A new Xbox One update is rolling out for members of the preview program, and though it's a relatively small one, the tweaks it does make sound pretty nice in a Quality of Life sort of way - especially for Achievement hunters. Even if you're not signed up to test the updates ahead of time, you can typically look forward to their features rolling out for everybody in the weeks or months ahead.
Here are the four biggest changes you should know about ahead of time (especially if you just got one of those nice new Xbox One X bundles over the holidays, or are thinking of getting one soon).
Guide's "Next Achievements" feature streamlines your hunt
Sometimes you play games to play games, other times you play games to get cheevos. The new "Next Achievements" feature is for the latter option. With this enabled, you'll be able to pull up the Guide to view and sort a list of Achievements from across all of your games that shows which ones you're closest to unlocking. Then you can launch the appropriate game right from there. You can even tweak the filters to prioritize the most common, most rare, or most-Gamerscore-granting Achievements.
"Do Not Disturb" lets you focus on the task at hand
This is a new online status that tells your friends not to bother sending you that hundredth Rocket League team invite. If they don't take the hint, it will also automatically suppress all notifications. Sure, you could always manually disable notifications, but this way your friends will know what's up, and all of your social settings will go back to normal as soon as you take the virtual sock off the doorknob.
Mini Game Hubs make the Guide more informative
Mini Game Hubs in the Xbox One Guide mean there's no need to back out of the game to see which of your friends are playing, hunt down a party via LFG, or use some other Game Hub features. Not a massive change, but anything that reduces the amount of time you spend swapping in and out of games is a good thing.
More flexible shutdown options
Used to be you could only tell your Xbox One to shut down automatically after one or six hours of inactivity. Kinda arbitrary, right? Well, now you can have it shut down after two, three, four, or five hours too. Seven? No. Seven is right out.
