Half of NXE features were cut

Ahead of the high-profile Xbox 360 firmware update that will bring with it the New Xbox Experience

later this month

, Microsoft has admitted that it had to cut half of its plans during the development process.

Speaking to CVG, Microsoft’s Jerry Johnson stated: There’s still a lot of stuff we want to do. Half the things we wanted to do in NXE we cut out of the service.

One of the nice things we did was this architectural change to make things more published and driven from the service. All of a sudden we opened up the platform to say ‘I don’t have to wait until once or twice a year to release something onto the dashboard’.

There’s a Photo Party app that will be part of the platform. The way it will be distributed is all of a sudden you’ll see a slot on the dashboard and if you don’t have it you click on it and it’s going to download from the service onto your application part of the dashboard. Those are the type of things we’re going to start doing.”

NXE will be available to download from November 19th. Those without internet access will be able to download the patch online or from future disc-based titles.