The Xbox App for Windows 10 provides a peek at a future in which cross-platform gaming might actually become a reality. But for now, it mostly provides a fancy look at your Xbox One dashboard.
I spent the weekend testing the Windows 10 Pro Technical Preview, which contains what you can charitably call a beta version of the app. The Xbox App is not the same as the Xbox Smartglass App, but has been available for months for Windows phones and tablets, and which is also (confusingly) included in the preview version of Windows 10.
The Xbox App is much more ambitious. Microsoft plans to build it into every copy of Windows 10, regardless of platform. Eventually, it will give you the capability to stream games from your Xbox One to your PC or tablet and will provide the platform for developers to enable PC and Xbox One combined play. For now, at least in theory, it gives you access to nearly every other facet of the Xbox One dashboard: your friends list, your apps, your activity list, your messages, your achievements, and the like.
Many of those capabilities lead to dead ends in this build. When it comes to drawing information from your Xbox One to your desktop, the app performs extremely well. In general, you can’t yet send information back the other direction, even to change the avatar on your profile. Click here for a list of the features actually included in this build.
You can’t stream games from your Xbox One yet, and you can’t play against someone across platforms, though both features have been shown off by Microsoft in other internal builds.
Above: Things look great in the Xbox App, until you start clicking on menu items.
Getting started: Installing Windows 10
If you have an existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer and are willing to risk changing it to Windows 10, installation of the preview build is likely to be relatively smooth, requiring just a Windows Update download and a series of setup windows. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to run perfectly or that it will be compatible with all your software. This is a beta build of an operating system, and errors are going to happen.
Reversing course and going back to your old Win 7/8 system will be very difficult, requiring a complete strip-and-reload of your operating system, a task that is not for the faint-hearted.
I installed my version of Windows 10 from scratch on a clean secondary hard drive to avoid corrupting my primary Windows installation, which was tricky and not fully supported by the new OS. Microsoft does make a bootable disc image available to install Windows 10, but having that file isn’t enough to create a bootable CD or USB stick; you’ll need a utility (either Microsoft’s own or a third-party) to do that, and I went through two before finding one that would play nice with Win10.
If that previous sentence reads like gobbledygook to you, I would definitely not recommend installing the Windows 10 preview on a fresh drive yourself.
Even after installation, Windows 10 posed a number of challenges. It didn’t recognize all of my hardware, including the motherboard, so basic functions — like telling the PC to sleep, or detecting accessories — didn’t work without a lot of tinkering with drivers. And Win10, like all good Windows installs, wants to take over your system.
Convincing it that you don’t want to always boot your PC from that drive where you installed it takes some persuading, and Windows Boot Manager doesn’t appear to exist in this build. (Amusingly, the original 20-year-old Windows Control Panel to fix your system settings does, if you dig deep enough.)
But once installed, Win10 is surprisingly resilient and stable for gaming, at least in my weekend-long test. I installed a few old and new games and dashboards on that drive (digital store/game service Steam, turn-based strategy tilt Civilization V, the massive online role-playing game World of Warcraft, RPG Divinity: Original Sin, first-person puzzler The Talos Principle, and a couple of yet-to-be-released previews), and all of them worked without bugs or crashes, which surprised me this early in the Windows 10 preview cycle.
Bottom line: It was hard, but not as rough as I expected, to get it up and running smoothly on my system.
An odd touch of lag for games in Windows 10
The Win10 versions of my games lagged a bit behind the older Windows copies, an experience other players with the build said they saw as well. It remains to be seen how much of that minor latency is directly tied to planned future features like the ability to capture your last 30 seconds of gaming as a film clip.
But I attribute some of the slight down-tick in frames-per-second to the fact that I used compatible-but-not-optimal video drivers. Win10 recognized my aging GeForce GTX 660 videocard handily, but it failed to see the second monitor attached to it, so back to the Windows 7/8 Nvidia drivers I went.
That meant my drivers weren’t taking advantage of DirectX 12, Microsoft’s new collection of commands that programs can call on to render graphics and execute gameplay. (To be fair, my games aren’t either, of course.) If you check out Spencer’s video at about the 7:30 mark, you’ll see a demonstration of a scene rendering using the same hardware with DX11 versus DX12. He suggests that not only does it render much more, much more quickly, but that it requires half the power consumption of DX11.
Most recent video cards will be compatible with DX12: Nvidia’s 400 series and better, AMD’s HD 7000 or better, and Intel Haswell-based video processors.
Hey, Cortana
While not part of the Xbox App, Cortana acts as a reminder of how tied to gaming Microsoft has become.
Cortana — familiar to all players of Halo games, where she is Master Chief’s virtual adviser, spiritual companion, and suspected weekend masseuse — doesn’t have her full powers in this Windows 10 build, but she’s there to search for you as an intelligent assistant (think Apple’s Siri or Google Now). I don’t have a Windows phone or tablet, so this was my first experience getting to know Cortana outside of a Halo context. I loved everything about her except the fact that I had to use Bing to search the web. Sigh.
People who do use Windows phones and tablets will likely feel right at home with Cortana’s setup in Win10. She’ll ask your name, figure out with you how it should be pronounced, and then use it freely when interacting with you in print and in voice. You can summon her almost anytime with a simple “Hey, Cortana,” just as in her phone and tablet forms.
Above: While not as sexy as she appears in the Halo series, Cortana can still help you find your way.
The start menu (yes, it’s back in this build) has the traditional search bar, but this is Cortana’s world now. Search using that box with either voice or text and Win10 will search your computer, Windows menus, and the web for what you need.
Voice recognition is smooth and instantly available. Windows 10 recognized my headset and required no setup for voice searching — I just clicked the microphone icon and got started.
I love the way the search box shows what it’s rendering from your speech as you say it. The constant micro-corrections and guesses as you talk are rather like autocorrect/autosuggest as you text on a phone, and it makes it all the more amusing when Cortana guesses wrong.
The Xbox App feels like a core part of Windows — and your console
Windows 8 and the Xbox dashboard already had a lot in common, so it shouldn’t feel surprising that the Xbox App seems like a native part of Windows 10. I fired up the app as soon as I was done chatting with Cortana, and it immediately found the Xbox One I had on downstairs with no special arrangements on my part. The app’s icons and fonts look and feel right at home on a Windows screen, and if you didn’t know you were controlling a device in your living room, there’s nothing here that would tip you off.
As a result, it’s supereasy to navigate between screens on the Xbox app. Instead of just toggling with an analog stick, you have the option of clicking and scrolling, and it feels native and natural. Those functions that are enabled, including text messages to other players, work well and much like they do on the Xbox One — only simpler, since you’re much more likely to have a keyboard.
Above: A message to an offline player on Xbox Live from the Windows 10 Xbox App.
The message screen is the first place you’ll start to get a feel for how cross-platform gaming is going to work. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox for Microsoft, outlined a vision in his extremely scripted presentation at the Windows 10 preview event: All your friends appear on this list, regardless of where they’re playing (Xbox One, their PCs, their phones, their tablets). You can message them anywhere and hear back from anywhere, on voice or text.
In the same way, your games list includes not just your Xbox One titles, but those apps and games you’ve purchased for other Microsoft platforms.
Future feature: Simple game clips on your PC
Xbox game clips have been around since the One launched, and the SmartGlass app has provided a way to control that clip-making from Windows devices outside the One. But game DVR features in Windows 10 won’t be limited to Xbox One (or even Microsoft) games. Hitting the Windows key + G is supposed to pull up a recording menu inside any Windows game, and I was excited to test out the new system.
The irony of that command using the Windows key, when that key has been the bane of PC gamers for years, is delicious. Some gaming peripherals companies actually bake a mode into their control software that disables the key while you’re playing games. This feature may be a reason to reconsider checking that box — once it’s available, that is.
Unlike most screen-recording software, the Windows 10 recorder can capture the last 30 seconds of gameplay BEFORE you click the button. That’s an interesting feature on an Xbox, where Microsoft has complete control, but it’s a lot more intriguing on a PC. You can use the Xbox app to alter your clip with the same tools as on the Xbox One and post it on Xbox Live or other social networks for your friends to see.
Unfortunately, recording isn’t enabled in this build, so the Windows+G combination steadfastly refused to do anything productive.
And also in the future: Cross-platform play
Above: Microsoft’s upcoming Fable: Legends RPG will allow Xbox One players to square off with and against PC players.
One of the most ambitious promises of the Xbox App is the capability to play against or with people who are in a game on an Xbox One. Microsoft’s upcoming RPG Fable: Legends enables play between gamers on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs (including achievements on both platforms).
That feature isn’t available in the current build of the Xbox App, and while it’s exciting to think about for games with co-op play (like Fable), one wonders how well it will be adopted by developers with competitive titles. Control precision is very different between Xbox and PC, and unless game companies want to limit PC gamers to using controllers, it might provide one side or the other with an unfair advantage in competitive titles.
Xbox SmartGlass in Windows 10
Above: This is a screen from the Xbox One SmartGlass app as it looks on Windows 10 — not to be confused with the Xbox App, but still useful in its own right.
One feature that is part of the current build of Windows 10 is the already exisiting Xbox SmartGlass app for tablets and phones.
SmartGlass also provides a look at some of your Xbox information, but is clearly designed for tablets or phones (though it works the same way on a PC). It gives you a simple way to control clip recording and even your Xbox One itself, using your device as a remote. SmartGlass worked as smoothly on my Windows 10 installation as it does on tablets and phones now, and it was amusing controlling the Xbox from another part of the house altogether.
It appears to me that most of SmartGlass’s features will eventually become part of the core Xbox App, but it’s included separately here, perhaps because the Xbox App isn’t finished yet. Its mobile-device focused approach suggests the way that the core Xbox App might look and behave on Windows 10 tablets, such as Microsoft’s Surface.
Try it for yourself
Above: The Windows 10 Start Menu now called the Start Screen.
Anyone can download the Windows 10 Pro Technical Preview by joining the Windows Insider Program (free) and downloading the files. If you already have a previous version of Windows installed, users report upgrading to this one goes fairly smoothly. If you’re installing fresh like I did, I would suggest either being highly technically proficient or calling on helpful friends who are.
If you’d rather wait for a real product, the final version of Windows 10 will hit the market later in 2015. The price is right: Windows 7 or 8 owners will get their upgrade to Windows 10 free.