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Doom, but make it medieval?
Bethesda world premiere first.
First COD game coming to Game Pass Day One.
Treyarch and Raven are working on it. 10 years since COD was last in an Xbox show.
We’ll look at the campaign, multiplayer and zombies later.
It is set in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, where “the truth is not what it seems”.
This appears to be the full reveal trailer, complete with The Prodigy as a backing track.
Oh, we are starting with Call of Duty, right? Start the way we want to end it.
Here we go!
It is also a question whether Xbox will also mention the controversies that have arisen in recent months. A lot has happened: massive layoffs at Activision, the severing of ties with Toys for Bob, the cancellation of a new Blizzard survival game, and the incredibly sad and shocking closure of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks.
Only 5 minutes left until the showcase, you can tune in here:
The other pretty sure bet is that Bethesda Game Studios will give us a good look at Starfield: Shattered Space, the first expansion for its space RPG. We’ve just had a big May update for the game, which introduced a ton of quality of life features, so much so that many of us have gone back to the game – mainly due to the removal of overload – but details on the DLC are rare.
There is also STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. With the release date currently set for September 5, I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a new trailer today during the Xbox Games Showcase, giving more details about this highly anticipated new game.
State of Decay 3 should also be a contender to appear at the Xbox Games Showcase today. There was a leak seemingly confirming that a trailer will drop today, which is good because we haven’t heard from developer Undead Labs in years.
Let’s take another look at that reveal trailer, shall we?
Naturally, all eyes will be on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which was only fully revealed with its title earlier this year. It currently has a loose release date for this fall, but I imagine this will be fully confirmed during today’s showcase.
The game’s story, which is being developed at MachineGames, takes place between the films Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, circa 1937. It starts at the iconic Marshall College where Jones teaches, but from there we travel around the globe for answers, including the Vatican, Egypt and the Himalayas.
The gameplay looks great – as you’d expect from FPS experts MachineGames – with plenty of stealth and puzzle solving in between taking out Nazis with your gun and whip. While most of it is first-person, the game will occasionally switch back to third-person, so you can admire Indy in all its glory.
Another from last year’s showcase was Clockwork Revolution. Another really cool trailer that gave serious BioShock vibes. No more details about this since then.
Another game that was first shown at last year’s Summer Game Fest Xbox Showcase was South of Midnight.
Honestly one of my favorite trailers for a while, it has an eerily cool vibe with promises of “a fantastical and macabre third-person action adventure set in the American Deep South.”
So what about those games, huh? Let’s leave Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 out of this chat, because we absolutely know it will get a full reveal during the special post-show Direct.
My personal choice would be to see more of Fable. We got that epic full trailer at last year’s event, complete with Richard Ayoade as Dave the Giant and ‘vegetable lover’, but we haven’t heard anything about the game since.
We got a glimpse of the gameplay from this trailer, some magic and combat, but we did get a great feeling that new developer Playground Games (of Forza Horizon fame) will keep the British sense of humor that has always been a staple of the game has been. series.
In his predictions for this Xbox Games Showcase, our very own Xbox expert (Xpert?) Josh West said what he wants to see a little less conversation and a little more action, please.
“As I look at the lineup of upcoming Xbox Series -quality on console; the framework to take online multiplayer to new, untouchable heights; and a commitment to delivering the best experiences within the ‘core’ shooter, role-playing and racing niches. Unfortunately, that message was diluted over time as Xbox waged a war for input and spent a generational cycle dealing with the aftermath.”
So now we really just need some games.
However, the report has it that this snazzy new universal controller will be sold standalone, but will also debut with the Xbox Series X refresh that was also detailed in the leak.
The big advantages of that leak were that it would ditch the chunky cube design in favor of a tall cylindrical shape that forgoes the disk drive entirely.
It will still have a power button, a pairing button, and a USB-C port, but it’s unclear how much size difference there will be between the two based on the concept designs alone.
We also don’t know what the price difference will be: good or bad. The docs say it’ll be “the same great price,” but these are again from 2022. The Xbox Series 399.
According to that report, it would also feature broad “build improvements” and “enhanced longevity,” with things like new modular thumbsticks, haptic feedback, quieter buttons, and more.
The documents stated it was a May 2024 launch, but since those documents were from May 2022, things have undoubtedly changed since then.
Personally, I think it’s pretty unlikely that Xbox will announce new hardware today, but hey, I’ve been wrong before. Personally, I’d like to see the controller refresh as detailed in the documents leaked as part of the Activision acquisition.
It is said to keep the same design as the current pads, but is quite an upgrade in terms of features. It will reportedly have Xbox Wireless 2, Bluetooth 5.2, and Direct-to-Cloud functionality to improve overall connectivity and reduce latency no matter what you’re connected to.
But more importantly for my wireless-loving ass, it apparently includes a rechargeable, swappable battery as standard. Goodbye AA batteries, get away.
Let’s start with the biggest rumor, but also potentially most interesting, and those are the reports that Xbox is about to unveil a portable Xbox console.
Now it may be a bit far-fetched, but rumors of an Xbox handheld have been circulating for a number of years.
What’s not clear is what form that might take. A mini-series S? An Android streaming device? A cloud-based dedicated console? Or a real Game Pass-powered Steam Deck rival?
Now myself and our hardware editor, Phil, agree that when an Xbox handheld finally shows up at the Xbox Games Showcase, we hope it isn’t a PlayStation Portal rival. I just want to be able to access my Game Pass games on the plane, train, or wherever I want. Please.
With about two hours to go until the Xbox Games Showcase, let’s take a little stroll through the Xbox Gardens to see what we could be expect to show up at today’s event.