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Microsoft Is Now Letting Xbox Players Choose Whatever Gamertag They Want

Microsoft Is Now Letting Xbox Players Choose Whatever Gamertag They Want

If somebody has already taken your dream tag, that will no longer stop you from having it too

Jake Massey

Jake Massey

Love playing Xbox, but hate the fact your gamertag is ThePurplePuffin cos someone had already taken TheRedEagle?

Well good news, this won't be a problem anymore.

Xbox has announced new gamertag features which will give players more ways of expressing themselves.

You can now choose whatever gamertag you want.
PA

For a start, you will now be able to choose a gamertag even if it has already been taken - so you can finally become TheRedEagle. In order to distinguish you from other red eagles, Xbox will auto-assign you with an ID suffix after a #symbol. The suffix will also be in a smaller font to keep the focus on your new name (which somebody else got to first). For example, you could now be TheRedEagle#1029 (with the 1029 in a smaller font).

But don't worry if you are the original TheRedEagle, you will still get to keep your claws on that without any suffix and don't need to take any action.

Players will also be able to take advantage of 10 new alphabets when creating their gamertags. The change means new gamertags will support more than 200 commonly spoken languages.

The complete list of new alphabets is as follows:

- Hangul
- Katakana
- Hiragana
- CJK Symbols for languages in China, Japan, and Korea
- Bengali
- Devanagari
- Cyrillic
- Thai
- Basic Latin
- Latin-1 Supplement

The next Xbox console will be released before the end of 2020.
PA

The gamertag updates are available as of today (Tuesday) and will appear in the new Xbox app for PC and Xbox Game Bar - so carpe diem. They will show up on mobile devices and on consoles over the course of the year.

Gamertags can be up to 12 characters long and can be changed once free of charge. Thereafter, changes will be priced at $9.99 (£7.86).

On Sunday at the E3 gaming convention, Microsoft revealed that their next console will be released before the end of 2020.

It said the machine - code-named 'Project Scarlett' - would represent the 'biggest leap' there had been over a previous generation console, with four times the power of an Xbox One.

Sadly, no one got to see what the console will actually look like at the convention, but we have been promised that all achievements, friends and progression will carry over from Xbox One. It'll also have 120 fps, 8k, next generation ray tracing and drastically reduced loading times.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

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@jakesmassey