A handful of new features are coming to the Xbox app on PC, making it much friendlier for playing Xbox and Xbox Game Pass games.
As of Thursday, Xbox Insiders get to test out a grab bag of features on PC, including Xbox Cloud Gaming and, for the first time, modding. In addition, the app will also unroll more general improvements: the ability to choose separate drives for game installation, and improvements for download speed, to name a couple. The update is already live for Xbox Insiders to test, and will roll out to the rest of users at a later date.
Jason Beaumont, partner director of experiences at Xbox, shared the new features via a November update from the official Xbox channel Thursday.
The move is part of a larger push to support Xbox gaming for Windows PC users. In June, Microsoft said that Xbox Game Pass would be included as a part of the Windows 11 operating system. However, just because people could play Xbox Game Pass games on their desktop didn't mean that it was completely optimized yet. These changes are a key step toward improving the experience.
The update also gives players access to local files, which means they may now mod Xbox Game Pass games on their PC. Games that are moddable will say so in their game details page.
There are some other additions, like a toggle for using high-dynamic range color (HDR) with older games, as well as a new section for cloud gaming — which gives Windows PC users the ability to play console games — when the app is updated.
The upgrades are currently being beta tested by the Xbox Insider program. Those who are interested in getting access to the new features can sign up for the program and give them a try.
Xbox Cloud Gaming has been available via the Xbox app on PC for quite a while now, hasn’t it?
By Turible on 11.11.21 6:54pm
Until recently, you had to be part of Insider in order to play through the PC app, otherwise you’d have to play through a browser, an inferior experience. But I think they made Cloud gaming part of the app for everyone last month.
By EMarley on 11.11.21 10:23pm
When you say you can play console games via streaming, does that mean PC players can play Kingdom Hearts 3 with gamepass ultimate?
By EMarley on 11.11.21 10:25pm
Somebody pointed me to a great site a couple months ago: https://gamepassport.net/ — you can quickly search, sort, and filter the complete Game Pass catalog by features, including XCloud support. It looks like there are 420 games that run on the Series consoles, but only 300 that support XCloud. I’m not sure how they pick which ones run where, but KH3 is one of the 120 that got left out. (Any other "cloud play" games on that list would work from PC already, because cloud play has been available for a month or so now.)
By Thworted on 11.12.21 4:06am
Thank you, that’s really helpful.
By EMarley on 11.12.21 10:14am
"access to local files"
So basically I will no longer have to worry about losing dozens of gigabytes of storage because Game Pass forgot about an installation and the folder is locked down?
By JustALazyFox on 11.12.21 5:44am
I just discovered this problem recently. In particular, if you install a game, it goes in a computer-wide folder but only shows up as installed for your Windows account. If another user "installs" the same game, it uses the same system folder, but now when you "uninstall" it you don’t get the space back, because it’s still installed for this other user. Just a terrible, poorly-thought-out mess of a system that we can’t ditch fast enough.
By Thworted on 11.12.21 10:23am
Not really. In a shared system you wouldn’t want users uninstalling games for other users.
By agies on 11.12.21 12:17pm
That’s bonkers. Every application install on every system I have used since MS DOS 6.22 has gone in a well-known system-wide location, ideally with some kind of (again, system-wide) uninstall command. They fucked that up, and it’s terrible.
Go to Settings → Apps & Features ("Add or remove programs" in the Start Menu). Now, go down that list, pick a program at random, and answer me one simple question: if you click the big button labeled "Uninstall"… will it actually uninstall the damn program? Trick question, you can’t answer, there’s no way to tell. Terrible, terrible design.
By Thworted on 11.12.21 12:43pm
Are they going to make it so that controller support isn’t all jacked up? I swear each game randomly decides if I should have steam open or closed, ds4windows running or not, connected via Bluetooth or wired, etc. to get the game to detect my PS5 controller. No such issues with any other game service
By NegativeCreep (I'm A) on 11.12.21 9:10am
I think the blame for this one falls more on developers than Microsoft. I have the same problems, but somehow some games are able to get DS4/DS5 support working perfectly while others require crazy workarounds. (I’ve never tried to get UWP/Game Pass stuff working with Steam, but I do use DS4Windows a lot.)
By Thworted on 11.12.21 10:24am
It would be really nice if they no longer deleted save games when you uninstall a game.
HEY MICROSOFT. JUST BECAUSE I UNINSTALL A GAME DOES NOT MEAN I WANT TO RESTART IT IF I PLAY IT AGAIN.
By Paxtez on 11.12.21 11:02am
That sounds nightmarish, but how many games from the Store actually work that way? Most of the ones I’ve tried say they support "Xbox Cloud Save". If they don’t, I check the PC Gaming Wiki to find the save file location. Generally, it’s somewhere under my user profile (Documents, AppData/Local, something like that), but I think once or twice it’s been under the game install (WinApps). Maybe I just got lucky, though?
By Thworted on 11.12.21 12:45pm
This happened to me when I played Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night on Game Pass. I was working on grinding out skills before the final boss. It fell off Gamepass so I uninstalled the game.
Later I got a copy on Steam and found a tool that converts the save formats. But my save folder was missing. So I never got to even finish the game, and I really didn’t want to start all over. =/
Since then I’ve done some 2 experiments, when I uninstall Gamepass games it deletes the local save file locations.
By Paxtez on 11.12.21 12:57pm
Man that sucks. Bad luck, really:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Bloodstained:_Ritual_of_the_Night
Cloud save on every platform except Xbox / MS Store.
(In another thread, I linked to https://gamepassport.net/, where you can see that, out of 376 PC games, 198 support cloud saves, in case you’re curious.)
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