New Xbox Live Avatars will “ship when they’re ready,” says Xbox’s Mike Ybarra

Last year, Microsoft teased an exciting redesign for the Xbox Live Avatars, which have barely evolved since the Xbox 360 era. According to what we know, the redesigned avatars will be powered by the Unity engine and will be more inclusive than ever. In the video below, you can see prosthetic limbs, a wheelchair, a pregnant woman and many more customization options.

Microsoft originally planned to ship the new Pixar-looking avatars last Fall, but they have since been delayed to some time this year. Xbox’s head of platform engineering was recently spotted rocking the new avatar design on Xbox Live, and with the Xbox Spring update incoming we could hope that the Xbox team was getting ready to ship them in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, it looks like this may not happen. Xbox’s Mike Ybarra has just dismissed recent reports saying that the redesigned avatars would arrive in April, adding that “they’ll ship when they’re ready.”

They’ll ship when they’re ready. We have no firm date and ship date will be based on feedback (like most features). https://t.co/yZuxjdFblD

— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) March 14, 2018

It’s not exactly clear what’s causing the delay, but as usual Xbox Insiders should get access to the new avatars before everyone else. We’ll let you know if we learn more information, but in the meantime there is quite a lot to be excited about in the upcoming Xbox Spring update: between support for 1440p displays, Mixer controller sharing and the redesigned Microsoft Edge browser that can finally download media files, the Xbox One should is getting some much welcome improvements in the coming weeks.