14 DAY TRIAL // At its gaming oriented conference, Gamefest 2008, Microsoft offered interested gamers a look at its upcoming Xbox Live Party feature, which is to be introduced on the Xbox 360 together with other updates during fall.
Eric Heutchy, platform engineer at Microsoft, was the man demoing the new feature. He provided an overview of Live Party by saying that "At its core the feature is eight way group voice chat. It works over all Xbox 360 experiences - all existing games, all new games, the dashboard, movies, media center, everything you can do on the console. The members of your party can each be in a different experience".
Microsoft decided that voice chat is the best way to connect people over the Xbox 360, mainly because of the fact that voice can be continuously transmitted while users attend different experiences provided by the gaming console. So, voice chat is the basis on which the rest of the service was built.
The next element added is a way to quickly send invites to everyone at the party. This is done via a single button on the interface and will benefit gamers that want to create multiplayer matches without the hassle off talking to friends and then inviting them the regular way.
Because most people are interested in their privacy, there are options available to turn a "public" party into an "invitation only" one, while giving the user that created the party the option to kick off anyone and automatically send invites to his list of Xbox Live friends.
The option to "invite party to current game" will automatically connect all users to "any game on your hard drive, memory unit, or disc in the tray". Heutchy concluded by stating that "This is the first time on Xbox Live that users are able to indicate that they want to have a social experience together at the platform level".
Expect more information on the feature as the autumn release date for the re-vamped Xbox Live service draws near.