40 tips and tricks for the Xbox One

Your new Xbox One X – or Xbox One S – sits in front of you. Sure, you can figure out how to turn the thing on, even how to get your discs or downloaded games going (we hope). But when it comes to really getting under the hood with everything your new games machine can do, there are all sorts of features and functions that you might miss at first glance.

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If you have more than one Xbox One console, or if you play Xbox One games on friends consoles, youll find it handy to store your saved games in the cloud (on the Xbox Live servers). You can then continue playing a game on a different console, right from where you last left off.

As a console generation, the Xbox One already has a lot to offer: with expanded backwards compatibility, ever cheaper Xbox Live offers, and the hardware upgrades to the Xbox One S and 4K powerhouse Xbox One X.

So things have changed a lot since the early days of the Xbox One, and this guide will tell you everything you need to get the most of your Xbox console – at least, until the next Xbox generation comes around.

From convenient short-cuts to little-known freebies, here are 40 must-know tips and tricks to squeezing every last bit of value out of your Xbox One, Xbox One S, or Xbox One X – whichever model you've gone for.

Want to see the Xbox One X in action? See the video below!

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• The best Xbox One X prices, bundles and deals you can get right now

The Xbox One X promises to usher in a new age of native 4K Ultra-HD gaming. This is, obviously, an exciting prospect as it means our games are going to look better than ever.

“But,” you give voice your concerns, “aren’t games chock-full of 4K assets going to take longer to download?” As it turns out, not necessarily.

To lessen the time it takes to download digital game titles and reduce the amount of space they take up on your valuable hard drive real estate, Microsoft has designed a system called Intelligent Delivery that delivers only the parts of the game you actually need.

Say, for example, you’re a proud, new Xbox One X owner with a 4K TV. As long as you’re home, you’ll never look at an HD screen again – so why download 1080p assets? With Intelligent Delivery, you won’t.

You could run the same scenario for 1080p TV owners with an original Xbox One and the console will only download 1080p assets but none of the 4K ones.

Essentially, Intelligent Delivery talks to your hardware before starting a download to see what settings you’re running and then optimizes delivery for those settings.

But, what happens if those settings change? Microsoft is prepared for that.

Save your game to an external hard drive and head over to a friend’s house with an Xbox One S or Xbox One X, and you’ll immediately be prompted to download the 4K assets you’re missing.

Tag it and bag it

So how does your Xbox know which part of the game to download?

Developers will soon be able to tag certain “chunks” of a game. Those tags could include 4K and 1080p assets, audio files or anything else.

Audio tracks, believe it or not, take up a surprising amount of space, especially in sports games like FIFA where the developers record the same audio in over a dozen languages. According to DigitalFoundry, developers will be able to tag audio tracks based on language, which means that if you're primarily an English speaker, you’ll only download the English voice-over tracks when playing sports games like FIFA instead of downloading those tracks in every language.

Tagged chunks are the backbone of the new Intelligent Delivery system and allow developers to send out parts of a game piecemeal – a very good way to cut down on the initial download time and should save significant hard drive space when utilized for your entire game collection.

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Source: DigitalFoundry

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• Want to know what the future of Xbox is like? Check out our hands on Xbox One X review