As the air around the Xbox One clears and it becomes slowly more and more attractive, the online functionality of it sounds like it is more and more visionary and beyond anything attempted this gen. While a whole lot of these features, such as Family Sharing, got nerfed during Microsoft’s 180, some of them, like their new Achievements system still survive. Now there’s another neat sounding new feature: Smart Match.

As the Official Xbox Website tells us, Smart Match “is completely reengineered for a new generation of gaming – using advanced algorithms to pair players based on skill, language, and now reputation. It’s smarter, faster and optimized to help you play with exactly the people you want, when you want.” It goes beyond just the Beacons system on the Xbox 360, and it allows for stat sharing to boot.

Microsoft also boasts about how Smart Match will free up your time by letting you do more stuff using the system’s excellent multitasking functionality while it matches you up with players, but of course that is more a function of the system itself than it is Smart Match. Finally, Smart Match will have an active notification system, so that even when you are doing something else and letting it match you up, you’ll know that you’ve been matched up and you can jump back in.

Sounds pretty cool to me.