Xbox Series X Will Have Backwards Compatibility on Day One - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 07 July 2020 / 3,757 Views
Microsoft at The Game Awards announced its next generation console, codenamed Project Scarlett, is officially called Xbox Series X.
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer in an interview with GameSpot revealed the Xbox Series X will have backwards compatibility at launch.
"We wanted to make sure we had that, day one, we could deliver on the compatibility promise, and so I've been playing quite a few [Xbox 360] games on my [Xbox Series X] and Xbox One games on the [Xbox Series X] and that's just to ensure that we can be there day one," said Spencer.
Xbox partner director of program management Jason Ronald added, "We have thousands of games that run on Xbox One today. We want those games to be able to come forward with you but we also want your services to come with you.
"We want your gaming legacy to come with you, whether that's your Gamerscore, whether that's your friends list, all your Achievements, your game saves, all of that should come forward so there are no barriers for you as you think about moving forward."
Phil Spencer added that it has been a lot of work to ensure that games from three previous generations work on the Xbox Series X.
"There is work in ensuring [backwards] compatibility across those generations," Spencer said. "So, as you might remember, we slowed down and paused our backwards compatibility program for [Xbox 360] on Xbox One."
"[It takes a lot of work] even for Xbox One games, because one of the biggest challenges is console games are usually hyper-optimized to the unique hardware capabilities of the device, and this is a new generation of hardware," Ronald added.
"It is a new chip architecture. At the same time, we did design the silicon with [backwards] compatibility in mind, so we did make certain decisions to try to lessen that work, but I don't want to trivialize how much work the team's actually doing because there is a tremendous amount of work."
Xbox Series X launches in Holiday 2020 with Halo: Infinite as a launch title.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Good news. Curious to see if the new Xbox can make OG Xbox, 360 and maybe X1 content all higher res. If so, that would be a huge incentive to buy one at launch.
OG Xbox and 360 are emulation. But X1 may be enturely native thus limiting games to the original resolutions.
Xbox One will be emulation too, but "emulation" in the same sense as you taking a PC game from a decade ago and playing it on a modern day system. Both Xbox One and Series X are x86-64 CPUs and DirectX 12 GPUs - so obviously the emulation is pretty basic to be sure it's running the same. My guess? Xbox Original and Xbox 360 games will now run at native 8K/locked whatever FPS they were designed with (building upon native 4K/locked original frame-rate from Xbox One X), and Xbox One S only games can be boosted to 4K. Xbox One X games, though, would only benefit from additional power to smooth over any framerate hiccups. Even with 12 TeraFLOPs of power, that wouldn't be enough extra headroom to take a native 4K Xbox One X game and turn it up to 8K. 4K is ~8 million pixels, and 8K is over ~33 million (!!!) pixels
I am skeptical of the X1 content getting a resolution boost but I certainly hope the BC team found a way to make it happen.
Perhaps there is a way to override the native resolution like emulators do. Assuming there is some secret sauce in this BC method.
Considering what they had been doing on X1 yep I expected it to be day one on XSX. Good for library keeping and people migrating to have stuff to play during launch window that usually is light on great games for all platforms.
I don't play older gen games whenever I jump to the new one, but with the improvements they push "natively" on the BC that is good stuff.
Agreed, I was still playing many 7th gen because the early years of 8th gen werent great. Having BC at launch, maybe with improved performance and resolutions can encourage sales.
Many people upgrading probably just had base consoles. So if their new Xbox Series S or X suddently plays favorites like Fortnite or CoD:MW now at 4K/60 fps, thats already a big deal even before buying new games.
So far marketing has gone smooth. Now, release the SX with an installment plan. And bingo.
Not really a valid comparsion. Wii, WiiU, PS3 and Xbox 360 all use PowerPC architecture, so emulation between Wii and WiiU is very easy. Since Xbox One uses x86 architecture, all 360 games are automatically incompatible without changes to the code. That's the only reason why you need to download the game even if you insert the disc.
Xbox Series X also uses x86 architecture, so the whole X1 library should be compatible immediately after launch. For 360 games the same issues apply.
Should be, yeah. All OG Xbox/360 BC games and all X1 games should be compatible from day one - maybe not the X1 Kinect games but that's not clear at the moment. They said that X1 peripherals (controllers, racing wheels, guitars etc.) would work so that might include Kinect 2.0. If it does you would definitely need an adapter though.
After launch I fully expect the BC team to add more Original Xbox and 360 games to the library.
BC is better now than it use to be mainly because the old games get converted to digital and gain quality of life improvements much like how Steam games work. Playing native BC, you get stuck with the visual issues like screen tearing and low resolution etc. Much prefer the BC Xbox is implementing rather than the old way.
@Barozi - I disagree with most of what you said. Theoretically Xbox 360 BC could have been an emulator that attempts to emulate every game. That's essentially how OG Xbox and PS3 worked when BC used emulation.
Also, an emulator shouldnt require downloading the entire game. OG Xbox for example let you play off the disc.
I dont really understand why MS does BC the way it does now. But I certainly think they chose to go a route that involved the publishers and also monotized BC (i.e. digital sales).
Couple things I was to clarify.
PS3 at some point was PS2 emulation via hardware and software and games could load off a disc.
Xbox 360 used an emulator to OG Xbox games. They were completely different architecture but the 360 could still play OG Xbox games from a disc.
Hey Pugg, from what I know PS3 originally didn't emulate, it had HW from PS2 inside so it just run natively all games from PS1 and PS2. Then they removed the HW (cost saving) and were just SW emulation (that moved BC compatibility from like 99% to 80% or something like that), and then I have no idea why they cut all BC.
I forget the exact info but at first PS3 did PS2 emulation natively. Eventually I think they removed the PS2 GPU but compatability suffered. Then eventually they removed all PS2 hardware and BC ended.
I personally felt removing BC from PS3 made sense because many PS2 games didnt necessarily age well and it was a cheap console. 7th gen BC whether it be from X1 or PS Now was significant because 7th gen had more notable games than any other gen in my opinion. There are still a bunch of 7th gen games with active online communities.
However, Sony did eventually make a great PS2 emulator for PS3 and PS4. All the PS2 games you can buy on PS Store for those consoles are entirely emulation. However, they only use it to sell individual games. I believe hackers have modded that emulator to load any game with mixed results.
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