When owners of either the Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X consoles play Minecraft, they are actually playing a version of Mojang's hit sandbox game that was made for the older Xbox One, via backward compatibility. Now there's word that a version of Minecraft made specifically for Microsoft's current Xbox consoles may be coming soon.
Both the German USK and the US ESRB video game ratings board, (via Eurogamer), have new listings for an Xbox Series X/S version of Minecraft, which likely means an official announcement from Mojang and Microsoft is imminent.
Many fans have been waiting for a version of the game that could launch natively on Microsoft's current consoles, so it could take advantage of the more advanced hardware in both devices.
In 2019, Microsoft and NVIDIA announced support for ray tracing visuals in the Windows 10 version of Minecraft. At the time Microsoft said it also planned to add ray tracing effects to "future platforms that support DirectX Raytracing." That was certainly a reference to the then-officially unannounced Xbox Series X console.
Way back in 2017, Microsoft and Mojang announced plans to launch what they called the "'Super Duper Graphics Pack" for Minecraft, to boost its visuals to 4K resolution. Two years later, it was announced that the development of the graphics pack had been halted. At the time, Microsoft and Mojang stated they were not "happy with how the pack performed across devices."
Since then, the game has received a number of free updates, including the most recent 1.20 version, also known as the Trails and Tales update. Among other things, the update brought the game to Chromebook-based notebooks for the first time as a native game app. Hopefully, we won't have to wait too long for the native Xbox Series X and S versions.
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