The Guide and Player Profiles
The Interface
This is the most important part of the Xbox 360 software is the user interface, as this is where you’ll tell the XBox 360 what it is you want to do. Each of the sections you can see in the picture below will be called ‘blades’, with each giving access to different functions.
The Guide blade will be accessible all the time, whether you’re in a game, playing a movie of listening to music, you’ll be able to pull up the Guide whenever and access the functions within it. The guide will allow you to access features such as music playback, messages, player and friends lists, 1 to 1 voice chat, a virtual keyboard and even sign and out of the Xbos 360 profile you’re using.
The Guide shouldn’t be confused with the Dashboard though, as the Dashboard runs when the Xbox 360 is turned on with no game in the drive, similar to the way Xbox works now. Dashboard gives you access to the base level functions of the Xbox 360, such as audio and video set-up, storage management and peripheral management. Dashboard runs as a separate application, whereas Guide will run concurrently with anything you’re doing on the XBox 360.
Player Profiles
The Player Profiles will apply to both online and offline games and game modes, providing continuous data which can be used when the player goes online after having had an offline session of the same game. What this means is that any scores, achievements and progress made within the offline version of a game carry over into the online world, so that should you not have an internet connection but rule at a game, when you do get online, you’re prowess will be available for all to see from within the viewable portion of your online profile.
Speaking of online play, a LIVE Gold account will be included with all Xbox 360 ‘Deluxe’ packs, in the form of a 30 day trial, allowing gamers to get online straight away, but we’ll cover that in more detail later. Every Xbox 360 game will have a new reward system called ‘Achievments’. These are basically reward points given out for achieving certain things within a game, regardless as to whether you’re online or not. For example, finding all the hidden areas in a level or completing a certain number of races in first place…. How the Achievements are won will be down to the game developer, but they’ll be a requisite of any Xbox 360 game. The purpose of the Achievements is to help with matchmaking when you go online, as they are a measure of how good you are, check out the LIVE section of this article for more info on that.
The Player Profile will also allow each player to set up global settings for their games, which will apply across all games that Profile is loaded for. For example, if you’re an old skool FPS fan, you’ll more than likely use inverted mouse (down looks up) and the Player Profile means you’ll have to set that just the once. When loading, a game will check against the Player Profile and load the default settings you have set-up in your Profile… so left handers can have the movement on the left stick and looking on the right… or fire can always be assigned to the right trigger button etc etc.
But it isn’t just limited to controller set-up. You can also set personal defaults for things such as car transmission type, difficulty levels… in fact, all the usual options you go in and fiddle with before loading up any game for the first time.
The Player Profile will have to be set up for each new profile made, but the idea is to allow games to load up for the first time and already be customised to the player’s needs. This can even be taken as far as volume settings too and Microsoft were keen to emphasise that players will be able to playback their own audio tracks in a game should they wish, and they’ll be able to set this up from within the Guide blade as well as in the Player Profile.