Xbox One Not Backwards Compatible

[xPixelatedx]

May I ask you how often you spend time playing old games? I've always kept my old systems and my old games in pretty good condition but I'll say I haven't pulled out an old console for some time now and am wondering if I've just been slowly building a video game shrine/museum for decades now. Maybe it's just me but I methodically play games the first time through and generally to as near 100% completion as I want to get.

Don't get me wrong, I almost cried the day FF Tactics (The Lion Wars, not that advanced crap) came out on the PSP. But I never considered cracking my old PS1 out an playing the original game even though I still have both. I'm always too preoccupied with newer games and the recent backlog of games I'm still catching up on. There's too much in the now and near future to spend too much time looking back.

Backwards compatibility is a nice feature. But it's never been that useful for me. If you and people like you genuinely have a different method of replaying games than I do, then ok. But I don't see many people who can afford the new systems and yet still spend their time playing old games with any regularity.

First off, I would like to thank you for wording your position and opinion very well even though it was clearly contrary to my own. I wish more internet comments were like this!

Second:

May I ask you how often you spend time playing old games?

The thing is, I probably spend most my time playing old games now, as a lot of the newest ones don't really interest me. Oh sure, there are exceptions, that's why I would have considered getting a new console to begin with. Last year I bought Halo 4 and Borderlands 2 for my 360... however, that's all I bought. I am thinking about getting Bioshock Infinite on my 360 as well, but nothing else coming out this year for that console interests me. I do however have quite a large backlog of 360 games that I do enjoy. It seems I liked the 360 much more when it first appeared, and it appeared (to me) the games have more variety in their library.

But overall, I am a BAD person to ask this lol. I bought a PS3 to basically play PS1 games. I held off getting a PS3 for the longest time because I only wanted 1 game for it (MGS4) so I couldn't justify the price. However I then learned every model of PS3 can play PS1 games, and I love my PS1 library (58 games). My PS2 is one of those finicky models that often has trouble reading specific kinds of discs, so I bought the PS3 to basically play MGS4 and all my PS1 games... and I do!
I am currently also buying new PS1 games that I am playing and enjoy right at this very moment. After Seeing game grumps episode where they play Strider 2, I saw I missed an amazing gem and paid $60 (the price of a New 360/PS3 game) for a near mint copy of it on ebay. It was worth every penny.
I am currently using the wiiU's downtime to play my wii games as well, as well as virtual console games which technically count as 'Old Games'. Super Metroid is actually paused on my wiiU game pad right now as I took this opportunity to charge it while I reply to comments online. I've been playing it off and on at my desk today, so I was playing an old game on a new console while you were typing your comment... that answer your question? XD

I've always kept my old systems and my old games in pretty good condition

This brings up another important topic related to the xbox... Even if I did keep mine in good condition for the next 4 years (and I will) I honestly doubt it will still work. 360's aren't known for that, you know? Even my fat PS3 died at some point and I had to eventually get a slim, much to my reluctance. Long gone are the days of sturdy design like the SNES. These things we have now? Yeah, most of them won't be here down the road. All the more important that we have the ability to play these games.

 

[Crazie_Guy]

Having skipped the 360 I was looking forward to maybe starting the next gen with a box that could bring me the massive 360 backlog while also looking toward the future.

Congratulations Microsoft, this was your one chance to make me buy your Xbox over the PS4 without hesitation or second thought, and you threw it away.

 

[Zeckt]

In my experience there is absolutely no way a 360 will work in 4 years. It will become a giant paperweight and any games I have will become worthless. My first 360 had an RROD, my second one had other random problems, and my third ones limited edition gears of war controllers BOTH died shortly after 3 months of owning. The controller thing pushed me over the edge, that was completely unforgivable. Limited edition my ASS with THEIR failure rate. I hate microsoft and will always hate microsoft till I'm 6 feet under for good reason. They are $@##ing terrible. If I was in their press conference I would need to be taken away by security.

 

[creamy5000]

Wow finally a console that will have specs the same or slightly better than my PC. To bad I'm going to be upgrading my PC to blow all the console away again and it will be backwards compatible.

 

[accipitre]

Hey guys.

In case you hadn't heard about this thing called Google, it's really easy to tell that Microshaft is bullshitting you. There are working Xbox 360 emulators for the x86 architecture (i.e. PCs). They're buggy, and don't always work that well, but they exist. That fact alone means that Microsoft is fucking you over, and lying through their teeth. With access to the inner workings of the Xbox, they could easily program an x86 emulator and port it to the Xbox One. They won't, because it means that people will have to keep buying 360s to play their old games when their current 360 breaks.

Not that I care, because as the PC Master Race, I can emulate pretty much any architecture out there. It'll be amusing to see Xbox One emulators with cracked firmware out there.

 

[Poetic Nova]

Haha, Xbone, I love the name they already gave the nextbox. But seriously, I have zero reasons to buy it unless some of the exclusives will gain some interest from me. But 'till now, no interest in the 8th gen of gamingdevices.

In my experience there is absolutely no way a 360 will work in 4 years. It will become a giant paperweight and any games I have will become worthless. My first 360 had an RROD, my second one had other random problems, and my third ones limited edition gears of war controllers BOTH died shortly after 3 months of owning. The controller thing pushed me over the edge, that was completely unforgivable. Limited edition my ASS with THEIR failure rate. I hate microsoft and will always hate microsoft till I'm 6 feet under for good reason. They are $@##ing terrible. If I was in their press conference I would need to be taken away by security.

Guess I could count myself incredibly lucky then, I have a 360 running for around 4 to 5 years now without a single issue. But I do have to ad that it is the last revised model before the slim model came on the market.

But I do have to say, I won't be surprised when the Xbone will have a similar failure rate.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

That confrence gave me no real hope for the Xbone, and I haven't had any real interest in a Sony console in a while, so it looks like I'll be sticking with PC gaming for now.

My thoughts exactly. I've never seen a more underwhelming generation of consoles in my entire life; and that's saying something.

 

[Zeraki]

I'm honestly shocked that people are apparently surprised by this.

This whole console generation is just shaping up to be... meh.

 

[Roxas1359]

I have no son.

Damn right. Until they actually show some stuff I want and deny those "always online" and "the Kinect will be watching you as you play" rumours, I'm not holding high hopes for this. And that name... Xbox One? Seriously?!

I would add something about the 360 hating its Dad too

---

Might of hated its dad, but it at least tried to play some of the games that it could.

OT: I'm honestly loving the name being the Xbone. Really it makes me sad how it's gone from just putting in a game and playing to "talk with your friends on Skype, order Pizza Hut, and more! Oh, and I guess you can play games if you want, but why do then when you can stream porn!"
I mean say what you want about the Wii U, but at least it is trying to be a game console focused on games. It's not doing that good of a job right now, but it's at least trying. The PS4 seems like it'll focus on games too which is what I want mainly since I'm a console gamer and not a console socialite. But that could change and after seeing this I hope Sony doesn't try to follow MS down the same path.

 

[raankh]

Hmm, I don't think I've ever gotten a system at launch. Maybe half a year afterwards. I thought Sega already taught us that lesson?

Well, I'm sorry to say, but you're simply suffering from intelligence. It might be difficult when all the other kids are camping at the mall for release night, but know that you're not alone and that others too suffer from encephalic activities.

Learning from mistakes, even if those are not your own, is indeed a burden, but if we stick together I'm sure we can make it. nantoka~

 

[Timmaaaah]

God this is so lame! I read an article based on the announcement that was supposed to quell rumours! It said that the new Xbox would have a built in 360 module so you had 100% backwards compatibility... Also said that there would be no always-online connection...
Screw consoles Ima going PC.

 

[Timmaaaah]

I don't see why they didn't just take the 360 and PS3 and give it a massive hardware upgrade. The consoles don't need to change, just the amount of power they have.

 

[Olas]

And in come Sony defense force...

I'm not sure how familiar everyone is with internal computing hardware, but I don't see how anyone could have really expected *either* of the new consoles to be backwards compatible. Hardware is a fickle, complicated mistress, and this is why PC is plagued with problems simply because of users having different GPUs, different processors, etc.

It's ridiculously complicated and expensive to get hardware to be compatible with older models and software.

Ya, sure, totally.

Yet my PC can play all 4 Halo's at the same time (I mean like literally at the same time) no problem. I'm not a tech guru, but I think it's common sense that if 2 games that essentially look and function the same way can't be made to work on the same hardware you're doing something wrong, or perhaps you've done something wrong when you made the 2 devices.

Either way I have no sympathy, whatever problems stand in the way of doing this they're just problems Microsoft created for themselves somewhere along the line. Nintendo doesn't seem to have much trouble with it, both the Wii and WiiU were backwards compatible and I'm pretty sure every DS/Gameboy has been backwards compatible at least one generation going all the way back to the gameboy color.

 

[SpAc3man]

So many people here that don't understand that you can't just run PowerPC code on x86-64 hardware. There's no way in hell they can "just emulate" the 360 on current hardware. Or they would have to heighten the price and include a separate PowerPC chip.

I'm pretty sure the original Xbox and Xbox 360 had this very same difference, yet that didn't stop them from letting me play Halo 2 on my Xbox 360 through emulation software integrated into the machine.

The emulation was easy to get working in that case as the original Xbox was so much more basic in terms of hardware complexity and performance than the 360. The Xbox had a 733MHz x86 Pentium III while the 360 has a 3.2GHz tri-core PowerPC Xenon. Most emulation software requires a CPU to have a much higher clock than the emulated CPU as this makes timing requirements much easier to meet. While we don't have any exact numbers for the Xbone CPU, I would say it would be in the 3.0 to 3.4GHz range. This would make the timing requirements and absolute ***** to meet.

Original Xbox games running on the Xbone should be very easy for Microsoft though. No reason they can't do that.

EDIT: I have just heard some rumours of the Xbone being 1.6GHz which would make sense if they are using one of the laptop AMD APUs.

 

[Gitty101]

I can't believe this is the direction they're going in. I mean, are they clueless?

Looks like it's a bad time to be a Console gamer.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

I was already sticking with the PS4, having owned a PS3 this gen, but I will admit that this makes me smile. It is an evil smile, but a smile none the less.

As for holding on to old consoles - meh. I still have a PS2 and two PS3s - one backwards compatible but with a broken BluRay laser, and one with neither of those things. What's one more console to me?

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Unpopular opinion incoming:
1. Backwards compatibility is not an issue for me. I owned many different generations of consoles and only PS2, PS3 (to an extent) and 360 were backwards compatible. So I am used to not being able to play previous libraries on the nex-gen systems.
2. I hardly ever buy used, so this isn't a big deal for me either. I prefer new items, plus I know how to clearance shop.
3. I never buy a system on launch, I wait for about 6-12 months and see what has changed and what has been fixed.

In closing I care only about the future of the system itself not the past titles I own and have played the shit out of already. And I tend to keep my old systems so if I wanted to play games on them I could.
If they could come up with a way of improving graphics on older games in backwards compatibility I'd be more inclined to rage about the lack of the feature. But it don't work that way.

This pretty much my opinion.

Backwards compatibility has never been a selling point to me. I don't care, because the only reason I buy a new system is to play new games. Similarly no backwards compatibility means nothing to me because I keep all my old consoles.

People seem to act like once the get the next-gen system, their old console will explode or something. Of course there are the people that will complain because it means that they can't sell their old console to get money to get the new one, but I've always found that to be a stupid excuse, because, really, if you have to sell your possessions to afford the things you want, then maybe you should think twice about spending your money on something you can't afford outright.

----------------

My take on the Xbox One reveal:

I thought overall, it was awesome. I'm all for the quick switching between everything. I'm glad they implemented video capture for the whole system to record for all games. The games they did show looked amazing, though they'll probably look even better when I watch a non-laggy version of the reveal, I guess my PC is horrible with live video, because my internet connection is top notch.

I think the one of my favorite parts was the Spielberg Halo TV series announcement.

The controller doesn't look too different(but really you can't do too much to make something more perfect than it already was), though the part about the newly added features to the triggers and whatnot sounds awesome.

Really the only thing that pissed me off was the stupid nod to Dumb Dumb Abrams with all the new Star Trek references with watching the first new movie while looking for info about the second new movie. Yeah, that part was vomit inducing. They could have easily done that example with a movie that was actually good instead of showing "Schlock Trek".

It's one of those days that I wish I had time travel, so I could actually go back in time to stop something from being done. Removing the new Star Trek movies from existence would be a most honorable act.

 

[Da Orky Man]

And in come Sony defense force...

I'm not sure how familiar everyone is with internal computing hardware, but I don't see how anyone could have really expected *either* of the new consoles to be backwards compatible. Hardware is a fickle, complicated mistress, and this is why PC is plagued with problems simply because of users having different GPUs, different processors, etc.

It's ridiculously complicated and expensive to get hardware to be compatible with older models and software.

To be fair, using software available for free on the internet I could play virtually any game released during the PS2 era and before on my laptop, and quite possibly during the current generation if my laptop had a bit more juice behind it. Fair enough, I can see that working on a coherent and reliable emulator would eat up time and money, but if people are willing to release them for free, surely Microsoft could afford to do it.

Also, didn't Sony essentially put a PS2 chip into the PS3 to deal with backwards compatibility?

 

[bug_of_war]

XBone is appropriate for this failure. Putting aside the jump in Sony's stock from the awful, awful conference... used game shenanigans and no ability to play my 34 xbox discs, to? Fuck that. I was right all along, this next gen is going to be the most incompetent. The wiiU now actually stands a chance... and it really, really shouldn't.

I don't know...Playstation and Xbox are pretty big names, and there's always the 5-13 year olds whom will own one of the two consoles without ever really knowing any of this information. I wouldn't say this next gen is going to be incompetent, I mean shit, it's not even here yet, but I will agree that it's going to have a tougher time than previous gens. The Wii U seems to be crawling, and from my angle it's gonna still be crawling until they do what they did to boost 3DS sales and make a Pokémon game. Either way, this next gen that the Wii U has started has started with a crawl, maybe the PS4 and Xbone will speed it up, maybe not, we just gotta sit back and wait to see.