REDMOND, Wash.—Ahead of Xbox One X's November 7 launch, Ars Technica was invited to hang out at the company's Xbox campus and chat with one of the console's leading managers. With this opportunity in mind, we grabbed a camera crew and asked as many questions of Kevin Gammill, the Xbox division's "core platform group program manager," as we could.

For the most part, we stuck with questions about the past, present, and future of the Xbox One X console, which the company is positioning as a current-gen "upgrade" option. Team Xbox wants players to feel comfortable that their games will work on any Xbox they buy from here on out, whether that's the more budget-minded Xbox One S or the brand-new, $500 Xbox One X. The more expensive option has its merits, particularly 4K-friendly updates (which are significantly less than an equivalent PC) for those with such a TV. But we took the opportunity to ask questions about concerns we ran into during our tests

Among other things revealed in the above video: Gammill says he "does not think" that Microsoft will enforce "Xbox One X-only" rules, at least in "this generation" of console hardware. "We had talked about the possibility of Xbox One X-only games and decided strongly against it, because of the 'member of the family' aspect," Gammill told Ars.

Our other questions touched on things we noticed among the new system's "enhanced" games, including an apparent focus on resolution over frame rate, inconsistent HDR optimizations, and the fact that our review period just didn't have many of them to test (in spite of the system's final specs being known since before the console even got a name). Oh, and we also asked Gammill about his thoughts on the system's eventual name, which was once "Project Scorpio."

Before we left Gammill alone, we also hammered him with requests and features that Xbox One users have been asking about for some time on various forums, including Ars' own. The results of our wishlist requests are in the second video, directly above. Our requests included the ability to use USB headset kits (particularly wireless ones) on the system, the ability to create wholly offline profiles and "guest" accounts, the system's lack of true "background music" support (which currently requires wonky third-party apps), and old Xbox Live game shows like 1 Vs. 100. Gammill didn't answer any of these with any surprising announcements, but we couldn't let Team Xbox off the hook without getting them on the record about those.

At the request of some of our readers, we have uploaded the transcript generated for closed-captioning purposes as a rich text file.

Listing image by Microsoft