Microsoft confirmed the names of a few more Xbox 360 games that will soon be functional on Xbox One through the newer console’s backwards compatibility feature, but they also showed a reel that hinted at lots more. Let’s enhance and see what we can see.
The first one is unknowable.
After that, we’ve got:
- Trials
- Ghost Recon Future Soldier
- Far Cry 3
- Fallout 3
- Fable 2
- BioShock Infinite
- Dynasty Warriors
- Driver San Francisco
- Disney Universe
- Defence Grid
- Dead Space
- Dark Souls
- Civilisation Revolution
- Child of Eden
- Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
- Cars
- Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway
- Borderlands
- BioShock
- Bayonetta
- Battleblock Theatre
- Banjo Tooie
- Tom Clancy’s Endwar
- Assassin’s Creed II
- Risen 2
- Far Cry 2
- Alien Hominid
- Alan Wake
- A World of Keflings
- A Kingdom of Keflings
- Risen
- Unclear — another Dead Space?
- Unclear
- Another Assassin’s Creed
Beyond that, it’s pretty tough to see what’s what, though I toss it to you the hive mind to see if you can sort out what’s in the back part of the reel. I see Assassin’s Creed Revelations and a Viva Piñata, but beyond that I’m not sure what we’ve got here.
That final “EX” one is Shadow Complex.
Users of the Xbox One preview program can already play a number of Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One. I’ve used it myself. Today’s new Xbox One release, Rare Replay, is the first non-preview use of the feature, giving users access to nine 360 titles on the Xbox One:
Beyond that, Bethesda has said that Fallout 3 will be supported, and Ubisoft and Square Enix showed in trailers today that Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2 as well as Just Cause 2 will all work with the feature, too. All of those publishers seem to be bundling those Xbox 360 games with their forthcoming respective Xbox One sequels.
There don’t appear to be any technical hurdles to getting more games on the list, as long as those games don’t require Kinect, which isn’t part of this. The backwards compatibility feature in Xbox One basically is “just” the console pretending to be a 360, so as best we understand it — and as Microsoft has explained it — any 360 game can run on the Xbox One. It’s simply a matter of publishers giving Microsoft the OK. We recently asked publishers if they were giving Microsoft the ok, and pretty much all of them gave us a no-comment. Today, Microsoft mentioned the following publishers as among the first supporting the program:
The most conspicuous absence there is Activision, which is too bad given that the most-requested game for the entire program is an Activision game:
There’s no indication of any of those three games being greenlit for backwards compatibility yet.
Microsoft did recently say that all four Xbox 360 Gears of War games will not only be supported but will be offered to all purchasers of this month’s remake of the first game. At Gamescom, the company also said that it would support back compatibility for the key games it published on 360 in some shape or form (remember, Microsoft published the first Mass Effect, and therefore isn’t likely to be talking about the subsequent games in this first-party context):
We’ve asked Microsoft if they can send us a full list of games that will be supported.
Xbox One backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games will go live in November. Microsoft is promising support at launch for over 100 games and says the feature will be free to all users. Presumably it will help if you own the games on disc or digitally, though it’s not clear how this will work if you merely borrow a disc. The Xbox One downloads a copy of the game to your harddrive, but surely they will check if you still have the copy by requiring you to keep the disc in? What we do know is that, yes, it works with your old save files. It’s worked with all the games I’ve used it for so far.
UPDATE 1: While I’d only tested the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility feature with games I owned digitally, multiple readers who also have tried it through the Xbox One’s preview program say that you do indeed have to keep your Xbox 360 disc in the whole time you’re using the game on the Xbox One, even though the console is running a downloaded copy of the game. That’s clearly Microsoft’s way to make sure that people aren’t tricking the system. Seems fair. And if you own the game digitally, no disc needed, as I’ve experienced.
UPDATE 2: Microsoft has declined to say whether the games in the reel shown at Gamescom today are all confirmed for backwards compatibility’s official November launch. “The image we shared in the briefing is representative of the rich and diverse selection of titles we could bring to the program in the future,” a Microsoft rep told me over email, pointing me to the shorter list of games that the Xbox One preview version of backwards compatibility now supports. “We aren’t confirming anything beyond this list but look forward to sharing more as we get closer to launch.” You, dear reader, will have to decide whether or not Microsoft chose games for that reel that they don’t think they can actually deliver, which would be interesting considering that the reel stuck only to games from the publishers Microsoft then said were on board with the program.
Comments
64 responses to “It Looks Like All These Xbox 360 Games Will Soon Run On Xbox One”
Really impressed with Microsoft’s efforts on backward compatibility. They’re offering with the Xbone is looking stronger and stronger each day. Kudos.
Wii U launched will full backwards compatibility, including virtual console. Yet better late and half-arsed than never.
But the PS4 has no backwards compatibility, and that’s the Xbox One’s biggest rival.
The Wii U only used partial Software emulation i believe. That’s because the Wii U and Wii’s CPU’s can operate the same computational instruction set to run software. I believe only the graphics rendering is software emulated. It’s also important to keep in mind that the Wii is much less powerful & complicated hardware, so is much easier to emulate.
Look I’m a big nintendo fan but I wouldn’t call Wii to Wii u a massive generational hardware jump…
So yes, Xbox is kicking Sony’s ass on that front for sure.
And Ummm now Xbox has a bigger catalog of N64 games than wii u does ️Hahahaha 7/6
21 > 7
See how that works?
I would consider the Virtual Console a proper selling point if there was more than a handful of decent titles that were backwards compatible, and weren’t held back from their previous consoles/handhelds just to make the Wii U more appealing. And the Xbox One now supports more Nintendo 64 games than the Wii U does, which really shouldn’t be happening.
If you’re going to attempt to shit on a pretty cool announcement that doesn’t in any way affect your ability to enjoy similar options on other consoles, then at least do it right.
Why is it half assed?
Really? I’m not impressed at all. If I had of been at the crucial moment (say around launch), I would have bought one by now. As it is I still fire up the 360 every now and then but otherwise play on the PC.
im hoping Gears of war 3 gets listed. i have the game but never got a chance to play it.
Gears of War 3 has been confirmed.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/08/all-the-gear-of-war-games-will-be-backwards-compatible-on-xbox-one/
cheers 🙂
GoW 3 has some of the fun PvP I’ve ever played. I spent months hooked on that game!
Nowhere near as fun as the original MP though 🙁
All 1st party games that aren’t Kinect enabled and aren’t peripheral based will come across.
Oh shiiiiiiiiit, that’s a good list. I own half of those games, too!
Killing it MS. They’ve done plenty wrong with the Xbone, but they’re getting this right for sure.
Sony’s PS4 BC is an exploitative kick in the teeth, offering a broken ass system that delivers an intentionally crappy product so that they can nickle and dime their most loyal customers to play the games they already own.
This…. This is great.
Yeah, I fucking hate the way that cross-buy bullshit gives me free PS4 versions of PS3 games I already bought.
That’s not BC, that’s a deal between Sony and the publisher to get you to buy old games while you’re saving for a new hardware.
MS have had similar deals. That’s clearly not BC, and clearly not what I’m talking about.
Streaming BC:
1. Doesn’t use the hardware they just asked you to pay through the ass for.
2. Requires the most onerous kind of ‘always-on’ imaginable. Remember when MS did a lesser kind of always-on and it was the apocalypse?
3. It allows Sony to charge people against the clock for games that they already own, that are already linked to Sony accounts.
4. It delivers a product that sucks, will always suck and which is never ever going to produce results on par with hardware conversion.
5. Sony knows all these things, yet they made a choice to deliver the sh*ttier product so they could charge extra for it.
You don’t need to blindly excuse them. Sony do LOTS right in this space in just the same way that both companies still do lots wrong.
There’s no argument here that the MS system isn’t a vastly better one though, the Sony system for streaming pay-against-the-clock BC is f*cking horrendous.
Wow bro, have a snickers… downvoting for the sudden apparent raaaage…
Pretty fired up this morning! Although to be fair I’ve been fired up about the whole Sony BC thing for a while.
People bend over backwards to give them a free pass or make excuses for them (see Mr Braaaains above mentioning a completely different scheme), but the way Sony has gone about streaming BC on the PS4 is every bit as exploitative as any single thing EA have EVER done.
I really mean that, I can’t think of a time when a company has intentionally made a single policy that was so blatantly exploitative. I’d be happy to hear individual examples of worse policies if you can think of them. At least with the other things that have gone terribly for the consumer (SimCity and Diablo III come to mind), there was at least an INTENTION to deliver a decent product, a hope that if you were online the games would run fine and everything would be sweet.
The PS4 BC can’t work well. You just can’t reliably stream high-action games over the internet in their entirety with the same outcomes as you can when it’s all happening in a box under the TV. It’s setup in the knowledge that it will fail and it’s being done only so they can charge their most loyal customers, the people who already own their games, against the clock to play games that are already linked to their accounts.
I’m not trying to be anti-Sony broadly, they do things like cross-platform purchases ect that ARE good schemes, but how good would it be if the PS4 got what the Xbone is getting in terms of PS3 BC? It’d be great.
Oh I think the streaming option blows chunks completely. Maybe it will work one day but not for a long while yet… But I’m not much of a fan of compatibility via emmulation either. As far as policies go, both consoles have made crap decisions this gen, sonys streaming service was silly, ms claiming kinect was absolutely needed before backtracking. Both have done lousy things. A true fan calls out the bullshit whereas a fanboy or fangirl lets it slide because they get caught up in the hype. If the ps4 got bc it would be nice, like I said I dont play my older ps3 games (but Ive got a bitching steam collection lol) because Im busy playing newer ones, but thats more down to time issues with uni etc.
Is it really sudden when the first reply to foggy’s original post was pretty passive-aggressive?
It’s all in how you handle yourself. You can’t control how others reply,just yourself.
That’s not Backward’s compatibility though, because games with CrossBuy have been designed and developed on both PS3 and 4.
Backwards Compatibility is when a game that was only developed for past-generation consoles is playable on the the current console.
This is an excellent point in itself.
It would be much better if (1) they offered it on all games rather than just some and (2) it worked automatically for your disc games, rather than only for digital downloads.
The crossbuy thing is nice, but only covers a tiny fraction of the PS3’s library, and is not useful for physical media. The Last of Us had to be re-bought, for example. Most of the titles for which cross-buy was added were basically smaller or indie-style games not the big AAA titles. Dishonored has just been announced for PS4; from what I can see Sony want another $40 or so to update it. (This seems to be discounted for previous purchasers, I think.)
Speaking here as somebody with a PS3, 360 and PS4 (and who hasn’t turned on his 360 for at least a year) but not an XBox One, this announcement plus the Rare collection has me seriously tempted to buy an XBox One.
Admittedly MS have a much easier problem to solve, as the 360’s basically PowerPC architecture has already been mostly “solved” for emulation, whereas the PS3’s Cell architecture has not been widely emulated.
*shrug* It’s all good and everything but I’ve moved on to playing newer games. Both systems BC is a kick in the teeth realistically, the only way it WOULDN’T be is if it were PS2 or Wii level BC, where any and every disc worked straight off the bat, no questions asked.
The publishers would all need to give permission for that, even the ones that don’t exist anymore.
I don’t think they need permission for that, they never have in the past. I’m pretty sure what makes Microsoft’s system different is that technically they’re distributing new copies of the games themselves. Where the Wii played GameCube discs directly the XBOX One gives you a repackaged downloadable copy of the game from the marketplace (playing from disc is essentially just putting the disc in to unlock the copy you downloaded and installed). I assume they need permission to re-distribute it using their new system and to repackage it into a format that the XBOX One’s XBOX 360 emulator can read.
Makes sense.
So happy about this!! I traded a heap of my games, but thankfully still have quite a few of the ones I really loved.
Hoping that they add Skyrim, as I totally missed out on that game. Can still play on my 360, but that much easier if I can do it through my One 🙂
edit: that was supposed to be a new comment not a reply to you sorry lol
Not great. Wii U’s 100% complete BC is great. This is half decent and better late than never.
If they did BC for launch instead of Kinect, and not tried to force online connections, Xbox ONe would be beating PS4.
Fixing the crashes and poor performance of the OS would also help, but I fear it’s to late for MS to outsell the PS4 – the damage is done after MS shot themselves in the foot.
The thing that the XBone does have over the Nintendo BC is easily playing digital purchases from x360 on the Xbone (assuming they’re supported of course).
This is a huge thing for me. Maybe I’m just getting lazy in my old age but I’m a big fan of having an easily accessible library of titles at my fingertips.
My Xbone probably has about 30 titles on it already, but that’s going to be potentially triple or more if 360 support is widely available. That means games on the HDD that can be opened instantly for a quick session of something old.
That’s not so easy on the WiiU. The old Wii games were disc only (as far as I know) so all my Wii BC titles are buried in the cupboard being forgotten. You also have to factor in that the Wii controllers were sh*t and aren’t the same as WiiU’s standard controller, so if I want a quick game of Mario Galaxy not only do I need the disc I also need a Wiimote and a nunchuck (and potentially batteries). If I want to switch to Mario Sunshine from there I need a Gamecube controller and adapter…. Again its a pain in the arse.
That’s without factoring in having to switch the WiiU to Wii mode, or spend money to port my old Wii VC titles to the WiiU… just lots of little things that make it less-than-convenient to use.
The Xbox controller is essentially the same controller (for better or worse), so properly functioning BC really is exactly the same as booting up the old console.
Man Dark Souls and Bioshock Infinite – excellent!
Man… I want Shadow Complex 2 damn it…
I’ve been waiting for that announcement so long, I don’t know what I’d do if it happened!
Shadow Complex and Gears of War 1 (I also own 3 and Judgment) just showed up in my download queue on the Xbone!
CivRev? Really?
I’m done. I still play that damn thing for 12 hours or so every few months, even though I got all the achievements years ago.
Looks like I’ll be going back there….
I was going to say the same thing.
Games like Civ and XCom are the best for BC because they’re all gameplay and minimal graphics.
I’m REALLY happy to see CivRev making the cut.
Looks like possibly Child of Eden and Portal 2 in the back, maybe?
God knows I’ve spend 5 years of my life looking at game covers every day.
I’d really like to see Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine make the list.
Id really love to know how they are doing this backwards compatibility, do they have a 360 emulator running or are they porting PC versions that already supported x86?
Im guessing emulator. I have preview program and it loads the game like its in an instance of the 360 OS with loading screens etc from the 360, and the notifications also if I recall correctly are 360 notifications. So I was assuming on that basis emu.. but I have no idea.
They wrote an emulator. Engadget did an article on it recently http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/18/xbox-one-backward-compatibility-how-it-works/
It really is an impressive technical feat.
Essentially you’re emulating the XBox 360, OS and all on a VM which is why you can still do all the cool DVR and Twitch stuff because the XOne just sees it as a game. It also means that the emulator is game agnostic which is different to how the X360’s BC worked which required tweaking to the code of the games.
It’s pretty f’in awesome quite frankly.
If thats how it works thats pretty brilliant, they should let us emulate old 360 games on Windows 10.
But then that would require them to create an entirely different VM solution, that would scale to everything from a Dual Core i3 or i7 all the way up to a Quad or Hex core i7.
What I don’t get, if that’s the case, is why this can’t just play your 360 games off the disc, since as far as the OS is concerned, it basically IS a 360? Why do you need to download a digital copy of a game – and only games that are specifically supported by this BC implementation? If it’s basically VM imitating a 360, shouldn’t it just work?
That would actually be really cool because then not only would it support EVERY 360 game straight off the disc but, theoretically, it could actually be backwards compatible with original XBox games that were supported by the 360’s backwards compatibility.
Publisher permission. I’m going to go ahead and assume that because you can stream the games you’re playing, then the pubs want to guarantee that it’s a legit copy. MS just don’t want legal shitestorms I’m guessing.
Perhaps, but it’s entirely software emulation. It’s not like you can pop open the VM and plug in a mod chip,so it would be a pretty safe assumption that any games running on it would be legit?
Yeah, that’s fair. I’m guessing it’s just the licensing stuff then.
Anyone happens to know if Fuse the Game (360) will run on XBox One?
I don’t see it on the list.
Dark souls baybeee
Be nice if these games got up-res-ed to 1080p, I mean the hardware can do it. Would be very nice if they did.
This really is amazing….. i missed so many 360 games in the last 4 years or so. At some point ill be able to play just about all of them on the Xbox1.
I have an ancient Elite 120gb 360. It must be close to 7 or 8 years old. I upgraded the HDD to a 3rd party 320gb, and that killed the BC for games like San Andreas as the emulation software wasn’t on that drive.
But the disc tray doesn’t work any more. It had literal fvck tonnes of use, so I’m not surprised. I have about 60 digital games (80% AAA) installed on the 360, but none of my remaining discs work because of the broken tray. And it doesn’t have the wi-fi inbuilt.
Dealing with all that stuff vs BC on my X1 with a the 2tb external I have for it is a no brainer. I’ve moved all my games over to the external as it loads them faster than the internal. I’m so close to retiring my 360 to my collection of broken 360s.
Was excited for UMvC3, then remembered Disney. =(
The final minute of the xboxconference has this huge graphic showing possible BC games – among them (but not mentioned above) SplinterCell Blacklist, Call of Juarez (I think Bound in Blood), Pac Man CE DX, the first AssCreed, and both Rayman games
Also all new free 360 gold games will also be BC from now on…..its just keeps getting better and better 😀
So, I get the reasons for the disc being in the console, but it really kills it for me. I already get everything digital download if possible to avoid the whole disc swap hassle. I’m not going back to it for xbox360 games. However, I assume all of these games will be available for purchase at low low rates on the bone and many will be give aways for Gold, so that’s all good. One thing they should do is give access to every xbox 360 game that was made free through Gold. (I haven’t fired up the xbox 360 in ages and I know I’ve missed a ton.) Yes, the big takeaway is that I am lazy as hell.
I’ve downloaded every single one – even shot that I’ll never play like F1!
i hope that original xbox games become backwards compatible too, shouldn’t be hard just run it through the 360 emualtion software – i wanna play some kotor I & II and hunter the reckoning
Let’s hope they enable PAL discs soon…