… or as it should be described as me throwing random stuff against an Xbox shaped wall and seeing what will stick! With E3 related events going all digital again this year a lot of publishers are still committing themselves over this period to show what’s new or coming which makes it fun times for gamers. The big one for me is to finally see what Xbox is cooking now that Bethesda is working in the kitchen too. The following is just my take on rumours we’ve seen over the last few months plus a couple of random ideas too. Likely all wrong but I like to have fun with it anyway. 🙂

• If Kojima is working with Xbox, it’ll be through Bethesda. Saying this purely because Bethesda has a Japanese studio in Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within) run by Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil. If Kojima wants to make a horror game, it’d be the right team to collaborate with.
• There will be new releases dropping soon after the event. There’s already talk of Psychonauts 2 arriving real soon but I’m thinking if that were the case we might also see a new Forza Horizon not far behind it. From this point on the games will start coming.
• Halo Infinite multiplayer launches WAY ahead of the campaign. Seeing as the multiplayer portion of the game is going free to play, there could be a possibility that it and the campaign are treated as separate downloads like the approach taken with Crackdown 3. A lot of that might depend on how much is shared between the two modes if such a split was possible.
• InXile is either taking Wasteland into FPS territory or it’s a new Fallout. With both them and Obsidian familiar with Bethesda’s franchise either could do it justice. At some point we’d have to assume that many of the Xbox/Bethesda studios are going to share IPs around and Fallout was one of the most obvious ones purely because so many of the key talent behind it now work under the Xbox umbrella. Whether it happens now or later I don’t know but eventually it will.
• Starfield may be more sim, less RPG. Though there are a number of successful space sim games out there such as No Man’s Sky, Elite Dangerous and even the not-officially-released Star Citizen there’s still room for a similar type game to grab users if it can also combine elements like Mass Effect or perhaps a little of The Outer Worlds. That’s asking a lot for sure but nothing has really combined all of it successfully so if Bethesda get it right they could be into a winner.
• A future Forza Motorsport will adopt a model similar to Halo Infinite. With the next Halo‘s multiplayer being free to play, could we see that happen to Forza too? How they monetize it (offline play?) I don’t know but the extra work is going into making it a title to last a long time and avoid iterating every couple of years.
• Somehow Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo will show up quickly on Xbox. They may be marked as limited time PS5 exclusives but I wonder if they could find a way to get them into Game Pass sooner than expected. If the games are good, Xbox will have them ready to go the moment that agreement expires.
• Will EA allow Battlefield VI to launch on Game Pass? Considering how well that worked out for Outriders it’s a possibility. And they tested the waters briefly with Knockout City too. It’d certainly give EA/DICE a fair chance of pushing back hard against this year’s Call of Duty. With talk of Activision looking to remain in a holding pattern due to Warzone‘s success, trying something different could work out well.
• Lots more publishers join Game Pass. There’s been talk for a while that Ubisoft will also join Game Pass and I wonder if the delay there was to allow EA to have an exclusivity window on the service. If that’s the case I could imagine there are other publishers who may consider getting behind it and further leverage their catalogues.

I doubt any of this is going to happen but I’ll be watching the presentation early in the morning (.au time) to see what we really end up with… only a week to go! 🙂