This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of employ.

XBoxOneW10

Microsoft's Build conference was concluding calendar week, and the visitor's keynote functioned as a simultaneous expect at the future of Windows, the development of various bots and artificial intelligences (Tay'southward debut, in retrospect, didn't do much for this area), as well as the launch of HoloLens, Microsoft'south AR platform.

Build is a programmer conference rather than a gaming event, but VentureBeat caught up with Xbox caput Phil Spencer to talk about the platform and its time to come. With so much talk in the news about a possible PlayStation 4.5 (as well as myriad rumors about what kind of device it might turn out to exist,) what tin can gamers look from the Xbox One?

Spencer

Microsoft's Phil Spencer at an before Xbox effect

When asked point-bare almost the possibility of an Xbox 1.5, Spencer said: "I don't know. Not a big fan of one and a one-half. I think about what happens in near spaces. If I'thousand going to move forward, I want to move frontwards in large numbers… I can empathise other teams' motivations, why they might desire to go do that. But for u.s.a., our box is doing well. It performs. It's reliable. The service is up. If we go forwards with annihilation I desire to make information technology a substantial change."

This doesn't mean Microsoft isn't planning some sort of upgrade — Spencer'due south comments could be read every bit a remark on either branding (non wanting to rebrand the Xbox One as anything else without a big jump) or every bit pushing for a meaning, rather than an incremental change.

I potential way to read Spencer's comments is that he's trying to avoid the rampant speculation currently taking place effectually Sony'south PlayStation 4K upgrade. While claims that an upgrade is coming have come down from reliable sources, the exact specifications of that upgrade are completely unknown. It could wind up being a standard PS4 in a new slim class factor with reduced power consumption and 4K Blu-ray support, or it could be something with significantly more oomph.

Microsoft was burned badly in 2022 when the original Xbox One information technology unveiled didn't match what consumers' expected the device to evangelize. Spencer has every reason to avert a similar situation, particularly if Sony is really gear up to denote something past E3 this year.

On the other hand, it strains credulity to think that Microsoft, which has plainly decided to sit down out VR in favor of AR and HoloLens, would allow Sony to waltz ahead with its ain plans for a college-performance panel without answering the PS4K with some type of Xbox One upgrade. Right at present, the performance gap between the Xbox One and PS4 consistently favors the latter, just not by a large enough degree to sway most people. The difference between 720p and 900p when both platforms are at 30 FPS but isn't that big. If Sony were to offer a PS4 that could striking 1080p at 60 FPS and the Xbox One is still stuck at 720p and thirty FPS, that would affair — and a 1080p@sixty FPS target is well within the PS4K'southward hypothetical attain.

And so far, Spencer has clarified that he never intends to launch upgradeable Xbox I kits and that the company doesn't want to rebrand for an Xbox 1.5 without significant improvements. He's non quite stated that Microsoft has no upgrades in the pipeline at all.

The Windows Store and the future of PC gaming

When asked nearly the future of the Windows Store and the impact on PC gaming, Spencer implied that Microsoft'south messaging on this front hasn't been as good as it could accept been. Many of the flaws identified with games like Gears of State of war, including the lack of support for modding, the inability to disable V-Sync, no multi-GPU back up, G-Sync not performance properly in all cases, and the mode certain overlays and software programs don't work with Windows Store titles are the outcome of an early launch, not fundamental limitations of the Windows Store itself.

"My biggest business when Tomb Raider launched was that I was going to encounter a review of the Win32 version next to the UWP version and the UWP version would exist running at half the framerate," Spencer said. "I knew that would be dead in the h2o. We didn't come across that. People bought information technology. Information technology got downloaded and installed on their PC. It ran at framerate. Information technology was a pretty game."

Spencer went on to state that the company would be dealing with many of these issues in the months ahead. "Turning off Vsync, back up for G-Sync and FreeSync, that's May. And so we'll deal with mods and injections this summertime."

Spencer also implied that game mods would all the same work with Windows Store applications, or that at least some mods would. The distinction appears to be whether or non the mods themselves are used to modify a game's underlying code. In theory, it seems that a UWP game could choose to load mod data from a different location, and therefore preserve the ability to mod titles. What's going to be more than hard is game mods that change an executable or that require direct shader injection. One of the more popular visual mods for dozens of titles is ENB Shader Injection, while Xcom'southward The Long War mod direct modifies the base executable. It'due south not clear if either of these types of mods will ever exist allowed on Windows Shop titles, the interview makes it clear that Spencer views application sandboxing as a critical security feature that users' need to keep them safe online.