While the annual Game Awards ceremony is primarily intended to showcase the best video games of the year, it was announcements about the next generation of consoles that stole the show at the event. is held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Microsoft started the evening with great fanfare by finally lifting the veil on its next home console, dubbed the Xbox Series X. Four times more powerful than the Xbox One X, it should be available in time for the 2020 holiday season.
Known so far as Project Scarlett, the Series X is nothing like its predecessors. Rather, it is a large rectangular tower more like a desktop computer than a traditional console. It is equipped with a disc player and a ventilation grille.
Microsoft says that the Xbox Series X can display games in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, or up to 120 frames per second for certain titles. It is equipped with an SSD, which should essentially eliminate the cooldown of games, according to Phil Spencer, vice president of video games at Microsoft and responsible for the Xbox brand, in a blog post.
The ray tracing technology , a complex graphic process which allows to obtain an ultra-realistic luminous rendering, is also integrated into the Series X.
The controller of this new generation Xbox is very similar to the Xbox Elite controller, borrowing its improved directional cross. The size and shape of the controller has been refined and improved to accommodate even more people , says Phil Spencer. A share button, which will be used to save screenshots and video clips, has also been added.
All Xbox One controllers and accessories also work with the Series X.
Four generations of games
The Xbox Series X is backward compatible with thousands of games from previous Xbox consoles, but Microsoft has not specified whether all games will work with it. It’s a safe bet that some titles will be incompatible with it due to emulation problems, as is the case with the Xbox One.
A new game from Ninja Theory studio, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II , was released for the Series X on Thursday evening. It’s the sequel to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017), a game about demonic energy, love and the power of the human spirit.
