Microsoft Xbox news and discussion thread

[ratsoalbion]

Not exactly, but having your account linked means that anything that you own you won't have to re-buy. Achievements don't come into it.

[DomsBeard]

Not exactly, but having your account linked means that anything that you own you won't have to re-buy.

Thanks Leon, guess I'll just have to pay the money to change my awful old gamertag over

[Beck]

I'm not sure this is the correct to post this, please point in me in the direction of somewhere more suitable.

The giant bombcast talked of this article in one of their recent shows, it's a brillant article on the development and life of the xbox 360 - http://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-xb ... 0-6432469/

[Flabyo]

There's literally no way to buy 360 games for the XBO. If you own digital download games on 360, they'll be available to download on your XBO if you use the same gamertag.

That's all the backwards compatibility is so far, other than a few disc games that will work. Not many yet though.

[ratsoalbion]

Can you not buy 360 games via the web then download them on XO?

If not, why ever not?

[Flabyo]

Yeah you can do that, but you can't do it ON the XBO. For some reason. You can't see the 360's digital store from the XBO.

[DomsBeard]

I was presuming it meant I could pop Mass Effect 1/2/3 into my xbox one and play it.

It now sounds like a downloadable version of ps now where you can play previously owned digitally titles

[Flabyo]

At the moment that's basically what it is. There are a few disc titles that will work, but not many yet. It's not a case that the console suddenly gained the ability to play everything unfortunately.

[Indiana747]

The backwards compatibility thing with 360 disc games is misleading too. When you put a compatible 360 game into the XB1 it doesnt play from the disc, it activates a download from the store which depending on your connection, will take a while to download & takes up valuable HDD space into the bargain.
This back compatability has been over hyped imo.

[ratsoalbion]

Yeah you can do that, but you can't do it ON the XBO. For some reason. You can't see the 360's digital store from the XBO.

I know but, "There's literally no way to buy 360 games for the XBO" isn't true either.

[Beck]

I can see why inserting a 360 game into an Xbox one and a download starting would be frustrating but there are many reasons why that has to be. The backwards compatibility feature of the Xbox one is an amazing feat and one that Microsoft haven't been praised for enough in my opinion. When the announcement of the backwards compatibility were made myself and all of my friends who work in IT were in awe with what Microsoft have achieved. whilst it seems backward compatibility should be easy it's actually a very complicated system to implement.

The 360 backwards compatibility mode is actually a virtual machine running inside your Xbox one that emulates an Xbox 360. The virtual machine shares the resources of the Xbox one and whilst it might seem like that should be straight forward it isn't. I suspect the discs cannot be used for performance reasons, reading for a disc is often a bottleneck especially when passed through to a vm. Secondly I would imagine the games available for backwards compatibility have been streamlined, tweaked and converted into a suitable format. For an Xbox one do that locally would require a lot of resource and time that I'm sure the customer wouldn't be happy with.

[ratsoalbion]

I agree wholeheartedly - although Inalso believe they should have had it in from the off.

Better late than never though.

Also, after the sometimes suspect emulation of original Xbox on 360, it's excellent that 360 titles often actually perform better on XO.

[Beck]

As a gamer I agree 100%, you have to wonder if backwards compatability was left out because Microsoft expected the Xbox one to sell without a hitch. As an IT worker I'm not sure the work warrants the reward, I'd be really interested to see if there are any metrics for the number of people who bought an Xbox one were swayed because of the backwards compatability.

Microsoft are one of the big players in the virtualisation word, they've really shown that with this but i suspect it has taken a lot of time and resource. Especially with the Xbox live compatability and the better performance, it is amazing. Can you tell I'm jealous of you Xbox one owners?

[martymcfly3004]

I agree wholeheartedly - although Inalso believe they should have had it in from the off.

Better late than never though.

Also, after the sometimes suspect emulation of original Xbox on 360, it's excellent that 360 titles often actually perform better on XO.

Agreed, Fallout 3 works really well on Xbox one. Microsoft have done an amazing job.

[martymcfly3004]

The backwards compatibility thing with 360 disc games is misleading too. When you put a compatible 360 game into the XB1 it doesnt play from the disc, it activates a download from the store which depending on your connection, will take a while to download & takes up valuable HDD space into the bargain.
This back compatability has been over hyped imo.

Have you tried an external hard drive? It works really well, I have a 2tb drive that cost me about 70 quid over a year ago and it sorted all my space issues. An Xbox 360 game isn't likely to be more than a few gig.

[Indiana747]

I have a 3TB external drive for my XB1. I was leaning more to the fact that they are advertising it like you just pop in the disc & play away. This isnt the case, since said game has to be downloaded first.
Still use my 360 anyhow, so it doesnt bother me. I was just being pedantic about the whole issue, i still dont feel its as big a thing as there making it out to be. Its nice for the conservation of older games though.

[Flabyo]

I've never really paid much attention to backwards compatibility. I appreciate it's an interesting technical accomplishment, but I don't think it's that big a system seller for the vast majority of people. From a game preservation standpoint it's pretty significant, although I think given the sales of the console there will be working 360's around for a good long time to come yet (albeit most of them will be the third revision of the chassis) and by the time there isn't then emulation will have filled the gap.

There's also the fact that almost nothing I own is supported yet, and some probably never will be (anything Kinect for a start, would be nice to see how Fable: The Journey works with the much more precise Kinect of the XBO, but I can't see that ever happening. Sigh, of all the games I've worked on that's probably the least played...)

I'd like it to be more joined up. The Games for Gold for the 360 should all now work on the XBO too, but I have to tag them on the website before I can pull them down on the XBO. If you're giving me them for free, why can't the XBO just see them? If I can buy it digitally on the 360, then if there's XBO support I should be able to buy it on XBO too. It needs a '360 store' tab or something.

Seems like a minor gripe, but my experience with Apple's App Store tells me that discoverability is absolutely *key* to getting people to buy things. If someone owns an XBO but not a 360, surely you WANT to show them more things they could be buying?

Meh, I'm rambling now. I'll shush.

[Scrustle]

Backwards compatibility would only really have been a system seller when the console launched. It's way too late for that now. MS are only really doing this to score some Brownie points to make up for all the rounds they fired in to their feet the past few years. But it's a nice gesture, and I'm really happy they're doing it. Although so far I'm not that impressed with what's got support, I'm sure the future will bring more appealing stuff. They've already pretty much confirmed all the stuff I would ever reasonably want to use it for.

But did they not confirm at some point that Kinect-only games would never get support? It would make sense, given just how different the XB1 Kinect is. Even if they did get support, I doubt the game would be able to make use of the extra capabilities. It would probably be something like using Wiimotion Plus on older Wii games that don't support it.

I agree they should really add a 360 tab on the XB1 store, at least once this feature gets some wider support. There's no reason why it shouldn't happen, outside of the resources needed to do it. But if they're already doing BC in the first place, surely that's more effort in itself. If you're going to do that much, you might as well update the store to support it as well. I think it's pretty likely that will happen at some point.

[Beck]

It's quite interesting reading all the perspectives on this subject. I think it was Xantiriad from game burst that mentioned that an Xbox one is only slightly more than a new Xbox 360. The price difference and the backwards compatibility has got to make up some Xbox one sales for undecided parents this Christmas.

I'm not sure you will ever see Xbox 360 Kinect games work on Xbox one, that's another technical challenge that's perhaps a bridge too far? The death of the Kinect is a shame, it has so much potential.

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

There are minuses to the backwards compatibility thing in terms of implementation right now, but the fact is we've just been given a cool new service for free so any negatives are irrelevant really!

Microsoft have also been the best there is at improving how their consoles operate for years now, so I'm sure functional and software issues like viewing 360 games on XOne etc will be ironed out over time.

The fact that I can now play Nights on my Xbox One is bloody awesome and more than enough for me