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FantasyMeister: Are there any upcoming titles that are going to incorporate Avatars and other new features of the Experience into their gameplay?

James Houlton: 1 vs. 100 is part of the Prime Time channel, so that's next year. November 19 is really just the start of the NXE. The official date is that in Spring 2009 we'll be able to add in Prime Time as its own channel and 1 vs. 100 is that pivotal content part where you'll be able to change the way people play in terms of an interactive quiz. Your Avatar will also be part of that experience as well.

In terms of Avatars from launch, Scene It! Box Office Smash, that will be one of the first games where you'll be represented by your Avatar in game. There's things like Uno Rush as well. There will be a selection of titles out for launch as well, so once you've created your Avatar you will already be able to start to use it in a relevant game. You're not going to see Avatars running around Call of Duty 5!

Robin Burrowes: In certain instances we're going back to games that we've already published, like Hearts and Spades, and retrofitting those with Avatar support. So there will be about five or six Avatar supported games both full release and Arcade that will happen at launch. And then we're looking at ramping that up to certainly a few dozen Avatar related games by spring time.

FantasyMeister: Will the above become compulsory for developers in the future like Achievements currently are?

Robin Burrowes: It will be an encouragement point of view and we'll show best practice with some Arcade games and some first party games. Scene It! right now is probably best practice that we've got from a first party point of view. From an Arcade point of view, games like Uno Rush, which will probably be the hero title for how Avatars merge with games. We'll certainly be giving publishers the publishing rights to be able to merge those in.

Dave from Streatham: Will game installs improve load times and by how much? Won't this cause widespread piracy?

James Houlton: One of the things you can do is install the game now onto the hard drive. So if the disk is in the tray it will play from the hard drive and the disk just basically validates that you've got a genuine copy. If you were just going to play a game and try it you probably wouldn't want to install it, you'd just play it from the disk. We did some testing in the office and Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise took six minutes to download to the hard drive so it's pretty quick. The estimates in terms of performance, obviously depending on the game, it increases between 30 and 50 per cent in terms of load times. So if it's a game you play a lot, it's probably worth doing. Depends how big the hard drive you've got is and what else you use that space for.

FantasyMeister: Will there be any LIVE downtime on November 19?

James Houlton: No. They already did the downtime on September 29. There was a 24 hour period of LIVE downtime, and that was to basically prepare for it. On November 19 you'll just turn it on it'll just do the standard update.

Rogue Soul: Whatever happened to the friends list expansion (still capped at 100)?

James Houlton: You can have up to 100 friends and the Avatars will all be represented in your friends list.

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