Xbox had a presentation. It has things… So let’s talk about it! Sony’s may have sucked, but maybe Microsoft has the goods. I watched Summer Game Fest in part which was pretty lame (I mostly just skipped through it to see if any interesting announcements happened… they didn’t with a BIG maybe on Sonic), and the other presentations were so bad I didn’t even skip through them. This is why there’s no E3, because no one has shit to announce anyways, apparently. Can’t wait for Nintendo to also announce nothing. This is also why I didn’t post about anything else, but I kinda have to make an exception for the big 3, at minimum.

So let’s see if Xbox has anything at all to show. This time, I’m starting with the lowlights and slowly building up to what is certainly a ton of highlights… right? Let’s go! Oh and I guess I’ll mention Starfield in its own section since it goes it’s own section of the showcase, so it’s in none of the lowlight-highlight sections.

Let’s go?

The lowlights

Fable. They showed no gameplay, thus there’s no reason to be excited about this. No release date either, so it’s probably next year. What a stupid trailer. No release date shown in the trailer unless I somehow fell asleep as it was being shown.

South of Midnight. This gave even less to be excited about than Fable, since at least Fable is a franchise that exists. This is a new thing, but we got literally nothing to latch on to. Namely, no gameplay, but also no characters or anything interesting at all. And no release date! Why was this here!?

Star Wars Outlaws… No gameplay, 3 games in a row, wow. These first 3 lowlights were the first 3 games shown, with no gameplay. This is actually stupid. But hey gameplay will be shown TOMORROW at some Ubisoft thing… So why waste time in this presentation when you could’ve just fucking waited? I have no reason to be excited for this without gameplay, so this goes in lowlights (plus it’s a post-Disney Star Wars product so… chances of being good aren’t super high). Oh and it’s 2024.

Hellblade 2. I mean, they showed nice-looking graphics, but they forgot to show GAMEPLAY. So excitement continues being at 0 considering the only gameplay they have shown since this game was announced 4 years ago was basically the game playing itself since your input obviously had no effect on the events on screen. 2024.

Fallout 76 still exists. I don’t know why it does, or what idiot still plays it… but it does. I have no idea why this was here, legitimately.

ESO expansion update… okay? Like, I don’t know, whenever I hear of anyone actually playing ESO I’m surprised. That game just gives the impression of the MMO no one plays.

Overwatch 1.0.1 getting some content updates. After telling us the big awesome story mode we were going to get is no longer a thing, the excitement level for anything Overwatch related should be below zero for everyone. The game became crap long before “2” was a thing anyways.

Jusant is an extremely shitty-looking “let me play this game for you” climbing platformer thing that reminds me of the brain-dead “platforming” of the Uncharted games, which is just holding the direction the game wants you do and pressing the jump button when the game wants you to. This just looks awful. 2023 though…

The Xbox Series S is getting a new version with more storage. Why? They should be rapidly phasing OUT the Series S, not making new fucking versions of that stupid console.

The neutrals

33 Immortals is a top-down 2D action game with 33-player multiplayer co-op and it looks kinda meh. 2024

Sea of Thieves Monkey Island. I was gonna put this in the lowlights at first, because holy shit do the people behind Monkey Island seem to hate Monkey Island nowadays… but, if you like the truly shit game that is Sea of Thieves, this seems like something that has some modicum of respect for the Monkey Island franchise, unlike last year’s shitty Monkey Island sequel. July 20th, so one of the few things in this presentation to be playable soon-ish.

Forza Motorsport. It’s Forza. There’s really nothing more to say about it. The title is just “Forza Motorsport” now, which is kinda weird since I’m pretty sure that’s the first game’s title… maybe they’re turning this one game into a service instead of a full-0on game. October 2023.

Still Wakes the Deep. Just a generic modern horror game that looks like every other generic modern horror game. 2024.

Dungeons of Hinterberg…. Eh, some 3D action game that has really robotic animation and doesn’t look terribly fun. Maybe I just need to see more. 2024.

Towerborne… I have this in my notes but I legitimately don’t remember watching that trailer. Like, I know I saw it, but I retained nothing… even after watching it a second time. 2024.

The maybe-lights

Payday 3 got a trailer. It looks really cool. I’m not into multiplayer shit, but this looks like a solid upgrade over the second game. Good! September 21.

Persona 3 Reload is just a remake of Persona 3. Even though Persona 3 is a good game, it JUST got a re-release on modern platforms and has literally no reason to get a remake… I guess I can be nice and put this in the maybe list. I wanted to put it in the lowlights because it’s such a pointless release, but eh. 2024

Flight Simulator 2024. It looks like Flight Simulator. If you’re into that, cool! And it has Dune DLC I guess? 2024.

Persona 5 Tactica looks pretty cool. Not much to say about it. I’ll probably get it. November 2023.

Cyberpunk is getting an expansion… pretty sure this was already known. Keanu is talking like he got half his teeth punched out… And otherwise this showed nothing interesting about the expansion so… yay? I know people are hyped for this, somehow.

Cities Skylines 2… We got gameplay which is good. I mean, it’s not the most exciting gameplay to see in a presentation like this, but Cities is pretty cool if you’re into that type of game. October 2023.

Clockwork Revolution… looks a lot like Bioshock Infinite. It was a bit lacking in gameplay but there was some there. Seems to have some focus on time travel. Might actually be kinda cool. However it was announced as “coming out when it comes out”… so that’s something. Probably 2025? Why announce a game if you don’t have at least an idea of when it’s coming out?

The highlights

Avowed. Because they showed gameplay and it actually looks kinda interesting. 2024

Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth is something I should put in lowlights because of the lack of gameplay shown, but… I’m a biased bastard so I do what I want. This is the new Yakuza game featuring my boy Kasuga, apparently being in Hawaii this time which is a cool change of setting, and the cinematic was pretty funny unlike all the shit from the rest of the show. 2024

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. New announcements get highlight status if gameplay is shown and it doesn’t look completely awful. What was shown of this weird game was certainly confusing, but it doesn’t seem bad. Seems action-y but it looks like you can convert NPCs or something into supporters? Maybe? I’m always curious when Capcom has some new IPs to show, so I’ll keep an eye. No year of release announced.

Metaphor ReFantazio is THE highlight of the show, and it’s not even close. It’s clearly a take on Persona, but in a medieval/fantasy world and what seems like a less direct connection to the SMT series (though it probably still is). It’s hard to say from the trailer but there seems to be Persona-like things that equip to characters and a bond system. This looks pretty cool. 2024.

Show gameplay you dumb fucks

The amount of 2+ minute trailers with no gameplay at all are baffling. Even something I will get for sure like Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth didn’t bother showing anything which is shameful. This is bad, because these are video games. Video games are, of course, a medium where LITERALLY THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS is the gameplay. They’re games, not movies. So you gotta show game trailers, not movie trailers.  How am I supposed to be excited for something that is meant to be played, if you’re not showing me how it plays? Get the fuck out of this industry, idiots. Anyone making the choice of showing cinematic trailers for games instead of gameplay, needs to be insta-fired.

Games are about gameplay 100% of the time.

Starfield Direct

TBH I’d be normally putting this in Neutral or Lowlights. But it did get its own big section of the show so I might as well give my opinion about what was there.

So Starfield… It’s Fallout. In space. Modern Fallout, of course, is just modern Elder Scrolls with guns. And modern Elder Scrolls, of course, is like old Elder Scrolls but with dumbed down RPG mechanics because they think you’re stupid.

So this promises not just one big world, but over a thousand big worlds. However, those worlds are largely procedurally generated minus the “important plot areas” which are plonked into the procedurally generated planets. So this just seems boring, on its face, as far as exploration. It’s cool how they have all those atmospheric systems and unique biomes and shit, but there’s gotta be something on there to be worth exploring in the first place, and that doesn’t seem to be the case based on what was shown here.

Then there’s just so many disparate elements that don’t seem like they have much to do with each other. There’s your own character’s levels and skills and combat and stuff. There’s ship combat which seems to have FTL elements. There’s ship building. There’s outpost building. There’s “hey this character just randomly asked you if you could do something so there’s just plenty of dumb stupid sidequests all the time to distract you from the actual game”. There’s romance. There’s crew recruiting and management. There’s exploring the planets to do… stuff. There may or may not be some morality system of sorts, I dunno, they’re unclear about that. There’s piracy you can engage in. And somewhere, within all that, there’s a main story that seemingly revolves around finding alien artifacts. And none of it seems to… matter?

I dunno man, this looks like the type of game that has so much shit to do that none of it will end up being fun or meaningful. Like, maybe the very basics of ship building and following the main quest lines will be something playable? I dunno. They didn’t tell us what the gameplay loop was meant to be. Maybe you HAVE to waste time on side shit. That’s what I’m getting from this whole demonstration. If you’re giving me a game and telling me it’s just a sandbox where I can do whatever I want… You’re telling me you didn’t make a game.

So yeah, I have no hype for this. Also for anything internally made by Bethesda, considering it’s been so long since an internally-made Bethesda game has been anywhere near good. And, of course, there’s the mess that was Fallout 76 that everyone seems to be forgetting. Bethesda actively hates its fans.

…

… Dude literally said “Exploration usually involves exploring” with a straight face.

Overall

Well, I gotta say… after going through everything, I actually had more highlights and “maybes” than I originally thought. But a few of these are there not specifically because they’re great, or that they’re things I’m particularly interested in. Which squarely puts it at “at least there was something here, unlike Sony’s presentation”/10.

Was it good? No. Too much focus on 2024 with not much we didn’t know about for 2023 (which is already a pretty empty year TBH. No gameplay on a lot of the games which was pretty baffling. And there was no BIG BADASS THING. Metaphor ReFantazio is probably the most interesting thing here, but it being a spin-off of a spin-off is probably gonna be a tough sale to the general public. Nothing else was a big badass thing. Except Starfield I guess, which I can’t understand why people are so hyped about considering it’s made by Bethesda.

Also, unlike Sony, I don’t have to complain much about exclusivity, since Xbox has not been doing exclusivity since 2016. So all the games shown being PC games is a feature, not a bug. Sony not having exclusives is their own special problem.

Build a PC. You’ll be able to play Starfield above 30fps.