Mr Viral
No wonder they’ve built a team for it
by Fraser Gilbert Yesterday, 8:15pm
Xbox backwards compatibility has been an amazing benefit throughout the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S generations, but if the next Xbox console is to be a radically different device, it’s going to result in new challenges for the program.
We’ve seen this week how the Nintendo Switch 2 will be using emulation to run Switch 1 games, and the result is a small, but notable list of titles that apparently still have issues running on the Switch 2 at the time of writing.
This is nothing new in the world of Xbox. You may recall that the Xbox 360 featured a form of backwards compatibility with original Xbox games, and it too used emulation to run them – with wildly varying results. Some games performed perfectly, but I can say from experience that the likes of WWE Raw and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are full of slowdown and glitches!
Xbox has done a wonderful job getting so many original Xbox and Xbox 360 games to run flawlessly on modern consoles, but a lot of work went into that – every one of them had to be tested thoroughly to achieve such great results.
Now, it seems the work has begun again. Reports have stated that a new game preservation and forward compatibility team has been set up inside Xbox for the next generation, and if we’re looking at a Windows-based console and handheld that are in the works, trying to emulate console games for those devices might be a harder task than ever.
I’m assuming all the Xbox One titles that work on Xbox Series X and S were mostly good to go without any major changes – but that may not be the case with the next Xbox console and handheld. We could be talking thousands of titles that need to be re-tested and re-jigged in order to make them ready for the next console generation.
The good news is that Team Xbox seems very committed to the cause – let’s hope all that hard work pays off!
What are your thoughts around this? Let us know down in the comments section below.
Fraser is the News Editor at Pure Xbox, where he spends his time reporting on the biggest stories in the world of Xbox and beyond.
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