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Xbox Games Showcase impressions live from Los Angeles

David and Ben recap the Xbox showcase and share their impressions on the live event, all during their time in Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest.

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone, welcome back. We're currently at the sort of fancy pool area bit of our hotel.
It's not sunny yet, it's grey and a bit boring, but that's morning in Los Angeles by what we've experienced so far anyway.
The June Gloom."

"The June Gloom. We're here to talk about Xbox, as you can tell by all the lovely branding and different things we're wearing.
We're not at the Xbox thing anymore, but we're recapping what we saw yesterday.
Xbox decided to hold their thing miles away from everyone else, so we had to sort of sacrifice watching the live Call of Duty reveal, which you already have been well familiar with, to instead get back to the Summer Game Fest bit and do our job and do our work."

"So anyway, we're here to recap it. Dav, do you want to start by talking about the thing that caught your eye the most?
Yeah, we can start talking about Doom. I think it's the elephant in the room, the June Gloom with Doom, you know.
So, for some it might be like Doom with a shield, and it might be the same monsters, it might look very similar, but you know how these guys evolved from Doom 2016 to Doom Eternal with the RPG elements."

"I'm really looking forward to that one, and for a change I appreciated it being the show opener and having actual gameplay to it.
So, many of the other games we saw didn't, so it was kind of a highlight to me.
It was very, you know, heavy metal gore in your face, and I liked it, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have lots of fun with that one.
The only surprise to me was Perfect Dark. We've been hearing rumors about developing Hell for that game."

"You know, it's both the initiative with Crystal Dynamics, and I love the original franchise, so when I saw Johanna there, little kid in me went like, yay! And it was really nice for me to confirm that it's actually an immersive sim as they previously teased.
They didn't change the style of the game just to cater to a bigger audience or to go shooter or whatever."

"I really liked it. To me it was like Deus Ex in a very colorful way with different solutions, and of course a little bit more parkour and a little bit more, what's this EA game called?
Mirror's Edge.
Mirror's Edge, okay. A little bit of that to it, so I liked it."

"I was surprised it was shown sort of in a gameplay state.
You know what surprises me about that is that we've seen more gameplay from Perfect Dark than we have of Fable.
Shall I go on about Fable a little bit?
Release window, we got both Perfect Dark and Fable, both 2025, same as Doom actually."

"A lot of the games that we saw at the showcase were 2025.
I mean granted, a release window of 2025 to me opens the door to a delay to 2026.
If it happens, you know, it could happen.
Which at the same time opens the door for delays to 2025 from 2024, would you say so?
I mean I was shocked we didn't get a fixed date for Indie and Avowed."

"Oh for sure, and I was fully expecting them to launch either side of the Call of Duty month.
So we'd have like Avowed in September, Indiana Jones in November.
That's when they acquired Activision Blizzard and they showed off Avowed and Indiana Jones at the start of the year.
That's what I was sort of expecting to happen."

"But now we don't have a release date for either of them, and they're still coming in 2024.
A lot of question marks.
You know, Indiana Jones to me looks exactly what you want out of an Indiana Jones game.
Do you know what it looks like, right?
It looks like Tomb Raider in the 1940s or whatever."

"And that's kind of what I want, right?
It's exactly what I want, but at the same time, I mean, it was fun.
It was a nice cutscene, little cutscene.
It really feels like a movie."

"Yeah, we know that.
You guys are nailing this, but at the same time, this game is coming out this year.
I would have loved to have like a proper gameplay piece, like no cuts.
Like you get here, you solve these puzzles, you punch these guys in the face, you use the whip, and then you get to the cutscene."

"We got the cutscene.
I understand it's the more cinematic thing for people to know, to really realize that they are nailing this style.
But it's releasing this year, and we didn't get to play it here.
We didn't get to interview the developers."

"I'm expecting that to happen at Gamescom.
But, you know, even though I'm loving it, I would have loved to have some gameplay piece.
Any other highlights?
Well, before I do that, I just quickly want to talk about Fable again."

"You know, Fable is one of the more anticipated Xbox games they have coming up.
And, you know, the trailer, it was a lot of fun.
It was a really entertaining trailer to watch, but it was basically the exact same trailer we saw last year.
Different character, same sort of theme, very thematic, in-engine stuff most likely."

"You can have a little bit of gameplay.
Yeah, but, you know, we've seen that sort of stuff of Fable for so long at this point that I want something different.
I want something concrete, and I haven't seen that yet.
And that's what worries me a little bit about this game."

"Yes, it's coming out next year, but, you know, to me, the warning klaxons are still going off about this game because it's been so long in development.
It's the same as Everwild.
Everwild didn't show up, and it's another game."

"Nothing from Rare.
Well, Sea of Thieves.
We got a Sea of Thieves trailer, but that's expected.
But, no, otherwise, the two things I think we both want to highlight before talking about the big elephant in the room at the end of the show was South of Midnight and Mixtape."

"Now, I'll grab Mixtape because, to me, I think it was the best trailer we saw.
And it kind of surprised me a little bit because it felt like I was watching a movie trailer.
It felt like I was watching an animated movie, and, like, this is a teaser of what's going to happen when it premieres in July or something."

"It feels like I was there, and I really got to experience what this game is all about.
And that's what I think is really quite exciting about it.
We got a Life is Strange game in the same showcase.
I was about to say, it overshadowed it."

"Oh, it absolutely overshadowed it.
Like, the Life is Strange game looks fine, but Mixtape looks excellent, and I can't wait to check out more about that game.
But do you want to touch a bit about South of Midnight?
Yeah, just a little bit about Mixtape that you were saying."

"It really touched me.
It really moved me.
It's for a generation, and the whole licensed music together with the way it's...
I'm probably going to talk about that generation and that feeling and what life means to us."

"It's absolutely fantastic, and it overshadowed, and otherwise, a really nice-looking Life is Strange new adventure, which is, like, new graphics, new uses for the protagonist's power.
And I know, for Alberto, that was the main highlight of the game, together with South of Midnight."

"I dig the stop-motion sort of style to the cutscenes.
It was a bit weird on the theatre.
By the way, the presentation was nice.
The theatre was better than last year."

"The sound was weird.
I mentioned sound for SGF, like, being a bit too much.
Like, you could feel your shirt shaking, vibrating.
In this case, it was a little bit..."

"The sound wasn't very good to make an impact for those games.
So, South of Midnight.
It's an interesting adventure.
It's light-hearted in the combat approach, and the fantasy itself looks very interesting to me."

"It's fable-ish in terms of the creatures, and why can't this lady put her feet on the water?
I think that was one interesting thing.
She was all the time trying to avoid stepping on the water."

"And then she made all these flowers come up.
I think it's just an interesting fantasy for me to check out.
I think it's going to be light-hearted.
I can share it with my kids."

"And I think, even though combat looked a bit bland in this very brief showcase, I'm really digging the art style.
I like compulsion games, so I'm looking forward to that one."

"I will say, compulsion are a bit of a weird developer to me, because on one hand, they are very, very talented at creating interesting and unique worlds.
We Happy Few is really cool, the idea of it, but it didn't quite stick the landing with gameplay, so we'll have to see whether they can do that."

"What I will say before we move on to the big one is that there seems to be a current trend that we're facing in the games industry.
We've gone past the Battle Royale thing."

"We're seemingly going past the live service sort of thing, and we're getting into this thing where everyone is making these sort of action-RPG, God of War-like, banishing things.
Yes, exactly."

"And we had about five of them yesterday in the Xbox showcase, South of Midnight being one of them, by the looks of things.
So there was also Inotria, the last song, Flintlock, loads of different games."

"They're all very different when you actually look at them, but if you just took out all the visuals, it's like, oh, it's the same game reskinned in a mechanical sense.
So that seems to be the trend currently in the games industry."

"We'll see whether that pays off or whether people get bored of it, because people do generally get bored of these types of things when they get oversaturated.
But let's move on to the last thing then, the big one, I would say."

"I'd say it's a big one because of the importance of it and the fact that it's a massive brand for Xbox, but I don't think it was necessarily the announcement I was expecting, which is Gears of War E-Day."

"I love Gears.
I was expecting Gears 6 because there's a storyline still being told in the Gears of War franchise, or the Gears franchise, whatever they want to call it these days."

"But no, this is Gears of War E-Day, and it's seemingly like a prequel to the first game, happening when Emergence Day happened, right?
So when the Locust first came out, the ground and all that, and the Cogs had to fight them back, and you get to see a young Marcus, a young Dom, and all that stuff."

"It looks really good, and I know there was a bit of conflicting stories going about the way the trailer was created.
I think Keeley said that it was something to do with, like, I don't know, it was made by a cinematic company, and then, yeah, an animation studio."

"Then the studio came out like, no, we used in-engine assets and all that stuff like that, and the things you see are all the things you're going to experience in the game and stuff."

"But we'll see.
We didn't get a release date for it, which to me means if Fable's coming out in 2025, potentially 2026, I don't know whether we'll see this for a few years, to be honest."

"I think this was a while away.
No, I totally agree.
People were excited in the audience.
Part of it were excited about every single thing because they were part of the community."

"They were invited to be excited.
But as you said, I didn't get the same sort of wow excitement we got before for other announcements."

"And I thought, at least to me, Perfect Dark overshadowed that a little bit.
I got the chills.
Some people in the audience, they were really digging Perfect Dark, but then the closing announcement, yeah, okay, we'll see what it is about and when it's coming out."

"And Perfect Dark was more real when I wasn't expecting it to be that real.
My only closing comment is about the show itself.
My only gripe, or my main gripe, is the same as last year."

"It wasn't live at all.
We got filmed on stage before the show, like doing this welcoming, you know, non-scripted message to the fans and to the audience present there."

"We didn't check that message out at Game Reactor on a separate video because we recorded it.
But then he didn't show up on stage.
Nobody did."

"All was pre-recorded.
I think it lacks the human side of things which Xbox needs now.
It was a trailer reel for the most part."

"It was a trailer reel.
That's what I mean.
It was a trailer reel, not even dev commentary on anything, but bring devs on the stage, have them tell us things."

"I'm expecting that from Ubisoft today, and I think they have to fix that.
Theatre was okay.
Phil and Sarah and Matt coming before that was okay, but it wasn't real."

"It wasn't that human.
I would agree.
I don't think there's anything else to say.
I think that's a good place to round out."

"We'll follow this up soon with the Ubisoft Forward recapping thing at some point, so stay tuned for that.
Otherwise, yeah, this has been day two, I guess, of day three."

"I'm not too sure.
A day of Summer Game Fest behind us.
We'll see you all in the next one.
See you."

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