Xbox Live Redefined UX

Originally published in UX Planet in 2020

Some of you might remember Mike Jones’ hit song Back Then. If you do, you might also remember the nonchalant mention of his phone number in the song. In fact, it came out just a few months after Halo 2’s official release in 2004. But why is that relevant? Because me and a rag-tag group of gamers spread across the US playing Halo 2 decided to call that number, his number, while in a pregame lobby chat.

And guess what? Mike Jones actually picked up.

The Server-First Approach

Prior to the release of Halo 2, PC games like Counter Strike 1.6 (released in 2000) had built a specific type of online reputation. The way players engaged in games at the time was primarily by using a system we’ll call Server-First. The UX in this approach prioritizes finding the game mode you want to play over finding the friends you’d like to game with (in most cases). The voice communication starts once the players have joined the server that’s hosting the game. Here’s a quick diagram to illustrate my point.

This is important for two reasons.

1. The UX behind Server-First means you may not necessarily be speaking with your team before you’re in a server and playing a game mode. Thus, you’re limited to engaging with those players once in the heat of the game. In other words, you can’t partake in open-ended pregame banter.

1. The game mode is predefined by the list of servers provided to you. More commonly however, servers are abstracted from the game modes, meaning you join whatever game mode the developers (or custom hosted servers) are running at that time.

Let’s take a look at real world examples using a Server-First approach.

One of the most notorious examples is Counter Strike 1.6. You opened the game, clicked ‘Find Servers’, sifted through various game modes, connected to a server, and finally, started playing. Here’s an image of what that looked like in its heyday.

Interestingly, there were numerous filtering options that enabled players to choose between maps, game modes, and number of players in a given match. In many ways, you could find a game mode that you enjoyed playing and continue connecting with players in that server, day after day. Yet this still limited you to to joining a server with a pre-defined game mode (unless you knew the admins well enough to convince them otherwise).

The lack of a pregame meeting place meant it was more difficult to converge with other players. You were reliant on going off-platform, often by using applications like Ventrilo and Team Speak which enabled you to chat separate from the length of match rounds. The UX in other words at this time was not taking full advantage of its potential as an ecosystem builder.

Or what about Xbox multiplayer classic, Crimson Skies? Released 3 years after Counter Strike 1.6, the developers were tinkering with the idea of enabling users to join a shared space where identities in a group setting became prominent. Like chat applications at the time such as ICQ and AIM, there was starting to be a sense of a community comprised of individual users — a place where game appreciation, Easter eggs, personal philosophies, and manic rants could live symbiotically. So much that Crimson Skies even went ahead and named this feature a Game Lobby.

The transition from Counter Strike 1.6 to Crimson Skies on Xbox is quite significant. Though it didn’t enable you to engage in open-ended banter prior to joining a game in the same way we’ll explore shortly, you could see who was there with you. You could learn about who they were as individuals and connect their gamertag to a voice. But things only got wilder from here.

The Player-First Approach

Remember how with Server-First you couldn’t squad with a group of friends or easily a game mode before entering a server? Player-First is here to flip that on its head. It looks something like this.

Very quickly you see how starting and ending with a game party enables you to:

1. Invite and move a group of friends from one game mode to another without having to go off-platform.

1. Create personas around your gamer tags that further identify your rank and position to the community at large. You can brand yourself, build a reputation, and ultimately, create an identity.

So how was this approach put into practice?

The Pregame Lobby & Party System

The Bungie multiplayer team lead by Max Hoberman were ready to try something new. They wanted to create a multiplayer experience in Halo 2 that gave players the freedom to chat and communicate without hassle. Using their experience from Bungie’s recent hit Halo: Combat Evolve, and with the help of his colleague David Candland, the duo began brainstorming how to make Player-First a reality.

They landed on the idea of a party system. In fact, you can pinpoint one of the many sections of the official UX flowchart for Halo 2 where this idea was first documented.

In his own words, Candland described the difficulties behind developing such a new system.

It was a lot of work figuring out how to do all the heavy lifting for the player. I’m really happy with where we ended up. The Xbox team at Microsoft was so enamored with the simplicity of it all, they wanted to allow all Live games to leverage this system, regardless if they had the budget to develop such a system. So when the Xbox 360 came out, they had adapted many of these features (parties, messaging, and an always-accessible friends list) and brought them to the platform OS so all live games could enjoy these systems without the cost of developing it themselves.

The results showed. From the instant you turned on your Xbox, heard the whirring of that Halo 2 disc, and created an account on Xbox live, you were given the option to connect with thousands of players across your region.

Before entering a game server, there’s a pregame lobby where you can invite friends, chat, and decide exactly what type of game mode you want before entering a server — it was dynamic. The UX in this case was a direct catalyst for community ecosystem building. Here’s what it actually looked like in action.

The UI was minimalist, taking advantage of the Xbox controller layout that anyone playing Halo 2 had in their hands. If you wanted to start a game you clicked ‘A’, if you wanted to invite friends to your party you clicked ‘Y’.

That’s it.

The lesson here is that building a strong ecosystem isn’t always about finding the most flashy, cutting-edge UI design. It’s about encouraging users on your platform to build their own story, connecting them through natural, simple behavioral triggers. As David stated in a 2017 lecture on UX in gaming:

Nothing disrupts the flow of a game faster than stopping the action to put up a UI window and take control away from the player.

What amazed me after playing Halo 2 was not only the interface itself, but what that interface enabled me to create. The pregame lobby and party system were how you heard about new game modes by word of mouth, just like any other underground art or music event in the real world. It all felt novel, like you were the first person hearing about it. There were no bulletin boards or giant pop-up modals describing what you can or should do, it was for a lack of a better word: pure.

As one Youtuber put it eloquently:

With some digging around, I came across this thread posted in 2014 that reminisces on all of Halo 2’s community-developed game modes that players built around pop-culture themes. These were game modes that had to be followed on good faith by every player, they weren’t baked into the game with code. Some examples:

Tower of Power‍

Objective: Control the Tower

• Map: Acension
• Game Type: Teamslayer
• Shields: Off
• Weapons on Map: Just the turret on the tower
• Player weapons: Shotguns only

Cat-N-Mouse

Objective: Warthogs are mice, Wraiths are Cats, no firing guns, only ramming

• Map: Coagulation
• Game Type: Team Slayer
• Vehicles: Warthogs and Wraiths
• No Respawns

At any point a player could break these rules, but why? That thrill of being a troll is short lived when no one else wanted to join you. And really, that’s what a community is. The freedom for a group of individuals to engage in an endless game of social balancing. It’s how you build a culture.

Wrapping Up

It’s important to realize that games today have made Hoberman and Candland’s party system quite commonplace. When we’re in pregame lobbies we often take it for granted, forgetting about the times you either couldn’t speak with other players at all, or had to join a random server to engage in discourse. As far as user experience goes, it looks like a good party might have been all we needed to make a few friends along the way.

Coincidentally , after researching materials for this article, I discovered that Candland was also the lead interface designer behind Destiny 2, a game that my friend and I commended for its stupendous interface design. Most notably the ability to enter almost any menu from loading screens — something I thought was technically impossible. This small tweak alone peaked my interest and reduced idle fatigue during load times. The power of a good UX never ceases to amaze.