Age of Empires: Castle Siege has just joined Microsoft Solitaire Collection as another Windows PC game that now supports the new, more connected, Windows 10 Xbox gaming experience. Before the arrival of Windows 10, users playing Windows games could still earn Xbox Achievements and use Xbox Live features like cloud saves and friends lists but all of the activity would be restricted to the older Xbox gaming network used on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone and wouldn’t appear at all on the newer Xbox One console.
With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft has begun to transition all of their PC gaming titles to the newer version of Xbox Live. Microsoft Solitaire Collection was the first game to do so and now broadcasts player activity to users’ Xbox One and Windows 10 Xbox app activity feeds. Its previous Xbox Achievements have also been replaced with the bigger, more visual ones used on Xbox One games.
Age of Empires: Castle Siege has just received a similar upgrade. Xbox One and Windows 10 gamers can now see when friends are playing it, the Achievements are bigger and now appear in activity feeds, and even the game’s icon has been updated to the new style used by Microsoft Solitaire Collection with the darker green and a centered “Xbox Live” logo as opposed to the basic “Xbox” traditionally placed on the left side of the colored band (though for some reason the old icon is still in use in several places such as in the Store app).
Like with a lot of Xbox Live games, Age of Empires: Castle Siege supports cloud saves and syncing between different versions. The game will save progress between Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows Phone devices, and in a rather exceptional move, will also sync with save data on an iOS device and allow users to log in with their Xbox Live account to earn Xbox Achievements. Earning Xbox Achievements on an iPhone? These are crazy times.
Naturally there are hundreds of existing games designed for Windows 8 that need to be upgraded to the new Windows 10 Xbox format and Windows Phone games will most likely go through the same transition period once Windows 10 Mobile launches over the next few months. Microsoft has yet to announce any timeframe for these necessary app updates. Upgrading so many games is obviously time and resource consuming and even the new Microsoft Solitaire Collection, which launched alongside Windows 10, is still lacking basic features like in-game leaderboards and deck themes.
Several current and upcoming Xbox One console games will also be coming to Windows 10 PCs throughout 2015 and 2016 including Killer Instinct, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Gigantic, and Fable Legends. A version of Minecraft specially designed for Windows 10 called, Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta is currently available. With the Windows 10 operating system coming to the Xbox One console before the end of 2015, it’s entirely possible that some Windows 10 PC games could make their way over to the Xbox One as well.
How are you enjoying the more unified Xbox experience? Are there any specific games that you’d like to see updated next? Let us know in the comments below.
