microsoft’s premium group of beta testers that get to experience some of these new features before they ultimately go live. The Update 1905 is set to hit the servers for Alpha Skip Ahead and Alpha rings tomorrow, and the general gist of it is incorporating new features for Xbox Game Pass, friends list updates and various improvements to messaging.
The full update list can be seen here, and what we have on hand is a version shortened for brevity’s sake. Microsoft and Xbox also encourage its Insiders to carry over discussions on the Xbox Idea Hub for what they ultimately think of the new and upcoming features.
Xbox Game Pass new features
The Xbox Game Pass has a large curated library of games, with over 100 titles fully available to download and play for users who pay the monthly subscription fee. For this update, Microsoft has added a small quality of life change in the form a Play later option. This lets you queue up games you want to play, especially since the Game Pass library offers an enormous amount of games to choose from, which may overwhelm some users. Play later basically acts as a list of games you plan to play in the near future, allowing you to return to them at your leisure.
Friends list now shows you where your friends are playing
The updated version of the friends list now also displays information on where your friends are currently playing. The Xbox app is available across different platforms, be it the Xbox, Windows 10 PC, or mobile, so this can ensure that you know where your friends are gaming every time, in case you want to join them.
Message requests
The messages tab will now prioritize conversations you have with friends and everyone you want to communicate with, and separate it from people you don’t know who message you. Messages from people who aren't on your friends list are dropped into a "messages request" tab. Unfortunately, this update will wipe out all group messages, so before the update fully drops, Microsoft urges its users to back up previous group messages for archival purposes.
Better sorting in games and apps
Articles such as “a”, “an” and “the” will no longer be used to sort titles. This is actually pretty nifty, since titles like The Witcher will now appear under “W” instead of “T”.
In addition to all these changes, certain experimental features will also be made available to a subset of the Insider group to allow for further testing.
