The Xbox consoles have gone through a ton of changes, all to improve the quality of life for players and get them to play games faster. The company adds features to their consoles that make them unique for the Xbox, which hopefully drives more players to get an Xbox. However, over the course of each Xbox console's life, Microsoft has done both, adding things and taking out things, mainly because many players either don't like a feature or they want things to be included in their console.

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Removing features can be a double-edged sword because many players may like a feature the console has, and when taking it away, may ruin the experience for them. To date, Microsoft has removed features that are great and has left many players wondering if they are coming back in the latest entry, the Xbox Series X. Here are some features that are missed by players, from a console family that has one the best exclusives in gaming.

5 Swapping Out The Internal Drive

xbox 360 line up

This could be done very easily during the Xbox 360 days, with the original Xbox 360 having players just eject it out from the top and replace it with another made changing the drives much easier. Plus, for many of the later iterations of the Xbox 360 the internal drive moved to the button of the console, and was in a slot that players would need to uncover in order to access it. All they would need to do would press a button and the cover came off, exposing the internal drive, which could be pulled out very easily.

Even though Microsoft has opted to make things a little easier by having bigger space on the internal drives and cloud gaming, the original way to do it was cheaper and still easy. On top of that, games are getting bigger on the Xbox, with all the added things like higher quality of sound for many games, making the file size larger. So expanding spaces is a norm now. Nowadays, if players want to take a game with them, they'd either need to upload the saved data to the cloud or download the data. With external drives, many players forget to move their games. That's why having a removable internal drive was great and allowed the console to be less cluttered with external drives all around it.

4 MSN

msn log in screen

Players who wanted to be social on their console apart from multiplayer could do it this way. Older players can remember this way of communicating with people before texting was popular. This was a pretty interesting feature that connected the player's social media before Twitter. They could talk to people who weren't even on a console that way as well. However, while MSN was liked, the issue that many players had complaints about was typing. It took a long time to type out sentences since players had to select one letter at a time.

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Thankfully, Xbox has a ton of neat accessories that serve many purposes, for both gaming and non-gaming. The company had a mini-keyboard that could attach to the bottom of the controller. It was a cool little feature that showcased the Xbox 360 as more than a gaming console, but a box where players could do more. It offered players the social aspect, something that was still new during those days of gaming.

3 Snapping

xbox snapping player playing game while having a bar snapped on the side

The newer consoles had a ton of new features that made interacting with it a lot more fluid, like voice commands. But the interesting feature was snapping, which was something Microsoft heavily advertised for the marketing of the Xbox One. This feature allowed players to open up another application, if it could, to be used at the same time as a game. So for example, if players were playing a game, they could snap a YouTube which would appear as a bar on the right-hand side of the screen.

While the snapping feature was underutilized, it allowed players to get the most out of their Xbox One console. So if someone wanted to take a screenshot, or just watch something while they were gaming, they could easily snap the application to do so, provided the app allowed it. It was a great way of showing how the Xbox One took the media aspect of the Xbox 360 and furthered it with this function.

2 Kinect

xbox kinect on top of a tv

This device is something that divided the community quite a bit. Not in its function, which was pretty expansive, but how Microsoft forced it on players. Initially, every Xbox One came with it, and many players didn't want that. However, many developers used it, and in turn, made some gameplay experiences super immersive. For example, in Tomb Raider players could use voice commands to change Laura's weapon, or for one the best Aliens games in Alien Isolation, where if players made noise in real life, the mic would pick it up, making the alien find them.

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The Kinect could track players' movements, so games like Alien Isolation would take that aspect, and make it a part of the gameplay. If players leaned over, Ripley would also lean over as well. This, as mentioned before, made gaming on the Xbox One more immersive, and made those earlier horror games that used the Kinect functions rather fun to play.

1 Upload Studio

xbox upload studio UI

Upload Studio was an app that players could use to edit clips they recorded on the Xbox One, and allowed them to upload directly on YouTube via the console. So when Microsoft stopped supporting it, many players were turned off by that. Even though Gamepass was in its early days on the Xbox One, it has a bunch of great multiplayer options like Titanfall 2, which is a game that lets players do some cool things. And if players wanted to share those moments with some heavy edits, the Upload Studio made it all possible.

It also made editing a lot more streamlined, so players could get into the details of the clips and edit them in a bunch of ways. Since Microsoft is pushing an ecosystem, meaning players can access their games and services on different platforms, the one thing they're pushing players towards is mobile. So if players have the app on their phones, they can do all that Upload Studio had with the expectation of adding edits. Even though Upload Studio is gone, players can still upload their clips via Xbox Live with a new system that was introduced a couple of years back. And with that, they can edit these clips with a third-party app. While not as streamlined as Upload Studio, the option is still there.

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