It was obvious that with the PAX West 2017 event being held in Seattle, Washington from September 1 to 4, Microsoft would have a significant presence as everything takes place near its headquarters in Redmond and this would give the opportunity to reveal information about its next console, Xbox One X. Yesterday, on the occasion of the event, Larry Hryb's "Major Nelson" podcast focused on the new console and features that are ready for its debut.
During its live broadcast from PAX West 2017, Larry Hryb, director of programming for Xbox LIVE and Mike Ybarra, vice president of the Xbox and Windows game divisions, gave a general overview of the features that are already ready for the console and how it will work in terms of hardware to provide a suitable environment for developers.
Initially, Ybarra revealed that practically the future of the family of Xbox One consoles is in the models "S" and "X", that is, that the development base will be Xbox One S and in it, the programmers will have the possibility to take advantage of the maximum of everything that the platform offers.
By sharing hardware architecture, Xbox One X will offer the possibility of taking everything that has already been done in the previous model and will allow it to exploit its hardware capabilities to achieve a graphic display of the highest level. The executive also confirmed that they did the work necessary to make the transition of the developers of Xbox One S to Xbox One X "smooth" and not represent any obstacle.
Now for those who expect full support for mouse and keyboard in the family console of Xbox One, there is great news as Microsoft will be responsible for advising and suggest to developers about the advantages of enabling support for these accessories, especially in those titles with a competitive scene in multiplayer modes.
Although the decision will ultimately be in the hands of the studios, Microsoft will be open to have full support for mouse and keyboard. Around this, Mike Ybarra revealed that this idea, for the time being, is referred to Minecraft, but fans have taken it as a green light so that in the near future new titles will have support for these PC accessories.
On the other hand, the inevitable cross-play theme was present and in this respect, Ybarra reported that at the moment they have an excellent relationship with Nintendo and they are hopeful that it bears fruit to show the qualities of a multiplayer without platform barriers.
At the same time, the executive mentioned that Xbox has everything ready for cross-play to take place, so it will remain in the hands of developers if they want their multiplatform games to be part of this. As a matter of fact, Major Nelson prostrated himself in front of the camera and asked Sony to encourage him to participate in cross-play.
As for Xbox One X and its graphical display, Mike Ybarra said that Microsoft has provided a flexible environment for developers to choose between resolution or frames per second and this will be moved to the final product where users can select if they want to privilege 4K or fps. In general terms, Microsoft seeks to offer the largest number of graphic options to meet the needs of users in that area.
Finally, Ybarra revealed that they are working on new forms of interaction and artificial intelligence for Cortana seeking to expand the number of actions that can be done to enrich the user experience.
Remember that Xbox One X will hit the market on November 7th.
