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Xbox One Update xbox one Twitch thumbsticks Major Nelson

Xbox One March Update 2016

A brand new Xbox One update has launched and it brings a number of changes, some of which were seen in the Preview Program that received an update earlier in the month. The update coincides with a Windows 10 Xbox update, both of which have some interesting improvements.

Firstly, a change has been made to party chat - the limit for players in a chat is now 16. Previously the player count for a party chat was 12. Party Chat originally launched with just 8 player support and it has grown since, mostly because it has been one of the most popularly used features. Xbox One engineer Mike Ybarra says that 64 player party chat may one day be a possibility. We'd hope that with that, we'd have some sort of channel sorting system so that party chat could be used as a voice server like Teamspeak 3 - players would be able to join different channels to avoid overspeaking other players who may be playing a different game. On top of the increased player amount, Xbox One owners will now be able to stream to Twitch and join a party chat. Players will even be able to choose whether to share the voices of other members in the party chat to Twitch or to mute it on the Twitch stream.

A top request from Xbox One users was to introduce a digital store that includes backwards compatible games and Xbox has now met that request. A new store has been added and games for the Xbox 360 that are compatible on the Xbox One can now be purchased there.

Major Nelson has also announced a new update to the Xbox Elite controller that adds more thumbstick precision and this is now available in the latest Xbox One update. Major Nelson mentioned that Xbox has "Created a new method to calculate the position of the thumbsticks consistently, enabling thumbstick response that is more in line with what you are expecting."