Summary
Here’s a summary of what was shown tonight for the Xbox One X:
- Gameplay from Halo Infinite’s campaign
- A quick look at a new Forza Motorsport
- Zombie multiplayer game State of Decay 3 announced
- A beautiful new fantasy nature game from Rare: Everwild
- Updates on Dontnod’s emotionally-charged Tell Me Why and Ori: Will o’ the Wisps, both coming to Xbox Series X
- A new first-person fantasy RPG from Obsidian: Avowed
- As Dusk Falls, a striking-looking narrative adventure
- A psychedelic montage from mind-melting platformer Psychonauts 2
- Destiny 2: Beyond Light will be optimised for Series X
- A quick announcement of STALKER 2
- Warhammer: Darktide, a four-player co-operative shooter
- Tetris Effect Connected, an update to the transcendental Tetris Effect
- The Gunk, a science-fiction cleanup adventure
- A look at Bloober Team’s The Medium, in which you play in two realities at the same time
- Sega shows Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis
- Military shooter CrossfireX will be out this year
- Storybook fantasy game Fable is being revived by British studio Playground Games
It was a quickfire showcase designed to show the range of games coming to Xbox Series X later this year and next - but apart from Halo, we didn’t see anything in-depth on any of them. Here’s hoping we’ll see more soon.
Updated
Thank you for watching with us! Next stop: release dates and prices!
Microsoft was clearly keen to emphasise that everyone who subscribes to Xbox Game Pass will be getting access to all of those games on Xbox Series X - and people who already play games such as Sea of Thieves can enjoy the graphical upgrade on the new console for free. Can’t argue with that value for £7.99 a month, especially how expensive next-generation gaming is likely to become.
Updated
No word on a launch date or a price for the console itself, of course - and we had no word about the PlayStation 5’s launch date or price last month, either, so we don’t know exactly how the two are going to be squaring up later this year.
That’s our lot it seems. We’ve seen a quickfire barrage of games, some new, some we knew about already, all of them looking impressive on the Series X. It was quite overwhelming but the obvious standouts were Fable, Halo Infinite and As Dusk Falls, for me.
Updated
A new Fable from Playground Games
It IS Fable! As has long been rumoured the torch has passed to British studio Playground Games. The trailer shows the series’ trademark verdant fantastical England and a touch of promising humour. It’s super brief, but nonetheless exciting to know that we’ll be back in Albion soon.
Updated
There’ll be more to share later this year, but before that, there’s one last premiere... is it Fable?
CrossfireX is a fast-paced military competitive shooter about the world’s dominant private military corporations duking it out. That’s out this year.
Updated
Sega is bringing action-RPG Phantasy Star Online to Xbox Series X with Phantasy Star Online 2 : New Genesis. This upbeat epic music is bringing back many happy early-00s Japanese gaming memories. That’ll be out in 2021.
Updated
“It all starts with a dead girl.” Oh good. This is a supernatural noir mystery in which you play in two realities at the same time. That’s immensely ambitious. It’s Bloober Team’s The Medium, out later this year.
Updated
Another sci-fi game now, featuring an alien world covered in gunk and monsters and a lone explorer trying to clean it up. It is actually called The Gunk, and it’s from Thunderful, the creators of Steamworld Dig and Steamworld Heist.
Updated
Next is a new version of the absolutely stonking Tetris Effect called Tetris Effect: Connected, which will launch with the console later this year. If you are struggling to get excited about Tetris I fully understand, but that game is TRANSCENDENT and I will absolutely play this.
Updated
And hot on its heels comes Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, a four-player Warhammer co-op game that has you facing off against hordes of enemies. That’ll be out 2021.
Updated
Another premiere now: STALKER 2, sequel to the beloved horror-tinged PC game.
Updated
Bungie will release Destiny 2: Beyond Light on Xbox Game Pass, designed to take full advantage of the Series X’s technical power. Given that this was already an extremely good-looking game I wasn’t expecting to be floored by the improvement, but, wow. Bungie’s intense shooter is very well-suited to showing off the hardware. It’s out November 10.
Updated
Psychonauts 2 from Double Fine looks as psychedelic, weird, colourful and heartfelt as I could possibly hope for from a sequel to one of history’s most under-appreciated games. I am loving the 60s/70s inspired music and trippy aesthetic.
Updated
Here is a new trailer for Grounded, which is basically Honey I Shrunk The Survival Shooter...
INTERIOR/NIGHT’s new Americana narrative-driven game As Dusk Falls looks frankly incredible, with quasi-realistic animation and amazing performances.
Updated
“We have always known war. It forged our empire... turned heroes into queens and kings and decimated our foes.” I’m getting big Skyrim energy from this first-person fantasy RPG teaser: Avowed. It’s a brief tease for now.
Updated
Obsidian is putting together an expansion pack for its tongue-in-cheek sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds, and its four-player Honey I Shrunk the Kids survival game Grounded is out soon. But here’s some bigger news from the studio...
Updated
Ori and the Will o’ the Wisps is being updated for Xbox Series X - excellent news, as it’s one of the best games released in ages, an all-time great platformer. Beautiful, too (more so on a next-gen console)
Updated
Here’s a new look at Dontnod’s Tell Me Why, about a trans man and his sister revisiting their childhood hometown to come to terms with their past. Chapter one will be out on August 27th.
Updated
Rare reveals Everwild
A new game from Rare with gorgeous cel-shading and magical forest vibes: Everwild, featuring an “untamed world for you to explore and lose yourself in”. You play as an Eternal, a kind of nature mage.
Updated
A brief announcement trailer for zombie multiplayer game State of Decay 3, featuring undead deer.
Forza Motorsport revving up again
After a brief look at State of Decay 3, with a young woman tracking wolves through a frozen landscape, Xbox chief Phil Spencer pops up to present the next Forza Motorsport!
Updated
Phil Spencer is here to tell us that we’re going to see what 9 of Xbox’s 15 game studios are working on. Everything shown today will be included in Xbox Game Pass, so subscribers can play it all for the price of their monthly membership.
A look at Halo Infinite's campaign
A toothy, hostile alien hologram is telling Chief that the humans have lost the war here, and the planet’s ring weapon is under alien control. (Can you tell I lost track of Halo lore some years back?) That’s it for our first look at Halo Infinite’s campaign - it’s several times larger than the last two Halo games, say the developers at 343, and will arrive this winter. Here’s the footage.
Updated
A forcefield shield and a grapple give the combat some extra variety here, as Chief breaks out the plasma weapons and goes after an anti-aircraft gun. I know this is a demo, but there’s a lot of blasting here and not so much of the clever enemy manoeuvring that made the early Halo games feel so dynamic.
It has begun! Looks like we’re starting with what everyone wants to see: Halo Infinite. Master Chief stands behind a pilot making an emergency landing on an alien-occupied planet - this is the pilot who found Chief in space in one of the earlier trailers. Within a couple of minutes we’re in the iconic Warthog, panning around a 3D map of the planet and stopping to blast some grunts and elites with a pistol. Looks comfortingly familiar, doesn’t it?
Updated
And we’re off!
I’m looking forward to seeing more of Halo Infinite. I have extremely fond memories of playing 16-player original Halo at parties in my teens, where people would bring extra Xboxes and turn a room into a complex tangle of LAN cables and TVs. (Yes, I went to very cool parties.)
Updated
So what do we know about Xbox Series X? Well, it has that eight-core custom AMD Zen 2 central processor and RDNA 2 graphics chipset handling 12TFLOPs of data. The system is designed to deliver games in 4K at 60 FPS with support for up to 120 FPS, with real-time ray-tracing effects, too. 8K video support is also expected.
The console has 16GB of memory, and one terabyte solid state drive. Microsoft is also introducing its Velocity Architecture concept which is a set of firmware and hardware features set to cut down on loading and waiting times in-system – so games should load super fast, as should new levels and missions. It looks quite boxy compared to the flamboyant PS4, but that’s fine.
Updated
The question around Fable is, of course, who would be developing it. Some bad corporate decisions in the early days of the Xbox One had Fable’s original creators at Lionhead working on a 4-v-1 live multiplayer game, Fable Legends - but then that game was cancelled and the studio was shut down. My money would be on another British studio taking up the mantle.
We probably shouldn’t read too much into this but Fable has been trending on Twitter all day. It’s been TEN years since Fable III, oh my goodness.
Phil Spencer has transformed the Xbox business since he took it over in 2014, turning it back towards a games-first approach rather than the totally confused TV-sports hybrid “entertainment hub” idea that made the Xbox One’s announcement and launch so messy. Of course, this being the video games industry, the actual effects of those high-level changes at Microsoft have taken several years to percolate through and become apparent. We’ll see the results tonight.
Updated
In terms of third-party games, we’ll maybe see Fifa 21 from EA and something new on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla from Ubisoft. From Software is working on Elden Ring, but it could be a while longer before we see anything more on that – especially as George R. R. Martin is involved.
There should also be a smattering of indie titles and unexpected treats. In his recent blogpost, Xbox chief Phil Spencer promised that the Xbox Series X era would see more games from diverse creators – let’s see if that starts today.
Updated
So what can we expect to see in the next hour? Microsoft has made it clear this afternoon’s livestream is going to be all about games, so no more hardware revelations. First up, we know we’re going to see the first campaign footage from Halo: Infinite, the latest title in the shooter series and a direct sequel to Halo 5: Guardians. Other than that, there should be plenty from Microsoft’s first-party studios – we’re expecting more from Rare’s intriguing adventure Everwild, and perhaps new footage of Ninja Theory’s Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga. Double Fine might also show off Psychonauts 2, and Obsidian has its miniaturised squad shooter, Grounded. But – BUT – the big thing we’re hoping for is the first official reveal for the long-rumoured Fable sequel…
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the Xbox Series X games showcase. After Sony’s very strong PlayStation 5 event last month, the pressure is on now for Microsoft to show an exciting line-up. Of course, we already know what the Xbox Series X looks like (a big black box), so today is going to be all about its games. The livestream kicks off in about half an hour, so we’ll indulge in a bit of informed speculation beforehand.
Updated
