kerzain
6569
Oh great, now I can have Tomb Raider on backlog on TWO machines, Steam and XB1.
Cool, that means Battlestations Paific and Crysis 3 will be backwards compatible and play on the XB1 at some point.
I did play through Tomb Raider on PC, but I guess since it will be free, I’ll play through it again on XB1.
LMN8R
6571
I just completed Tomb Raider on Xbox One. Great game, once you get past the absurdity of it all!
I played it on 360 last year, and I was actually thinking seriously about playing again. Looks like my mind has been made up for me.
Rock8man: if I remember correctly, the deal about full back compat on Games with Gold starts in November. Which is not to say that this month’s won’t be backward compatible, just that I think they aren’t certain to be.
Coincidentally, I just started playing Tomb Raider on PC. It’s been in my backlog since one of the deep Steam sales.
It’s fun, but it really is The Lara Croft Horrible Death Simulator.
I actually just finished Tomb Raider as well on the Xbone. It is definitely the Horrible Death Simulator, and in the latter half of the game more like the Random Impalation Simulator–getting impaled on jagged rocks, in the surf, in the trees, pieces of metal… and of course she goes through all of that after already being impaled in the stomach. Definitely a good title to get for free.
I thought the backwards compatibility for Gold X360 titles were only coming in November moving forward when the update gets released?
— Alan
Backwards compatibility is being released out of beta to the general public in November. From that point onwards, all Games with Gold 360 titles will be BC and playable on Xbox One.
Past Games with Gold 360 titles are not guaranteed to be BC, but they can be. (For example, Gears 1 is already in the BC program.) There’s just no assurance they will ever be BC.
I was thinking the same thing
rowe33
6577
Argh, original Xbox backwards compatibility on the One would be yet another reason for me to pick it up finally. I imagine it would be ALL titles, right? Not just the ones that were BC on the 360?
The biggest stumbling block (beyond the technical ones) would be the publishers. They’d still have to give the okay for BC to be enabled on each game.
It’s all academic, of course. Microsoft hasn’t actually made any original Xbox game BC on the Xbox One yet, and they may never. It may just not be cost effective to do so.
I wonder if this is actually the case for OG Xbox games – you didn’t hear anything about needing publisher approval for the 360’s backwards compatibility way back when.
You may not have heard about it, but I guarantee someone had to get their permission.
stusser
6581
Who knows, maybe Microsoft’s licensing agreements allow them to run games on future consoles too. It’s not inconceivable.
Has this always been the case for consoles, even when the early model PS3s had hardware backward compatibility with PS2 and PS1 games? It’s very hard to believe Sony negotiated approval for every game on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_3_backward_compatible_PlayStation_2_and_PlayStation_games
I’m guessing it’s more like what stusser’s saying, that it might even be standard that all console licensing agreements that let you publish a game on a console in the first place include rights for Microsoft or Sony or whoever to run that on just about any hardware they can get it working on.
Of course if you’re just talking about adding old titles to the Xbox Marketplace to actually sell the games that are now backward compatible, of course that requires a new deal with the publisher.
Maybe earlier deals were open-ended, but I highly doubt that in the current space, console game publishers are letting the console manufacturers dictate those terms.
Microsoft has to ask permission for every (non-MS published) game coming to Xbox One BC. They’re not doing that for fun.
RickH
6584
That may be due to the simple fact that the XB1 is not playing the game from the original game media, but instead uses the media as a token to authorize use of a downloaded version of the game. Hosting a digital duplicate of a game on MS servers to be installed as-needed on XB1 hard drives would constitute a “copy” of the game for purposes of copyright.
In contrast, every other form of BC that I can recall simply uses the original media as the source of the game’s code.
Ah, I’ll bet that’s exactly it. Good point.
That may be it. Mystery solved!
Yeah, it’s definitely a question of distribution rights related to the way BC games are delivered as an VM. They would presumably need the same thing for original Xbox games.
The rights issues do indeed seem to be the cause of the delays, based on this tweet:
