Microsoft is teasing what it describes as big and bold changes to its Xbox Live Achievements. In a podcast interview with Windows Central, Xbox Platform VP Mike Ybarra says Microsoft is working on something that “fundamentally changes the concept” of Xbox Achievements. “We are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody's gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on Xbox,” says Ybarra. “We can do a lot more to reflect and let people show their gaming history and their status.”
It’s not clear what Microsoft will introduce for Xbox Achievements, but the company has a number of different ways it could better reflect gamer progress and history. Xbox Achievements were first introduced more than 10 years ago with the Xbox 360, but Microsoft has never really overhauled them. Gamerscore, a number linked to Achievements, has always helped represent how much effort an Xbox Live player has put into the games they own but little else. “We're going to go big in the area of letting people show off and represent their gaming history and the type of gamer that they are, far more than we do with Gamerscore,” says Ybarra.
Microsoft isn’t revealing its exact changes yet, but the company is currently testing a new beta dashboard for Xbox One owners. The software maker is also redesigning its Xbox Avatars, to make them a lot more customizable and diverse. There’s a lot of changes coming to the Xbox platform later this year, alongside Microsoft’s new Xbox One X console.