Phil Spencer was adamant, there will be no Scorpio exclusive games. Â But it seems this doesn’t include VR titles.
VR is something that will be unique to Scorpio in the Xbox One family, as the other consoles (The Xbox One and Xbox One S) just can’t cope with Microsoft’s vision of VR. Â Obviously, any VR titles are, by their nature, going to be exclusive to that console within the Xbox One family.
Aaron Greenberg’s interview with Engadget expands on this message. “…we’re not going to have console-exclusive games for Project Scorpio. It’s one ecosystem — whether you have an Xbox One S or Project Scorpio, we don’t want anyone to be left behind, Now, with the power and capabilities we have, we’ll be able to do high-fidelity VR. Now, that space, we don’t think of that as console gaming, we think of that as high-fidelity VR, and so with the VR experiences those will be new things that you will get on Project Scorpio.”
So VR isn’t gaming, it’s VR. Â It’s not the easiest message to get across the general public and it will be interesting to see where we are in 2018, once the Scorpio is released and, presumably, there are some VR titles out there for it.
Of course, Microsoft have yet to reveal any plans for VR hardware, though rumours persist of an Oculus Rift team up. It certainly seems that their interested in pushing this technology for their 4K console, though, possibly driven by the current pre-order success of Playstation VR’s hardware.
It may be that the ‘VR experiences’ they are planning will be similar to Square Enix’s forthcoming Tomb Raider on PS4, which contains a VR exclusive element, or EA’s Battlefront VR game which comes as a free add-on. Â If that’s the case, then it’s easy enough for Microsoft to continue their ‘no exclusive’ line while still providing VR experiences, but whether the demand for more graphical and processor intensive games pushes them to rethink this remains to be seen.
