July Xbox One update rolls out new FastStart feature

The newest Xbox One software update is now live and features a few small improvements, as well as a new feature they are calling FastStart.

FastStart was announced at E3 just a few weeks ago, is meant to be a way to start digital games faster by prioritising parts of the download above others, downloading the files you need to get going first, but the fine print leaves little hope for most Australians. The more detailed information on FastStart reveal a minimum connection speed of 20mbps, so unless you are sporting a decent NBN connection or one hell of an ADSL 2+ connection, chances are this feature won’t be useful to you at all.

The announcement also details how this is different from the “Ready To Start” feature that has existed since Day One, stating that Ready To Start is a developer implemented feature while FastStart seems to be an Xbox feature, but this is thrown up into the air by the fact that there are only a “select number of English titles” available at the moment. So there may be some Microsoft intervention in this particular feature.

While FastStart is definitely the biggest feature included in this update, it isn’t the only one. Microsoft has also announced new library organisational features that allow users to group games and pins together and organise their library as they please. This feature will also be tied to your Xbox Live account, rather than your console, so your groupings will always be with you.

The search feature on the Xbox One has also been improved, with the ability to hit Y from anywhere on the dashboard to bring up a search window. While this already exists in some applications like the store, the new feature will now be universal across the dashboard. The very unique and cool Mixer Share Controller feature has also been updated to work better on multi-touch devices, and full keyboard and mouse support for PC users. There have also been some quality improvements on Console broadcasting as well as stability improvements which are always welcomed.

While the future of FastStart is still uncertain in Australia it is good to see Microsoft making these updates to older features but also releasing new features to improve the average gamers experience.