Xbox One: 10 Big Changes That Would Actually Make It Worth Buying

5. Double Down On Kinect (In Ways That Make Sense)

The Kinect is...strange. From a gaming standpoint, it's surprisingly reliable. Kinect Sport Rivals: Preseason came packaged with a free jet-ski demo, and it works really well. Turning your hands to make sharp turns, stomping your feet to boost and go off ramps and jumping in front of your opponent to mess up their connection the camera are all pretty enjoyable gaming experiences. Sure, small living rooms still suffer a little bit and there are occasional hiccups, but for all intents and purposes the Kinect makes for an awesome casual gaming peripheral, whats less intimidating than the simple Wiimote controller? No controller at all. But then there's the other stuff; Kinect's ultimately an all seeing, all hearing device with cataracts and tinnitus. With so much of the Xbox One's appeal counting on the voice and gesture stuff, its instability is constantly aggravating. For the Kinect to be a true success, revolutionise the living room and get annoyed parents off their kids' backs, this thing needs to work and it needs to work as efficiently as possible. Which is probably impossible, since everyone speaks differently and there's probably no way to program the Kinect to pick up on various regional cadences. But if you let gamers customise (or train, if you will) their Kinect for their specific cadence - or better yet set up shortcut macros for the device - perhaps it€™ll feel a little less bi-polar. Imagine being able to program your Xbox to turn on, sign in, and load up the last Netflix movie watched via a simple "Xbox, veg out" or getting it to auto sign-in three guest profiles with "Xbox, play with Friends". Letting gamers choose how they want their Kinect to function is paramount to its success. The ability to turn on and off various individual features prevents the intrusion of the Kinect auto-sign in when a family member walks in the room during the middle of the Breaking Bad finale. It eliminates needless distraction when the gesture controls relayed into the camera pick up on glasses, mugs or brooms as hands interact with them, and doubling down on the Kinect voice recognition to the point where it's nearly perfect as it can be could kick-start the currently floundering peripheral.