I am a very loyal Xbox supporter and have been for years, I'm always raving about the new Xbox One but I have to say there are one or two things that they just haven't done well and is proving to be very frustrating as the weeks and months move on.
- Voice Activation through Kinect: Living in New Zealand the Xbox One was released here first (by the fact that the calendar day pretty much starts with us), so you can imagine my frustration when I set the Xbox One up that I couldn't get the voice activated commands to work. Once online it was a main topic of conversation with my friends, those in NZ all had the same problem yet our Aussie counterparts had no problems. After about a week of investigating it turns out that NZ was not given the voice bundle, WTF!! Why would you release a brand new console and remove one of it's key features and as of the date this was written we are still in the dark as to when this will be retified.
- Party Chat: Although we have no voice commands our Kinect does work for communicating via party chat and Skype. For the love of me, I have no idea who designed the party chat interface but whoever it was, they should have been shot or at very least fired because they are idiots. I set up a party and invite my friends into it but cannot hear them, why, because I did not "turn on party chat". Why would I set up a party and invite a whole lot of friends and then not talk to them, why do I have to activate yet another setting? I activate the party chat and I still can't hear anyone, why, because each member of the party having already accepted the invitation now has to go into the party chat and activate the "turn on party chat" setting. In my mind there is a lot of unnecessary piss arsing around for nothing, Microsoft get this sorted!!
- Voice Messaging: When you are in a game or in a lobby between matches, it is very convenient to send the odd voice message between players because the typing interface is useless when speed is of the essence, so why is there no voice messaging capability. I thought this system was an upgrade on the Xbox 360 not a step backwards. Again I have to wonder about the thinking behind the developers, are these guys / girls really gamers??
- In Game Recording: This is connected to point one, one of the features that had me excited was the ability to record the last 30 seconds of a game whilst in a game by simply saying "Xbox record that". Of course this is only available to those regions that have a Kinect voice bundle. I dare say there may be a manual version of doing this but I haven't bothered to figure it out for the simple reason that you have to stop what you are doing. Again Microsoft get this Kinect thing sorted!!