Xbox Is 'Exploring' AI To Make Its Older Games Playable On Modern Hardware

This sounds pretty damn neat if you ask me, and yet another of countless reasons that MS clearly isn't anywhere near bowing out - quite the opposite.

...huh?? With Bleeding Edge? Can someone pinch me? We're living in a timeline where that game may actually come back?? As someone who loves that game this is so bizarre to read.

Inject Xbox live features into OG Xbox games please.

Cool. I am interested to see how it goes.

This sounds great. But I am afraid there is a bigger hurdle to take with expired licenses. Even in their own games. Ingame music , licensed cars , brands and so on that are expired need to be renewed. Getting them running is one thing , getting everything legal to bring them back could be another problem.

Totally off subject again but we in late February and Xbox really have not sorted out consoles UK stock, some stores got a few in but again low or no stock in many main stores and on line.
Of course this is deliberate, but why? Seems a bit crazy to me as they do sell when stock turns up, and sell a console, sell a game pass subscription.

This sounds really interesting and is AI used in a good way to aid development and speed up the process. It'd be cool if it could indeed get many older games compatible with modern hardware too.

Exciting times

@themightyant yeah I think licensing will remain the biggest stumbling block for such efforts of games preservation. Also as you say, this could potentially be their way of getting your Xbox library onto PC as well, which I'd be all for

This sounds pretty interesting but I’m more shocked Matt Bellamy hasn’t copyrighted this before now.

Hopefully this pans out and lets more people easily access more of their library of games on future consoles. I can fault Microsoft for many things but the effort they've put into backwards compatibility so far can't be sniffed at.

@Elbow you know, you could just go play Bleeding Edge right now this second, right? Ninja Theory ended support for it, but the game's still online. Well, that's assuming anyone else is still playing it, of course.

So this will allow for mods on older Xbox games? Okay, interesting.

Thats really great! Kudos to MS for working on such things while PS/N tries to sell us remasters/remakes of games from older systems.

I’m not getting my hopes up. It very much reads like they just mean cloud gaming, which does not interest me in the slightest. I’ll stick to traditional local rendering as long as possible.

@Sol76 This!!!

In hindsight, Xbox's approach to Backwards Compatibility was really shortsighted. If anyone takes a look at the 360 and original Xbox games in the store it's shocking how many of them are delisted.

And when you look at how many games were never added to the BC program it starts to look even worse. If game preservation was the goal then I believe they should have made a working emulator that could play any 360 disc inserted into the drive. Hopefully they learned their lesson and Muse AI will also be used for something like that.

Interesting idea and one that feels like a good fit for AI.

I wonder if more long term the system could basically re-write any code to run on modern hardware? Albeit that that would be the end of the remaster we currently get... or it could mean hundreds more of them.

Interesting to see where this goes.

One thing that stood out to me in the quote is they say games can 'be played on any screen with Xbox'. They refer to Xbox as an entity here rather than an item (eg. any screen with 'an' Xbox). Which makes me think all these games are gonna be going everywhere. Which is cool as I'd be down for playing some on the switch 2 when I grab one.

Im all for the use of AI in game development. Using it for backwards compatibility is icing on the cake.

Microsoft is also using AI to fuel warfare abroad right now, read in the AP yesterday 😭 They're in so many places it's wild. All for them putting AI usage towards entertainment and work productivity than anything else. Here's hoping they use Muse legitimately and not steal as much data as possible as their earlier efforts.

It wasn’t tested using Bleeding Edge, it trained using it.

and when they say trained … I can imagine all the fine print saying all our interactions with games are being tracked and stored and used to develop AI …

@Markatron84 Huh? I'm talking about new updates and characters/maps. It's weird to publicly mention it with Bleeding Edge...

Well the issue likely is game need to be tested for backwards compatibility and using AI to start thing going might be a help. The AI could try to test the backwards compatibility then it might return possible problems that programmers can zoom in on to get it running.

@OldGamer999, we get it, you kinda sounding like a broken record at this point

@themightyant it’ll probably be something like just stick in the disc and it’ll play the game akin to ai developed emulation, which would be cool. Not sure how it’d work for digital games though.

and people are hating it because it’s ai, but ai is staying like it or not

also, i’m sure people are probably to find some other thing to freak out over in a few weeks

also is playstation is using ai for their upscaling?

https://www.thegamer.com/xbox-announces-generative-ai-muse-everyone-hates-it/
not everyone is a fan, in fact, i think this is giving sony ponies more ammo to smear xbox

i understand that for some people xbox should just accept victories but come on, it’s not that serious

@themightyant "the licenses to the games we bought are for Xbox not PC"
Your PC is an Xbox now, remember? As are all of your devices.
(Microsoft is truly playing 4D chess!)

To be honest, i just want to go a few months without any negative xbox news from any media outlet, they’re basically foaming at the mouth of any negative xbox news, but if playstation does it, it would probably barely be a blip on a radar

@Utena-mobile But it's better than any solution Nintendo or Sony have come up with so far.

@Elbow I'm not sure it's that strange. Not to sound facetious, but they're probably testing this stuff out with Bleeding Edge of all games because if nothing comes of it nobody will care.

@donv2135 I'm no techspert, but I'm sure AI is at the root of all upscaling technology, not just PSSR.

Hopefully they bring back dishwasher dead samurai and dishwasher vampire smiles 😎

Well MS might not be able to sell the newly made backwards compatibility games but they could possibly be added to game pass. Even if MS didn't have full right to sell the game I am sure they could find a way to place them on game pass only perhaps.

Lol at the people falling for Philnocchio's lies again.

Summary of muse by Michael Cook - an expert in the use of AI in game creation at Kings College London.

*Muse was fed 7 years of video footage of Bleeding Edge and can now predic what will happen if elements of a level are changed, it will predict what players playing this new layout would look like.

Useful for developers to predict what making changes will look like and how it will affect player experience, in theory.

In other words, the idea is Muse could be used as a shortcut tool for predicting and visualising how gameplay might adapt to a particular input by a developer. And, crucially, that developer is still a human.

It is not and will never be capable of coming up with ideas of it's own or creating new games it does not have footage of. The tool would require signficant video footage of gameplay of the specific game before it could begin to predict outcomes as it does for Bleeding Edge.

Cook states this is impractical and may never be fully useful in game development.

Cook also stated that Spencer's comments around game preservation were "idiotic" and it would never work.

Xbox is doing some pretty great stuff for accessibility. For instance, one of my buddies at work grabs the old station laptop, connects his controller and plays cod black ops 6 at work on the regular. I can now log in on my phone and play baldurs gate 3 from my own purchased game library and it is essentially a play anywhere title now. This is just a taste of ways you can enjoy your Xbox titles and it's only going to get better. It's really cool and I look forward to more innovation.