Xbox One Backwards Compatibility - How does it work?

The biggest news from Microsoft's E3 2015 conference had to have been the announcement of backward compatibility on the Xbox One. The ability to be able to play the huge back catalogue of Xbox 360 games on your current gen console is a game changer, but how well does it actually work? The Xbox One's backward compatibility update is available now for anyone with access to the Xbox Preview Program and in the quiet time between conferences, Ian tested it all out to see how well it worked. Find out his opinions in this video that shows off Xbox 360 gameplay on an Xbox One system.

[JoeSiegler]

Re: Save states cross console.  If your save games on the 360 aren't using cloud saves, it won't be seen, AFAIK.   I spent about 20 mins and moved all my 360 save games I still had on the console to the cloud saves.  Still left me with about 430Mb or so out of the 512 they give you.  Doesn't take a lot of space.

[MrxbobCoUk]

The reason the saves only worked for you "50% of the time" is almost definitely because you chose not to upload those saves to the cloud when you played the games on 360 originally. If you boot up your 360 and go to your hard drive, you can copy any missing saves to the cloud. They work 100% of the time, as long as you've bothered to sync them to the cloud.

[bgm]

I'll be happy if I can at least play the Dead Space trilogy, Assassin's Creed series, Gears, and Rockstar games by the end of the year.

[ICalverz]

I was streaming Perfect Dark last night with no problems. Also, all my save data transferred over. Just make sure all your save data is saved on the cloud instead of the 360 hard drive!

[SirLugash]

The savegame issue might be because of one of these reasons:
1. The savegame on your 360 wasn't copied/moved to cloud storage and therefore cannot be accessed from the Xbox One.
2. Some older Xbox Live Arcade title stored their savegame information within the player profile and not in an independent savefile. In that case this information would need to be extracted from the profile and put into a savefile which is then stored in cloud storage.

[BurkusCat]

From the looks of it, the 360 emulator is probably given the exact amount of power etc. it had originally. I know Toy Soldier Cold War had A LOT of framerate problems on 360 and could basically grind to a halt under intense situations. I think it would be a great place to do a test (maybe Digital Foundry?) to see if the emulator is granted extra hardware power and framerate is better or worse in those situations.

When it comes out, I think Bioshock games would be another good place to do a test because they are all locked to 30fps, but, there is an option to unlock framerate which introduces tearing but it means it is possible for the game to reach 60 fps (small rooms, no enemies etc.). Most of the time however it does not get near that. It would be another cool game to see if it improves framerate.

I'd love to see this test done, thank you :)

[timworley]

backwards compatibility means you pop a previous gen disc in the slot and you play said disc, not you put the disc in and wait 5 hours to download

[Spidr]

I have many friends that were on the fence on the last gen era and where thinking about PS4....This feature has pulled them back quickly!  This was a great tool for marketing from MS

[retrosimon]

Very smart. Now i actually might buy one if the list of supported games gets decently big.

[kirtoswordmaster]

so basically if you have any Xbox 360 disk games with the reverse com. you can play any game on Xbox one like normal.

[dvdmike]

I only played Alien hominid and hexic but it works crazy well

[HoboWithaShotgun]

The mass effect frame rate is awful at times

[wizz]

i hope they put crysis 123 on the backwards compatible list

[PaleandPastey]

I'm confused, is Johnny still doing his impression or is this really Ian?

[hjibuloibgiol]

How about you invite me to the preview program so I can experience the backward compatibility myself.

[satellite]

FPS during the E3 demo looked below 20. So how does some of the better looking and more advanced games of 360 run?

[edjimenez]

I already have a ps4 but this made me go out and get an xbox one since i have so many xbox 360 games.

[sliimshady]

But WHY does it make you restart your whole progress into a game??

[alpha_child]

5:27, why does everyone keep saying that the xbone is better because it will be able to play 360 games? why would you want to buy a 350$ 8th gen console, to play 7th gen video games? just keep your 360 and play on that thing if there's no new releases out :/

[Omegamario]

Awesome video Ian and I did come across a sort of fix that you could perform save wise for Perfect Dark especially. Put your PD save onto the cloud from your actual 360, I did that with mine for the games that I own. Super Meat Boy didn't pull my save from the cloud oddly, may try again later