April Xbox One Preview features will arrive in two waves; first set available now

The April update has begun rolling out to Preview participants on the Xbox One but Microsoft’s method is shifting slightly as they will roll the new features out in two waves instead of all at once.

Just to clarify before the questions begin – it is the collection of features for April that will be made available in two different waves – not all the features being made available for two waves of the Preview members.

So following up the March update will be tough as we finally got the screenshot capability but some of these April features are going to be handy as well.

According to our favorite gamer geek, Xbox Lives’ Major Nelson aka Larry Hryb, the remainder of the April features will roll out next week but here is what is heading your way now:

- Party chat improvements – Party chat is being improved with troubleshooting guidance for Xbox One owners. The Party App will help you get your microphone enabled and show you when privacy settings or networking issues are blocking communication with particular party members.

- Game hub links – Members can more easily discover game hub content from activity feed items. You’ll see activity feed items when any of your friends follow a game, and you’ll also be able to get back to a game’s hub from activity feed posts related to the game – including feed items about the game’s achievements, game clips and screenshots. Finally, we’ve added a link to game hubs from the game’s page in the achievements app.

- Achievement notifications – With this preview release, you’ll also see the achievement’s description in the notification so you know what you did to earn this achievement without having to open the achievements app. If you do choose to open up the notification to see the achievement details, we’ve also made some performance improvements to make loading the achievements app from a notification faster.

I really like that last one because I cannot tell you how many times an achievement alert would pop up on the screen and I would need to snap the Achievements app to understand what I did to get that. Now with the included explanation that should no longer be necessary.

Getting these updates in two waves now has me intrigued about what we might see in the next half of the April updates.

Any ideas?

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