Gamescom’s showfloor doesn’t open until tomorrow but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from getting things off to a great start. Playstation and Nintendo are largely sitting Europe’s biggest game show out this year, but it seems like the Xbox One’s best announcements have wound up being timed closer to this show than E3. The hour and a half long briefing contained a ton of new announcements and gameplay demonstrations. In fact there’s so much anticipated information here you wouldn’t be blamed for forgetting that the company was at E3 at all this year.
I’ve cherry picked my favorites below and included the entire conference at the bottom of the post.
Windows 10 For Xbox One / Backward Compatibility
It’s already been announced in the past that the Xbox One would receive a dashboard update that would be powered at least in some capacity by Windows 10. Microsoft has now announced that you can expect that update to arrive in November, along with the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility shown at E3 in June.
If you’re like me and have removed your old Xbox 360 from your living room setup you might be disappointed every month when Games with Gold reveals a 360 game for one of its titles. Microsoft has now announced that any future 360 games included in the Gold program will be backwards compatible, so that solves that problem as well.
Quantum Break
Quantum Break now has a cast list, actual gameplay to show, and a release date of April 5th, 2016. Hopefully this Remedy title doesn’t take a page from Alan Wake and give us five years worth of delays.
Thimbleweed Park
Of course everyone wants to talk about Quantum Breaks, and Halos, and Tomb Raiders, but let’s not ignore this thirty second trailer for Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick’s new Maniac Mansion-esque point and click adventure. Gilbert is often overshadowed by fellow LucasArts alum Tim Schafer and it’s interesting to see the two take completely different approaches to revitalizing the adventure game market. There’s a big difference between Schafer’s grandiose Broken Age and Gilbert’s minimalist retro approach. If this is half as good as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island then we should be just fine.
Crackdown 3
Crackdown 3 was noticeably absent from E3 this year and looking at the pre-alpha footage in its trailer it’s not hard to see why. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t look bad, but it also doesn’t look nearly as done as might have been expected. No release date on this one, but if I were a betting man I’d guess Christmas 2016.
Dark Souls 3
Bloodborne, I love you, you were great, really, but now it’s time for Dark Souls to come back. Shields, backstabs, dragons engulfing you in fire. Yep, that’s the Souls game I know and love. I’m fairly certain this is the first gameplay that we’ve seen to date and it’s looking like it’s going to land right on the money when the game hits next year.
Scalebound
Scalebound’s trailer goes the Crackdown route and shows off some fairly un-optimized gameplay. The game is slated for Holiday 2016 so it’s perfectly normal to expect that it wouldn’t be running smooth as butter.
Personally it’s nice to see a game demo that’s so clearly actual gameplay even if the character and theme of the game don’t really appeal to me. The reveal of four player co-op is a cherry on top for people looking forward to this one next year.
Ark: Survival Evolved
If Scalebound’s trailer is refreshingly honest then Ark’s trailer is a bold faced lie. I will be completely dumbfounded if the survival game that struggles on even the finest PCs can run that smoothly and look that good on the Xbox One.
Having said that, Ark is a lot of fun, and I think this is the first time one of Steam’s Early Access survival darlings will have made the jump to a console. There’s no way to describe how easy it is to get sucked into these games. Have fun Xbox owners, you’re not going to have any time for Halo now.
Halo Wars 2
Even though it’s the best selling console RTS game of all time, I can’t help but say I never expected Halo Wars to get a sequel. Ensemble Studios is out on account of no longer existing and instead the game will be developed by Creative Assembly, aka the team behind the Total War games.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider and Halo 5 are actually going to let the Xbox One go out on a pretty high note for 2015. The system has easily been my least used out of the three major consoles and it’s nice to finally have a couple games come along to change that. Today’s gameplay demo takes Lara out of the snow she’s been trapped in all year and shows some of the game’s rainier locales. I don’t know what else to say here, it looks great, I can’t wait to play it.
And the rest…
And for me, that’s pretty much it. There’s a bunch more to see in the full media briefing. If you’re so inclined, you can watch the entire thing here:
