Microsoft is testing out a new Xbox dashboard that tweaks how things appear on your console. Seemingly with every dashboard upgrade, there are fans that still pine for the old “Blades” dashboard from the Xbox 360.
Xbox Live director or programming Larry Hryb has definitively responded to folks wanting the “Blades” back in saying no, they have no plans on reintroducing any element from that iconic dashboard.
Hryb was talking on the Official Xbox Podcast (via TrueAchievements) with Xbox product manager Ivy Krislov as they both talked up the new dashboard – which is out now for select Xbox Insiders and won’t roll out until 2023.
“No, you can’t have the blades back,” Hryb said. “They were lovely, they were nice, but you can’t have them back because they don’t scale, as we say in the business, to what we want to do.”
The “Blades” dashboard was on the original Xbox 360s way back in 2005, and for those who never experienced them included separate menus on corresponding tabs that had silver blades. Toggling between the blades made the iconic “whoosh” sound, and nothing really has come close since. I’m a sucker for UI that has both slick visuals and clever sound effects.
The new Xbox “Home” dashboard doesn’t have anything like this, instead it’s more of a home screen that has most if not all of what you’d need to start your gaming session. Each subsequent screen can be filled with curated lists or folders of different games, apps, or media.
“We really consider this to be an evolution of the current Home,” Krislov said. “Taking a lot of the things we did well previously and building upon those.”
While things haven’t really changed much for the Xbox Series X|S dashboard (as such the Xbox One, too), Microsoft has been testing this new dashboard for the past year.
“Something a lot of Xbox fans might not know; typically, it can take us like three months to test really small features,” Krislov said. “Our hope is that by building this infrastructure we can test stuff, get your feedback, iterate, and come back to you with something even better.”
