After Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One S at last year’s E3 presentation, they continued to tease an even newer console, slated to release late the following year in Holiday 2017. Project Scorpio has been the subject of many hyped Xbox gamers’ discussions lately, wondering if E3 2017 would net them another look at the console, as well as how the system actually runs. Late yesterday evening, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer tweeted after coming out of a meeting with the team working on Project Scorpio and let his Twitter followers know what he thought of the hardware so far.
Great day, Scorpio update w/ team. Played my first games on early Scorpio unit. Games played great, console looked right, proud of the team
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) January 24, 2017
Spencer’s full tweet gives us a lot of hope but not a lot of detail on what’s actually happening with Project Scorpio. What we do know is that the team is already beginning to iterate hardware designs, by Spencer saying he got to play on an “early Scorpio unit”. With hardware this far ahead of release, Spencer’s remark that the “console looked right” is a little out-of-place, but Xbox has likely been working on Project Scorpio covertly for quite a while and are taking this year to finale hardware and software, rather than continue to develop it new.
Following his tweet, Twitter user @Crypt_Concepts mentioned that their excitement for Project Scorpio is with Ryzen, AMD’s latest processor architecture unveiled at CES earlier this month. They follow up, saying they “[c]an’t wait to […] see difference in base X1 game compared to Scorpio version”. Spencer replied, saying that he isn’t aware of any full games being brought up this early for entirely new hardware, and that doing it this way allows teams to fine-tune to final hardware, rather than change-ridden development units.