This week's slate of new releases for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One serves as an illuminating indicator of the state each console is in. The PS4 has two new exclusive titles in major series that date back to the PlayStation 2 days: God of War, by all accounts a masterpiece, and Yakuza 6, a satisfying final chapter for a much-loved character. The Xbox One, on the other hand? Well, now you can play a bunch more old Xbox 1 — as in the original Xbox — games.
I don't mean for this to sound damning, though. While Microsoft is rightly being pilloried for its anemic first-party software efforts, the Xbox One actually now has more to play on it than any other console. At least, from a certain point of view.
Things get better when you actually play these games, because in many cases they run vastly better on the new hardware. Original Xbox games are also now supported and get a 4x native resolution boost on the Xbox One and One S, or 16x on the Xbox One X — this usually means 960p on One S and 1920p on One X. 360 games load faster and often run smoother than they did on their original system, meanwhile, and sometimes even get specific enhancements for the Xbox One S and X.
It's kind of amazing, for instance, that I can put the Mirror's Edge disc I bought literally a decade ago into my One S and play it today with HDR support. The same goes for Halo 3, which now somehow looks better in backwards compatibility mode than it did when specifically remastered for the Xbox One in The Master Chief Collection. And in lieu of an actual re-release or PC version, what better way to prepare for Red Dead Redemption 2than by playing through its predecessor at a higher resolution?
More at the link: The Verge
I think it's an interesting take. The BC has been a great push from Microsoft and seeing them really give old games new life on consoles, because we know we can do a lot of this on PC already, has been great. Playing SSX 3 last night looked and felt great and I'm interested to see how Microsoft continues to develop this feature.