Hands-on with New Xbox Experience: Welcome to avatar city

Party time
Another big element of the new iteration of Xbox Live is what are called 'parties'. This, it turns out, is a crucial piece of the whole puzzle, because it's what will allow players to maximise the way they play games together with their friends.

Parties will make it easy for players to communicate with a group of friends, using a voice or text messaging system. And even if a group isn't actively playing together, friends can see others' profiles, showing what they're playing and whether it's possible to join games in progress.

"It's an example of a feature that doesn't feel core," said Penello, addressing more concerns from long-serving Xbox users that the parties feature is an attempt to turn the service over to casual users, "but I think it's something that core gamers are really going" to like.

That's in part, Gruhl added, because of what is known as party channels, which actually enable the communications between members of a party, regardless of whether they're playing the same game or not.

One benefit of this is that friends can set up a party channel that will allow them to, say, jointly go into a multiplayer game and communicate among themselves, even as they play against other players.