This week on the Xbox Wire, Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management for Xbox Series X detailed how the upcoming next-gen Microsoft console plans to honor the Legacy of Kain, I mean the past. It details how everything that you love about gaming should continue with you on your journey with the Xbox Series X including games, progression, achievements, and even accessories 

According to Jason Ronald, these ideals strongly influenced how the Xbox Series X was built from day 1. “Our goal has always been to empower gamers to play the best version of games from four generations of Xbox at the launch of the Xbox Series X”. While speaking of the launch of the Xbox Series X, last week on the VDGMS podcast I took and in depth look at the PS4 and Xbox One to determine when is the best time to buy a PS5 is or when is the best time to buy a Xbox Series X. You can check out the podcast here or if you would rather read the article and see the charts along with the information then you can see it here.  We took a look at price drops and exclusive game score average per year to deduce the best time.  

Xbox Series X and Microsoft seem to be taking the Skyscraper approach when it comes to beating the PS5. Nobody knows what the fourth tallest building in the world is but a lot can name the tallest building in the world. In case you didn’t know it’s the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The only thing that matters is that you have more and when it comes to the Xbox Series X, they are touting that thousands of backwards compatible games will be available for the launch of the next-gen system this holiday. It’s no coincidence that they are choosing to make a big post on this when Sony and Mark Cerny had somewhat of a mixed message regarding how many games would be backwards compatible at the launch of the PS5. 

During the “Road to PS5” talk with Mark Cerny, which was the talk that was very technical and supposedly intended for GDC, he said “we recently took a look at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles, as ranked by playtime and we’re expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch of the PlayStation 5”. It was this sentiment that caught fire on the internet with many people wondering why support for backwards compatibility was neglected. It was also the first impression and those are very hard to shake and it now seems like the PS5 will have around 100 backwards compatible games at launch.

This isn’t the case however as The PlayStation blog followed up a post a few days after the event with some further clarity on the issue “ A quick update on backward compatibility – With all of the amazing games in PS4’s catalog, we’ve devoted significant efforts to enable our fans to play their favorites on PS5. We believe that the overwhelming majority of the 4,000+ PS4 titles will be playable on PS5” 

Although the post didn’t mention whether they would be available on launch day or later but I rehash the past because I think it is important to show that at the end of the day, it sounds like the Xbox Series X and the PS5 will have a similar amount of backwards compatible titles available on day one.  I find it amusing that Microsoft choose to title the article thousands as the word that caught fire with Sony was hundred. As of right now it seems that one of the key advantages is that Microsoft has come out and said that games from all generations are playable.

This isn’t a huge surprise as Microsoft made tremendous advancements during the Xbox One generation with many things including project Xcloud, GamePass and bringing backwards compatibly to the Xbox One. It’s the fear of losing that drove Microsoft to put this amount of effort into additional services as it was made clear that the same game can be played anywhere. 

Outside of being the taller skyscraper with backwards compatibility, one of the main points of this post is explaining how the process will work on the Xbox Series X and how innovation will provide the best possible version of the game. As you would expect these games should load much faster thanks in large part to the custom SSD that comes standard with the Series X but the system has actually been designed with this feature in mind.

According to the article “ No boost mode, no downclocking, the full power of the Xbox Series X for each and every backward compatible game. This means that all titles run at the peak performance that they were originally designed for, many times even higher performance than the games saw on their original launch platform, resulting in higher and more steady framerates and rendering at their maximum resolution and visual quality

The benefits of the Xbox Series X for legacy games doesn’t end there as the system features the ability to automatically add HDR to all the backwards compatible games, even the ones from the original Xbox which launched in 2001, which is pretty incredible considering HDR wouldn’t be available for another 15 years. Higher frame rates, better visual quality and HDR all add up to what seems like a great way to play Fuzion Frenzy.

Finally, the last thing the post mentions is how one of the touted features of the Xbox Series X, Quick Resume, will also be functional not just for current games but for games dating back to the original Xbox, which sounds great and will allow you to keep multiple games from multiple generations suspended. Depending on what generation you feel like playing you are hopefully only seconds and a quick button press away from being right in the action. 

All of these features sound amazing in a press release but I would really love to see these features demonstrated to truly see how well it works and how easy it is. It’s possible that Sony and the PS5 will also have a lot of similar features that will make the games from the past better and maybe even include the PS1, PS2 and PS3 games as well but for right now it seems like Microsoft has the biggest backwards compatible skyscraper.