Xbox's 'Project Scorpio' promises 4K gaming and virtual reality play
Not one to be left out, Microsoft is keeping pace with Sony by preparing its own 4K-compatible console for release sometime next year, it confirmed Monday.
Xbox's "Project Scorpio" (the subject of many previous rumors) will support 4K gaming with a six-teraflop graphics processor and an eight-core processor. It will also comfortably support gaming in virtual reality, Xbox head Phil Spencer said at Microsoft's E3 press conference in Los Angeles.
Spencer stressed that although Scorpio is a more powerful console, it wasn't going to make the Xbox One obsolete. The future console would allow gamers to "play without boundaries" by unifying the ecosystem across its Xbox Live network.
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"No one gets left behind," Spencer said, referring to frustrations felt by players as upgrading to a new console often left their old games unplayable. (Even though some Xbox 360 titles are now available via Xbox One's backwards compatibility, large swaths of the back catalog haven't made the leap.) Xbox One accessories will work with the upcoming Scorpio, Spencer said.
We can already see early examples of this philosophy in Xbox's Play Anywhere program; games that fall into that program work across both Windows 10 and Xbox One, including saving game progress and achievements. Microsoft's Minecraft is also getting cross-platform Realms, which unite players across iOS, Android, Windows devices and Gear VR.
What was missing from the presentation were visuals. We didn't even see a silhouette of the Scorpio console, let alone any gameplay. No price was mentioned either. Spencer said Xbox decided to announce the console so early so that "developers and partners can take advantage of it now," but it also could be because Sony lifted the veil (at least a tiny bit) last week on its 4K-capable Neo, a more powerful iteration of the PlayStation 4.
Project Scorpio won't go on sale until Holiday 2017, so we're likely to see more of it at next year's E3.
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Chelsea Stark was the Games Editor for Mashable, where she covered everything from AAA titles, mainstream consoles, indie gems, mobile games and gaming culture. She handled news, feature stories and reviews. Before that, Chelsea was Mashable's Multimedia Producer, where she helped develop visual storytelling aids, whether they were photos of video. She came to New York in 2010 to pursue her master's degree in journalism at NYU's Studio 20 program, which focused on innovation as journalism is changed by new technology. Before coming to New York, Chelsea lived in Austin, where she did online journalism and social media for the local CBS affiliate. She loves good beer, classic Nintendo games, and all things geeky, and spends her time attempting to find anything close to good Tex-Mex in Brooklyn.
