Over the weekend Microsoft held an event in London with information covering the latest and greatest from Xbox. The focus of the event was clearly aimed at what was coming soon and judging from the majority of release dates these are coming well ahead of the new console which got barely a mention. A few games announcements of note:
- A new game from Rare called Everwild – I actually thought it was a Breath of the Wild clone from first glance.
- Yakuza is coming to Xbox… never thought that would happen!
- Past Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts games will be coming to Xbox… never thought that would happen too!
- Halo: Reach will be arriving in December for Halo: The Master Chief Collection for both Xbox One and PC. This will be the beginning of the series’ games arriving on PC too.
- Not only is Age of Empires II DE out now but Age of Empires IV is coming and is being developed by Relic Entertainment who have a great track record in the RTS genre.
- To think I may be using an Xbox to play Microsoft Flight Simulator still seems crazy but it looks sooooooo pretty…
The upcoming streaming service got some time too. I’m still going to have to wait until next year to try it myself but xCloud is steadily ramping up its capabilities and reach. Not only will the service also come to Windows 10 so you can finally play 360 games on your PC but it’ll be a part of Game Pass in the future too. For those who are already a part of the preview the number of games available has jumped from 5 to 50 titles. That’s turned out to be a good result for gamers too because it may have forced Google’s hand with Stadia which now launches with an additional 10 games to bring its own count to 22.
Hard to know yet if anything shown is going to fit that big budget AAA definition that the Xbox’s catalogue seems to be always criticised over but the amount of content on show is hopefully a promising sign of things to come. It’s also likely that the many more will be rolled out at E3 to coincide with the Scarlett launch and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The full Inside Xbox presentation is below. You can jump to the 35 minute mark for the official kick off.
The Late Night Session 
Some really bad interviews, but overall some good announcements. I don’t understand why studios put shit scared developers in front of a large audience and expect it to be a good sell?
Acknowledge them sure – but have someone who actually has stage experience.
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I suppose it’s just a case of trying to give these people a chance and see how they go plus give due credit. Much different for them from being in a studio compared to having a thousand screaming Xbox fans in front of them too.
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