With E3 2019 fast approaching, Microsoft is busy making sure attendees and viewers alike have a great show. The result is the latest Xbox One system update isn’t very large, but it still includes three important improvements to the sorting of games and apps, messaging, and players’ friends lists.
Firstly, the team has changed how programmes within My Games & Apps are sorted. Articles like “a,” “an”, and “the” will no longer be counted when sorting in the “Sort A-Z” and “Group by letter” views. For example, this week’s release A Plague Tale: Innocence will now be found under P rather than A. Current Game with Gold and new Game Pass addition The Surge will be found under S rather than T. This change has been implemented thanks to Xbox community voting in the “My Games & Apps” Idea Drive.
The new Message Requests feature now proritises messages from players who are already on your friends list and those with whom you want to communicate. If you receive a message from someone you don’t know, those will be filtered into the new Message requests tab. The downside to the addition of this feature is that all prior group messages will be lost — messages to individual gamers are unaffected. If you want to keep a record of them, you will need to do so manually by heading over to Xbox.com and copy/pasting them into another programme. You can see all of your current messages here, and you’ve only got a limited amount of time to create your backups, so don’t leave it too long if this is something you want to do.
Finally, your friends list has long shown what game or app a friend is using while they’re online, but changes implemented with the May update mean that players can now see on what device their friends are using those programmes. The update adds icons next to the programme name that indicates whether they’re playing it on mobile, PC, or Xbox One.
The May update is being rolled out to all console owners from today.