Xbox Update Adds Overdue Social Feature and More
If you're an Xbox user who's tired of hearing every small noise that comes from your teammates' headsets whenever you're playing a multiplayer game or are in a party, this latest console update is the one for you. Microsoft announced this week that voice suppression is now a standard console feature, but it's only available on the Xbox Series X|S devices, for now. Accompanying that noise suppression was one more feature to round out the rest of the console update.
For those who primarily play on PC and use services like Discord or already have headsets with built-in noise suppression, this feature won't be as big of a to-do. However, it'll still be beneficial in the sense that whenever you're partied up with someone else who's not using some sort of noise suppression, they'll now have the option to have it on by default. Microsoft said this feature should hep take care of "noises like gamepad clicks, breathing, and background noise from your parties" and added that it plans to bring the option to more devices soon enough.
"If you want to keep some types of background noise like music in your parties, you can also turn noise suppression off," the Xbox team said. "Just open the guide, scroll to Parties & chats, and select Options. There you can enable or disable noise suppression. We're excited that this feature launches on Xbox Series X|S today, and we'll be bringing it to more devices soon."
It's worth noting too that this feature is only available in party chat and doesn't seem to specifically affect in-game chat based on the way the announcement is worded. That means that public lobbies may still be filled with potentially distracting noises, but your party chats should at least be a bit quieter.
Alongside noise suppression is another social feature that allows friends to hop into a game straight from a clip that you've sent them, a feature which sounds not unlike one that was a selling point of Google Stadia's cloud-based infrastructure.
"Millions of Xbox gamers share game clips and screenshots with their friends with link sharing, released late last year," the notes for this Xbox update said. "Now the friends you share your game clips and screenshots with can not only watch your captures, they can start playing right away on their device with cloud gaming."
Microsoft's latest Xbox update should now be rolling out as of Wednesday.
