What makes games more fun? Having a career in them.
Mid-year 2017 Mike Ybarra, Vice President for Xbox, mentioned a system that rewards players not for their achievements but more for their gaming habits. Nothing was officially announced at the time but he expressed that whilst achievements are great there are a group of players out there that don’t get rewarded for their gaming hobby, particularly those in eSports or those that prefer to spend more time in a single gaming universe. Not a lot more info came from that other than they [Xbox] were working on a system that rewards everyone for playing games. Windows Central has now gathered more information on this system, the currently titled Xbox Career, and although it remains to be rumoured at the moment it certainly looks to tick Mike’s box, so to speak.
As stated in the article below, the Xbox Career would be an extension of the achievement platform rather than a replacement, focused on Quests which assumedly link to the other stats collected when playing games: Time Played, Enemies Killed etc. Completing quests would reward you with experience which in turn levels you up and allows you to unlock rewards, rumoured to be loot crates containing rare Avatar items. There are also talks of ‘prestiging‘ which, again presumably, means you’ll be able to reset your level for a unique unlock, à la COD.
Quests and levelling up aren’t a new venture for Xbox. The Xbox Insider Hub allows those within its program to complete quests for XP in a bid to level you up and entice you to answer polls and test beta features. But this new system appears to be a more integral part of the Xbox, open to everyone and rewarding gamers for playing games with actual rewards.
Whilst loot crates are a sore subject, and possibly the spawn of the Devil itself, if there’s no way to purchase these with actual cash this could be an interesting feature, he said with overcome naivety. The rumour of exclusive Avatar items would also tie in nicely with the announcement of the revamped Avatars that dropped last year. Whilst we’ve not heard anything else about them since it would make sense to launch these two updates side-by-side. With the assumed abundance of extra customisation for those little CG personalities there’ll be plenty to cram into the loot boxes, more than enough to entice players to keep unlocking them.
This, of course, is all still rumour so it may very well come to nothing but there is certainly enough info surrounding it that indicates this may well be the next big thing for the Xbox platform.
