Today, I wanted to show off the latest and greatest updates that have come to DayOne since we launched the public beta.
Now if you missed what DayOne actually is, let’s back track for a second. We’ve always been ambitious at XboxEra, and DayOne is the latest evidence of that limitless drive to provide our community with more.
DayOne is a community focused Xbox Game Pass ‘app’, designed to enable our community to track, rate and play games together. Following our release of the early access beta, we got a lot of fantastic feedback, and worked with our team and developer to act on it.
Now it’s time to really show it off 😊
First things first – in order to get the best use of DayOne, you’ll need to sign up for an account on the XboxEra forums. We’ve linked the two to provide extra functionality now and in the future. The good news is, it’s easy to sign up, and you can do via your Discord, Twitter or your Gmail account and more.
Once you’re logged in, the first thing you’ll see is the main page. Now DayOne supports mobile and desktop use but for the sake of this article, we’re going to focus on the desktop version.
Here you’ll find featured games, as well as shortcuts to the latest releases on Game Pass, what’s coming soon and what is leaving the platform at the end of the month. We use an API to pull this information from Microsoft directly, so it’s as up to date as we can make it, automatically.
We’ll often feature new games or hidden gems and want to involve the community in what gets featured here – for now, yeah, I’ve featured Peppa Pig. Come at me.
In addition, here you’ll also find the ability to look at games by genre, be it RPGs, family games or shooters. You’ll also be able to search in collections, from Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, EA Play and more.
When you’re looking at all games, you have a powerful set of filters to hand. Want something co-op? Maybe with 120 fps support? Dolby Atmos? You’ll find it all here – users can pin the filters to the side of the screen or call them on demand on mobile. You can also filter by name, critical score via metacritic, or how long a game takes to complete, thanks to our integrations with Metacritic and HowLongToBeat.
Now occasionally, the tags are a bit…off when they come from Microsoft, so thankfully we’ve built ourselves functionality to be able to override and correct them when they’re wrong. We’ve even accounted for when games leave the service entirely, with a No Longer Available banner displayed on the box art.
Now, not everyone plays every game on Game Pass. It’d take too long. And while we might try a lot of them, we may not complete every game we try either. So we’ve built functionality into our app that allows the community to mark games they tried, as well as completed. If you liked a game, you’ll be able to add your rating for your own personal score – to do this, simply click the + symbol on any game you want to rate, and lock in your score accordingly. DayOne will accumulate the scores as they come in, and provide a community average score too.
In addition, the plus symbol opens the door to direct links to buy the game on the Xbox Store, view the Metacritic and HLTB pages too.
If you click on a game to view more details, you’ll be treated to a host of additional information, from the developer, screenshots and gameplay details. In addition, if the team at XboxEra have reviewed the game, you’ll find an excerpt of the review, alongside our video.
Not only that, but as a community focused app, you’ll find a link to a discussion thread on the game on the XboxEra forums – if one exists. if it doesn’t, you can create one yourself and find other gamers to play with. You’ll also be able to mark whether you’ve tried or completed a game, to add them to your Library.
Ah, yes – the library. The My Library section – here, we pull in your Discourse profile details, and collect and note all the games you’ve tried, completed, and rated. As we look to the future, we envision deep Xbox Live integration, with achievement tracking and more to come.
The nutshell is this – we believe we’ve made, in partnership with our developer, the best Game Pass browser app available. And this, is just the beginning. Alongside the browser itself, you can expect regular DayOne YouTube videos to give you the lowdown on the latest additions to the subscription, as well as our reviews and usual coverage.
I hope you enjoyed this overview of DayOne – as always, for all things Xbox, stay tuned to XboxEra for more. Want to check it out? Simply click this link.
