Xbox One ditching ‘Xbox Guide’ menu

Microsoft is leaving behind the Xbox Guide interface, as the Xbox One will now reportedly take players directly to the dashboard when pressing the Xbox button. Xbox LIVE director of programming Larry Hryb (better known as Major Nelson) confirmed the switch in his latest podcast with corporate VP Marc Whitten.

Rather than having to leave your game completely, Xbox One will now simply minimize your game and run it in the background while you do your thing on the dashboard.

"I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I became accustomed to the new dashboard and the fact that when I hit the Xbox button whatever I'm doing shrinks down, and all of a sudden there's the whole dashboard," Hryb said.

"The fun thing about 360 – and we've been doing this for a long time – is you had the dashboard and you had the Guide, but you couldn't get to the rest of the dashboard because then you would leave your game behind," added Whitten.

"Now that it's all one thing, and all of the power of Xbox is there right behind that Xbox button, ready for you to say 'Xbox home', 'Xbox resume game', your ability to go instantly in and out of that, it just changes how free you feel moving in between experiences."

It was in the same podcast that Whitten confirmed a 6% increase in the Xbox One GPU's clock speed.