Play together with Xbox Live Gold. February’s 2018 Games with Gold lineup for Xbox One includes: Shadow Warrior and Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India.  For Xbox 360 owners (and through Xbox One backward compatibility), February kicks off with Split/Second, followed by Crazy Taxi. February’s lineup provides over $69 dollars in value and up to 3200 in gamerscore.

Source: XBOX YouTube
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Today we’re excited to announce another milestone for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG): the community of players on console has now grown to over 4M players! We’re thrilled to see the community continue to grow and have been inspired by everyone’s enthusiasm for the game – with your ongoing support and feedback we will continue to evolve PUBG and create the best experience for Xbox players.

This week we deployed the sixth content update for the game, delivering numerous gameplay, optimization and bug fixes. More details on all the updates we’ve made since launch can be found here.

To show the community our appreciation for your support and feedback, we are rewarding players with 30,000 Battle Points to purchase cosmetic crates in the game. Anyone who has purchased or purchases PUBG on Xbox One and has created a character before January 31 at 12AM PST will receive this bonus, so if you’ve been waiting to jump onto the island, now is the perfect time to become a part of our growing community on console.  Bonus Battle Points will be delivered and appear directly in players BP accounts (right below their gamertag) after February 1, 2018 at 12AM PT.

We will continue to build on the foundation we’ve laid with PUBG on Xbox One with the feedback received from the community and we encourage you to continue in your pursuit of chicken dinners! Be sure to stay tuned to Xbox Wire and Major Nelson for all the latest PUBG news. See you on the battleground!

Xbox note: If you haven’t picked up PUBG yet, now is a great time to make your first jump onto the island. Buy the game here, or gift a copy. PUBG has been the top gifted title in the Microsoft Store since the feature launched in December – now is a great time to build up your squad! And for a limited time only, buy 3 Months of Xbox Live Gold and Receive a 3 Month Gold token. Give it to a friend and team up for many hours of PUBG together.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
Creator’s Corner: Croc’s World
Xbox Live Sessions: UFC Champ Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson to Play Dragon Ball FighterZ with Friends
Assassin’s Creed Origins: The Hidden Ones DLC Available Now on Xbox One

Source: Xbox Blog
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Dontnod Presents Vampyr – Episode 2: Architects of the Obscure unveils more exclusive gameplay footage, while the creative team delves into the visuals and music that bring 1918 London to life. Two more episodes of this four-part webseries will release weekly each Thursday.

In Episode 2: Architects of the Obscure, DONTNOD reveals the areas of London that you will explore and impact during your time in Vampyr. Each of the four districts have their own distinct style and groups of citizens, which can flourish or perish depending on your actions.

This latest episode also introduces the music of Vampyr, including insight from composer Olivier Deriviere. He discusses how he developed the game’s original score. Eric-Maria Couturier, of the Paris Ensemble InterContemporain, drives Vampyr’s soundtrack as solo celloist, and here offers an exclusive performance that showcases his unique style.

Vampyr releases Spring 2018 on Xbox One.

Source: XBOX YouTube
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New cosmetics are now available in Overwatch! Unlock over 100 new items—including skins, sprays, emotes, voice lines, and more—for all 26 heroes. Available now on Xbox One® in standard Loot Boxes and the Hero Gallery.

Source: XBOX YouTube
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We’re releasing a new update (1802.180121-1921) to Preview Alpha that addresses and adds one of the items (Game Pass in Collection) we listed in yesterday’s release notes. This update also includes fixes to Kinect setup and Network Transfer. Read on to learn more about this update, which will be made available starting at 6 p.m. PT to all Alpha Insiders.

New Features:

My Games and Apps Collection – Game Pass (No, we really mean this today! We experienced an error that resulted in it not appearing yesterday.)

• We have enabled a new feature to show an “Xbox Game Pass” tab within “My games & apps” for users on Preview Alpha with an active Game Pass subscription. If someone has an active Game Pass subscription, they will see this tab appear in “My games & apps” and will be able to quickly install available games from Game Pass. It works just like “Ready to install” but for Game Pass. For users in Preview Alpha who do not have Game Pass, they will see the updated left navigation—section dividers added and Memberships tab has moved.

Fixes:

System Setup – Kinect

• When configuring a Kinect during the initial console set-up experience, the process no longer fails when attempting to tune audio.

Network Transfer

• The network transfer no longer fails when initiated from a console on 1802 (this update).

Known Issues:

Home

• You may be unable to add/remove/edit content blocks by pressing Y.

Profile

• Some users are seeing a new issue that can cause the incorrect Profile color to display after powering on the console.

Pseudo-Localization

• You may notice strange characters which replace normal translated text on the dashboard, Guide, and other areas. Please use Report a problem when you encounter these issues.

Games Installation

• Games that are installed fail to launch. Workaround: If the games are installed to an external drive please copy the game to the internal drive or attempt to delete the title and redownload to fix the launch error.

Display 

• We are investigating the inaccurate RGB colors that have been reported when displaying in 4K HDR mode when playing a UHD disc.

Tournaments

• The left and right navigation for selecting date and time during Tournament creation is currently reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
• Left and right navigation in Tournament twists is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
• Left and right navigation in the bracket view of Tournaments is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.

Avatars on Home

• Users wishing to represent themselves as an avatar can do so by changing their settings under My profile > Customize profile > Show my avatar.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
Creator’s Corner: Croc’s World
Xbox Live Sessions: UFC Champ Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson to Play Dragon Ball FighterZ with Friends
New Preview Alpha System Update – 1/23/18

Source: Xbox Blog
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Xbox Live Creators Program empowers passionate developers everywhere to share their games with the world. In the Creator’s Corner series, Xbox Live Creators Program developers will share what inspires and motivates them to design and create their games, what challenges and creative solutions they pursue to bring their games to fruition, and how they leverage Xbox Live capabilities to enhance their games for Xbox. Today, we’ll be chatting with Benjamin Sprakel of Sprakelsoft, based out of Berlin, Germany, about his experience creating and bringing Croc’s World to the Windows and Xbox audience.

What’s your favorite game, ever, and why?

If you mean my favorite game of other studios it would be probably The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as I played it back then on the Nintendo64 and it was just mind-blowing how much you could do in the game and how huge it was. And the atmosphere was great. If you mean games that I created myself, it would probably be Jewel Fever as it was so far the most successful of my games on Windows and many other systems.

Tell us about your developer journey — what inspired you to start developing games and what continues to motivate you?

I already programmed games in my childhood on a Commodore Plus/4 and later a MS-DOS 286-System and I liked it. After graduating from school, I attended university and got a degree in computer science but afterwards I worked in a more “serious” business as a consultant where we designed workflows or helped customers to integrate document-managing-systems into their organization. In 2010 I got a new smartphone and thought that it would be nice to try again to program a game for it. So, I went on and programmed a “Tron” inspired bicycle game called Liner which wasn´t anything near a polished game but people seem to like it as there wasn´t that much competition. So, I went on and programmed a few more games from which a few of them were modestly successful, at least for a small indie developer like me. As the revenue stream wasn´t bad I decided to quit my daily consulting job and try to create games full time, which I´m still doing today. I really like to be able to create what I would like to play myself and see if it works in the marketplace. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn´t. But that´s the business, I guess.

What was the first game you created, and how did that experience contribute to Croc’s World?

The first game I created as Sprakelsoft was Liner (which isn´t available anymore) and I gathered quite a bit of experience from it. I knew already how to create a game but wasn´t up-to-date on things like marketplaces/stores, providing support, updating to react to bugs and working together with ad providers. There wasn´t a special experience that contributed to my newer games like Croc’s World but I wouldn´t be able to create them if I didn´t get the experiences in areas like the ones mentioned before.

Tell us about your team and how you came together.

As I´m an indie developer in the truest sense of the word, I´m the only full-time person on the team. But as I´m not really an art guy I´m working together with a freelance artist who creates almost all the graphics for my games and whom I´ve come across while playing another game that he did art for and I asked him if he has time to work for me also. And my kids and my wife are part-time-testers. The music and sounds are from premiumbeat.com so they are not custom made for me.

What’s been the most rewarding part of developing and shipping your game in the Creators Program?

The most rewarding part was that Croc’s World was the most-played game on the Creators Program so it´s nice to see that people seem to like it. And it was always a dream to see my games on a gaming console.

What roadblocks or challenges did you overcome in porting to Xbox that prompted a creative solution to progress – what was the issue and how did you approach/resolve? 

The main challenge was to integrate the gamepad to play the game. On smartphones it has on-screen buttons and on Windows systems you can play it via keyboard. It´s not simply different to play the game itself but also the menus which I changed from the smartphone or Windows version to accommodate the controller input… The integration of Xbox Live was harder than expected as the first versions of Croc’s World crashed from time to time because we didn´t integrate Xbox Live right. But that wasn´t really a big issue. Porting it to Xbox, was in retrospect, a pretty straightforward experience thanks to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

Now that the game is available in the Creators Program, what would you/team like to work on next?

We are working on Croc’s World 3 right now which will be available soon. It features lots of new stuff and finally, Croc will be able to swim! We would also really like to bring Croc’s World Construction Kit to Xbox, but we need a good way to integrate the gamepad into the editor which I´m thinking about right now.

Thanks so much to Benjamin Sprakel for this interview and bringing the Windows/Xbox community Croc’s World. Tune into an exclusive interview and live-stream with Benjamin on Mixer.com/Xbox on Monday, February 5 at 11 a.m. PST.

Check out Sprakelsoft’s and other incredible games in the Microsoft Store or in-console within the Creators Collection and stay tuned to Xbox Wire for monthly posts featuring Creators Program developers from all around the world in the Creators Corner!

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

Related:
New Preview Alpha System Update – 1/24/18
Xbox Live Sessions: UFC Champ Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson to Play Dragon Ball FighterZ with Friends
New Preview Alpha System Update – 1/23/18

Source: Xbox Blog
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Join us on the high seas 24th – 29th January in the Sea of Thieves Closed Beta. Rare’s staggering shared world pirate adventure launches for Xbox One and Windows 10 PC on March 20th, 2018. We’ll see you on the seas! Get your pre-order in now at https://www.xbox.com/seaofthieves

Source: XBOX YouTube
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