Arguably one of the biggest announcements that came out of E3 this year – and this E3 was filled with big ones – was the news that the Xbox One would be gaining the ability to play Xbox 360 games natively. Of course, owing to the hardware architectural differences between the two systems, and the simple issue of licensing and legal rights, this is going to come with a lot of caveats, but it was still an amazing move that garnered Microsoft a lot of good publicity and PR.
GameReactor had the opportunity to go hands on with the feature for themselves (it is already available to Xbox Preview Program members), and tell us what it is like.
As of right now, the list of compatible games for the Xbox One is only 22- however, by the time the feature launches publicly this Fall, that number will be up to a hundred working games, Microsoft confirmed. Games will need authentication from your Gamertag to run, but apart from that, the entire process is smooth- the emulation in question here seems to be exemplary, as the games boot up within the Xbox One OS, rather than an Xbox 360 shell (which is the most popular form of backwards compatibility), with all Xbox One specific features, such as Twitch streaming and Snap, apparently still working (games even get a gorgeous splash screen like Xbox One games do while the game is loading).
Bottom line? This feature seems like it will be the real deal when it goes live. Hopefully Microsoft can get as many games on this service as possible.