It was revealed during Microsoft’s E3 2017 press conference that backwards compatibility support would be coming to original Xbox games, allowing gamers to play them on Xbox One. This certainly got a lot of people excited, though excitement was tempered a little when Xbox boss, Phil Spencer, confirmed that the amount of original Xbox games supported would not be as high as the Xbox 360 titles.
Today Spencer has given us more insight into this process, this time delving into the lack of modern features that original Xbox games would have. When a fan asked him on Twitter if original Xbox games would support widescreen, Spencer replied with “No, most OGXbox games didn’t have WS. Can’t really easily change the frame buffer aspect ratio on a shipped game from BC.”
The conversation continued when another fan asked about whether or not there would be achievement support for these games, and Spencer replied with “Only real option is to patch each game, won’t happen. Could give achvmnt 4 “playing”, don’t really like that.”
Despite it being disappointing that these games won’t have these features, it really isn’t surprising considering their age. Backwards compatibility support for 360 games brings them over as is, and then the more powerful hardware gives them performance boosts. However, there were no new features added or extra work down in order to bring them up to modern standards, and that is what would be needed to be done with original Xbox games. This isn’t a huge deal though, as just being able to play some of those old Xbox games will be great.
While an official date for when backwards compatibility support for original Xbox games will kick off hasn’t been announced, it is expected to kick off by the end of this year. Crimson Skies will be one of the first games to get the support, though we’ll likely be getting announcements of many more games getting the support in the near future.
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