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Xbox One X games showcase: Microsoft reveals Halo: Infinite and more - live
Xbox Series X games showcase: Microsoft reveals Halo: Infinite and more - live
(32 minutes later)
Join us as we cover the all the announcements from the Xbox One X games showcase live from 5pm BST/9am PDT
Join us as we cover the all the announcements from the Xbox One X games showcase live from 5pm BST/9am PDT
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.
Sega is bringing action-RPG Phantasy Star Online to Xbox One 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.
A brief announcement trailer for zombie multiplayer game State of Decay 3, featuring undead deer.
“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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another premiere now: STALKER 2, sequel to the beloved horror-tinged PC game.
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?
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.
And we’re off!
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.
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.)
Here is a new trailer for Grounded, which is basically Honey I Shrunk The Survival Shooter...
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.
INTERIOR/NIGHT’s new Americana narrative-driven game As Dusk Falls looks frankly incredible, with quasi-realistic animation and amazing performances.
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.
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.
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.
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 One 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 One 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.
