NEW YORK: At the tech company’s preview event before the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which runs Tuesday to Thursday here, Microsoft showed off several new upcoming games for its 2-year-old Xbox One system, including Halo 5: Guardians (out Oct. 27) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (Nov. 10).
And in a move to perhaps coerce some Xbox 360 owners to splurge for a new system, the Xbox One will gain the ability to play older Xbox 360 games later this year, Xbox division head Phil Spencer announced.
The ability to play Xbox 360 games such as Mass Effect on the new system for free “has been consistently at the top of your request list,” Spencer said. “Our goal is to deliver the largest games catalog ever on Xbox, and Xbox One backward compatibility allows us to do just that.”
The Xbox One hit the market in November 2013, the same month as Sony’s PlayStation 4, but the PS4 has forged a sales lead of about 20 million to 12 million.
The PS4 cannot play PS3 game discs, but the Xbox One will play more than 100 Xbox 360 games when the feature is added.
This move “is a significant moment for this generation of consoles,” said Piers Harding-Rolls, director and head of games at IHS Technology. “This has also removed a significant barrier to migrating from the older Xbox 360 platform and differentiates the Xbox offering from PlayStation.”
Sequels to popular series such as Halo, Tomb Raider and Forza Motorsport (Sept. 15), three games exclusively for Xbox One, had hyper-real high definition sharpness and increased fidelity of vision and sound.
Another highlight of the event, held at the University of Southern California’s Galen Center, used Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset to demonstrate 3-D building game Minecraft, which Microsoft acquired last year for $2.5 billion.
The demo showed a player controlling the hologram of a structure while watching and using voice commands.
Xbox One owners also will get first access this summer to a beta test period for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division from publisher Ubisoft. The full game is scheduled to be released in 2016.
“These games make up what I believe is the greatest games lineup in Xbox history,” Spencer said. “If you’ve been waiting to move from your Xbox 360, now’s the time.”
