With the year’s end just over a week away, Microsoft was busy pushing out previews, updates, and some interesting gaming news to boot. Find all that and more in the handy guide below.
It’s been a pretty packed seven days for the folks up in Redmond, chiefly in the preview department. We’ve also found out a tad more about the upcoming Xbox, and even the future of the Edge browser. All that and more can be found below, in your Microsoft digest for the week of December 15-21.
If the constant leaked codenames and plan details are to be blieved – and won’t change significantly -, 2019 and 2020 seem poised to be big years for Microsoft’s home console. First off is the disc-less variant of the One S which according to a new report could be unveiled as soon as January. However, that isn’t the most intriguing bit.
We know that Scarlett is the codename for the upcoming family of Xbox consoles, but we weren’t aware of exactly what the individual devices were codenamed. Courtesy of a new report, it’s been revealed that the low and high-end boxes (similar to the One S and One X of today) are dubbed Lockhart and Anaconda. The former is a cheaper variant comparable in power to the current One X, while Anaconda is next-gen’s high-end option which may go with SSD instead of HDD for storage. If you remember, previous reports had also mentioned that the company was looking into having a streaming-only box which would be under the $200 threshold. There’s no mention of that here, but Project xCloud is still alive and well, so presumably the variant sans local storage is still in the works.
Since next year was mentioned, that’s also when Xbox All Access will make a triumphant return – that is, after it goes away on December 31. For those not familiar, All Access applies the same two-year carrier subsidy model from phones to the One S and One X consoles. Either $21.99 or $34.99 a month – depending on the console you choose – gets you the hardware, an Xbox Live Gold subscription, and an Xbox Game Pass subscription. There are limitations like it only being available in physical Microsoft Stores in the U. S., limitations which, according to Larry Hryb (MajorNelson) should be addressed next year with the program’s expansions. When, where, and how are questions with no answers at the moment.
Also in 2019 you can look forward to the usual selection of Games with Gold, which are Celeste (Xbox One: January 1-31), WRC 6 FIA World Rally Championship (Xbox One: January 16 – February 15), Lara Croft: Guardian of Light (Xbox 360, Xbox One: January 1-15), and Far Cry 2 (Xbox 360, Xbox One: January 16-31).
We round off this section with some news that doesn’t necessarily have any sort of date to look forward to – unlike the Games with Gold above. Microsoft is apparently looking to add two new webcams to its lineup: one more enterprise-focused which connects via USB-C and could be the same one included on the Surface Hub 2, and another one that works on both Windows 10 devices and Xbox hardware. The latter is supposedly going to bring back some of the Kinect capabilities, meaning a long overdue first-party Windows Hello camera could be on the horizon.
Also on the horizon is Halo Infinite, which according to developer 343 Industries will treat the PC as a first-class citizen. This is particularly interesting as Infinite is the first mainline title in the franchise to come to PC since 2007’s Halo 2.
At the top of the week, a post by former Edge intern Joshua Bakita stated that one of the reasons why Microsoft decided to end EdgeHTML – despite its advantage over Chrome in video acceleration tech – was due to Google sabotaging the browser. The example given was a hidden div atop videos on YouTube, which caused Edge’s hardware acceleration fast-path to bail.
