Xbox Night Mode Sounds Great, But You Probably Can't Have It Yet

Playing video games at night can be a tricky thing. For starters, lights on your console, controller, and the light from the display can make playing at night a non-starter if you happen to be near people who are trying to sleep. If you're a kid who's trying to get away with playing games at night, all those lights can straight up give you away. Microsoft apparently has the solution to both problems with a new night mode for the Xbox.

Unfortunately, Xbox's night mode is currently in testing only with a select few testers. Night mode is currently only available for Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring, which means it's in very early testing. That also means that it could be quite a while before night mode makes its way to every Xbox console out there.

We'll keep our fingers crossed for a speedy testing phase, though, because The Verge's Tom Warren has uploaded a quick demo of night mode, and it seems to have a lot of functionality. In the video embedded above, we see that night mode has both a dimness setting and a blue light filter. When cranked up to max settings, you can make your display very dim, to the point where it almost gets hard to see.

You can crank the blue light filter to similarly high levels, but night mode doesn't just stop at display brightness tweaks. In addition, you can also dim the lights on both the Xbox console and controller, and you can block HDR outright. You can even set a schedule for night mode that follows sunset and sunrise times for your region or set the times that night mode kicks in and turns off yourself.

All in all, it's an impressive and useful feature, so hopefully, it won't be in testing for too long. We'll let you know when it rolls out to all Xbox users, so stay tuned for more.