Tech Rundown: First Xbox One Update Coming February 11th

Seems like “open-world” are getting closer to living up to the name. Pixyul, a Montreal game studio founded by ex-Ubisoft employees, is using civilian drones to photograph and scan the planet. The entire planet. They’re aiming to reproduce the Earth in all its glory in their first video game: “ReRoll.”

It’s supposed to be a survival RPG, but without the focus on player-versus-player belligerence. Think DayZ, but without the jerks. Players will still be able to play the role of soldiers if they so choose, but there are also gardeners, hunters, engineers -- the kind of people the soldiers need to help them survive. Which will be the entire point of ReRoll. Pixyul expects to launch a small, playable version of the game on PC sometime in mid-2015.

Microsoft’s rolling out the first system update for the Xbox One on February 11th. Some of the complaints they’ve claimed to address is the lack of access to content management. Xbox One users haven’t been able to see how much storage space games and apps, amongst other things, have taken up on their consoles. Also, they’ll be able to actually manage their download queues, since “My Games” and “My Apps” will be separated. There’s also the standard “stability patches” that every update in the history of the Internet includes. More importantly though, Microsoft announced that another update will be coming on March 4th, just in time for Titanfall - parties and multiplayer functions will be fixed, so hopefully it’ll no longer be a hassle to organize parties on the One.

And since we’re already talking about Microsoft, let’s take a minute to note that the new CEO, Satya Nadella, is exploding. On Twitter. Now normally that kind of thing doesn’t really matter to me, but it’s interesting to note that in the past two days, Nadella’s account has gone from 30 or so followers to over eighty thousand -- and that’s at the time of writing. It seems odd that the man chosen to lead one of the largest tech companies in the world didn’t have more of a presence on social media. The gap between his most current tweet and his previous one was three and a half years.