Microsoft on Tuesday un­veiled the Xbox Elite Series 3 con­troller, a pre­mium new gamepad that re­places con­ven­tional bat­tery life with a small in­te­grated hand crank users must ro­tate at high speed roughly every 45 to 60 sec­onds.

The con­troller, which first ap­peared in reg­u­la­tory im­ages pub­lished by Brazil’s Anatel, ap­pears at first glance to in­clude the ex­pected up­grades: swap­pable com­po­nents, new un­der­side con­trols, and a ded­i­cated but­ton for switch­ing be­tween lo­cal and cloud play. According to Microsoft, how­ever, the de­vice’s most sig­nif­i­cant in­no­va­tion is its “active power en­gage­ment sys­tem,” which al­lows play­ers to per­son­ally gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­ity to fin­ish por­tions of a race, sur­vive most cutscenes, or get al­most all the way through a dif­fi­cult on­line fire­fight be­fore need­ing to crank again.

“Players told us they wanted a deeper con­nec­tion to their hard­ware,” said one Microsoft ex­ec­u­tive dur­ing a press brief­ing that re­quired jour­nal­ists to pe­ri­od­i­cally recharge their demo units by hand. “With Elite Series 3, power is no longer some­thing that just hap­pens in­vis­i­bly in the back­ground. It’s now part of the ex­pe­ri­ence.”

Microsoft de­scribed the crank as both a sus­tain­abil­ity mea­sure and a pre­mium game­play en­hance­ment, say­ing it adds “light tac­ti­cal ur­gency” to every ti­tle by forc­ing users to de­cide when to briefly stop aim­ing, steer­ing, or mov­ing in or­der to per­form what the com­pany called “manual en­ergy col­lec­tion.” Early mar­ket­ing ma­te­ri­als re­port­edly po­si­tion the fea­ture as es­pe­cially use­ful in cloud gam­ing, where play­ers can now ex­pe­ri­ence la­tency and phys­i­cal fa­tigue at the same time.