A year after drawing line under program.
In a new blog post summing up the Xbox Series X’s backwards compatibility features, Microsoft has hinted it may not be done adding more games to its back compat program.
While much of the blog serves to reconfirm details first revealed exclusively to Digital Foundry back in March, Microsoft does include the following line about expanding its catalogue in the future:
“The team also continues to listen to feedback from the community on additional titles you would like to see added to the compatibility program.
“Resurrecting titles from history often presents a complex mix of technical and licensing challenges, but the team is committed to doing everything we can to continue to preserve our collective gaming legacy.”
Almost a year ago, Microsoft drew a line under its popular Xbox One back compat program after ensuring more than 600 games from the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era now work on Xbox One.
The same team has now been working to ensure almost all of Xbox One’s 3000-odd games – as well as those 600 older titles – all work well on Xbox Series X.
As Digital Foundry reported a couple of months back, Series X will allow for older games to benefit from automatically-applied HDR as a system-level feature, regardless of whether games had their own HDR mode originally.
There’s the potential for games to offer improved frame-rates, too. “We are exploring ways of improving, maybe, a curated list of games,” compatibility program lead Peggy Lo said. “Things that we are are looking at include improving resolution for games, improving frame-rates – maybe doubling them!”
Almost all of the most popular Xbox 360 games did become backwards compatible, if not available to purchase again, on Xbox One. But there were a few exceptions. (Alas, Lost: Via Domus, I never did get all your achievements.) Are there any missing candidates you still want?
