(Microsoft press image)
Microsoft released a new pre-recorded Xbox Showcase on Sunday morning as part of this year’s Summer Game Fest event, which also marked new CEO Asha Sharma’s first big public event since taking over the company’s gaming division.
Back in February when Sharma took over Xbox, some analysts, including me, openly wondered if she was there to shut down the department. Instead, Sharma appears determined to give Xbox a shot in the arm, telling Bloomberg News earlier this week that she aims to make Xbox “the number one gaming and entertainment company” by 2030.
For a product that seems to be permanently stuck in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, and which is facing at least one significant consumer boycott, that’s a frankly awe-inspiring level of ambition. That set up high expectations for this year’s Showcase.
Instead, Sharma and Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty seemed content to let their games do the talking. The focus of this year’s hour-long Showcase was firmly on new and upcoming releases from the Xbox studio network and its partners, as part of a low-key celebration of the Xbox project’s 25th anniversary.
The Showcase began with a new look at gameplay for the forthcoming Gears of War: E-Day (Oct. 6). The Gears of War series has, since the beginning, been focused on the conflict between humanity and a subterranean species called the Locust Horde.
E-Day is a prequel set on the first day of that conflict (“Emergence Day”), 14 years before the original Gears of War. It once again puts the player in the role of the series’ traditional protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago.
We’ve known that E-Day was coming for a couple of years, and Gears has traditionally been one of the bigger franchises in Xbox’s network. The big surprise here isn’t the game itself, but rather the quiet announcement that E-Day is an Xbox console exclusive.
This is a big reversal of policy from Microsoft, which made headlines over the last couple of years by deliberately publishing several of its first-party games on competitive platforms such as the PlayStation 5. While this appeared to be financially successful for the company, it’s also traditionally been the kind of move that video game companies (i.e. Sega) do right before they leave the hardware market.
Now Xbox is at least attempting to chart a new course. Both E-Day and the forthcoming steampunk action-RPG Clockwork Revolution (2027) were specifically identified as Xbox console exclusives. While several other first-party Xbox titles weren’t, including the Fable reboot and Halo: Campaign Evolved, any move towards console exclusivity is a big departure for modern Xbox.
The company later specifically confirmed via Xbox Wire that E-Day and Clockwork are not timed exclusives. For the foreseeable future, if you want to play either of these games on a console, you’ll have to own Xbox hardware to do so.
This suggests that Sharma’s Xbox may be moving back towards more proven market strategies for the platform, as opposed to the Spencer/Bond tactic of attempting to redefine the terms of success or the product itself.
Fable may be the next biggest news out of this year’s Showcase, as it’s been suspected of being vaporware for several years now. The original games were some of the biggest Xbox exclusives, as famously open-ended fantasy RPGs that allowed you to play as a hero, a villain, or something in between.
The series has been on hiatus since Fable III in 2010, so Microsoft got fans’ attention back in 2020 when it announced plans for a reboot. Then, nothing happened for quite some time. Every major press event at Xbox would feature some small piece of information about Fable, just as proof of life, before the project vanished again.
Now we actually have a release date for the new Fable: Feb. 23, 2027. In addition, the Showcase trailer marks the debut of Fable’s villain, Isabel, who’s played by British actress Hayley Atwell (Captain America).
Speaking of projects that seemed like they’d never come out: this year’s Showcase featured a new trailer for Seattle-based Undead Labs’ State of Decay 3.
This co-op zombie survival game, set in the post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest, has been in development for years, but a 2022 scandal about its toxic work culture nearly sank Undead Labs before it could be released. It’s frankly shocking that Microsoft never pulled the plug. Instead, State of Decay 3 is coming in 2027.
The Master Chief, now in Unreal Engine 5. (Microsoft press image)
This summer, we’ll finally see the next project from the rebranded Halo Studios, as the Unreal Engine remake of the original Halo is coming on July 28. In addition to the remake ofHalo’s story,Campaign Evolved will feature three new missions set one year before the game’s events, which team the Master Chief with fan-favorite character Sergeant Major Avery Johnson.
Other first-party news out of the Xbox Showcase includes:
- To celebrate the Xbox’s 25th anniversary, Microsoft plans to release a new edition of the Xbox Series X in November which features a translucent green shell and a matching controller. This is meant to recall the limited-edition Halo Xbox that released in 2004.
- This year’s Call of Duty is a fourth entry in its Modern Warfare subseries. It features a new mode, DMZ, set in the fictional Hajin Exclusion Zone in Korea, which is the setting for a high-stakes extraction shooter.
- Mojang Studios’ Minecraft Dungeons II is coming out on Sept. 29.
- Activision plans to revive the Spyro series, featuring one of the most recognizable mascots of the 2000s, with A Realm Beyond, coming in the spring of 2027.
- Ninja Theory’s award-winning Hellblade series is getting a third entry next year, simply titled Senua.
- Last year’s Doom: The Dark Ages will receive a DLC expansion, Revelations, on July 7.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has a new “world update” planned for July 4, which is meant to “celebrate the beauty of the United States” by adding multiple national parks to the game’s environments. Now you can fly through an ultra-realistic Grand Canyon or over the Dry Tortugas.
(Xbox press image)
Announcements from Xbox partners included:
- Atlus debuted a remake of its popular Japanese urban-fantasy RPG Persona 4 and, after a long period of silence on the topic, has confirmed it’s making Persona 6. While nothing is known about P6 aside from its existence, that’s still new information.
- As a celebration of the Castlevania series’ 40th anniversary, Konami plans to publish Belmont’s Curse, the first new entry in the core series since 2008’s Order of Ecclesia. It follows Rose Belmont as she and her father Trevor investigate a monster attack on the streets of Paris in 1499. It’s due out on Oct. 15.
- The French developer Asobo Studio revealed another trailer for its forthcoming prequel Resonance, which is a new entry in the Plague Tale series. These action-horror games, set in 14th-century France, deal with a supernatural take on the Black Plague and its protagonists’ attempts to survive it.
- Sega plans to revive its Crazy Taxi racing series with a new entry, World Tour, coming next year. Within minutes of the reveal, fans noticed that World Tour‘s Steam page features an AI-usage disclaimer, which has already begun a mild furor on Western social media.
- Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja revealed Wo Long 2, a sequel to its fantasy action-game, set during China’s Three Kingdoms period.
- Serenity Forge, an indie studio that specializes in both weird horror and “cozy” games, seems to be splitting the difference with its newest project. Vivarium is an anime-inspired, hand-animated game about life inside a small town… which is contained in a glass jar in what appears to be an abandoned house. It’s due out next year.
