It’s been some time since the Xbox showcase was held and after finally catching up on lost sleep and fighting off an annoying flu I think I should say a few things.

First up, the Melbourne Xbox FanFest event was great. Held at Fortress in the CBD, the venue was a perfect location with plenty of room and seating for all. The venue is designed to be a haven for gamers in the city and it really sold me on that. The number attending was restricted enough that it never felt overcrowded – seeing as we were going to be there for at least four hours before the showcase presentation started at 3am .au time it was appreciated. Everyone who attended was given a bag too, including Xbox branded clothing and more. To me it was generous as hell considering the event was also catered for through the night. The showcase presentation was held in a separate area in Fortress where everyone was offered complimentary drinks and snacks. If Xbox have another event at Fortress, I’d be more than happy to go if it’s managed like this.

Once the showcase kicked off it was pretty smooth sailing in terms of what was on offer with plenty of surprises and very little in terms of disappointment. Seeing Capcom and Atlus announce games first on Xbox was definitely a big surprise – I’m sure they paid a few dollars to get the exclusive reveal but the publishers probably like being able to test the waters here on the public response before announcing it to the wider gaming community. One announcement that fit in the “why didn’t it happen sooner?” category was seeing that Sea of Thieves was introducing a new story campaign based off The Secret of Monkey Island franchise. I’ll be back on the ship again checking that one out.

A substantial chunk of time was devoted to Starfield (around 45 minutes!) and it’s rare to see that much detail in a single video. Plenty of developers have produced vignettes covering specific features but rarely so much of it at once. That they weren’t afraid to add a dash of silliness to it helped a lot. From sandwich collecting to robot shaped starships, it showed that while that you can choose to be as serious, or not, as you want to be in your travels. There’s no doubt there were already a lot of people looking forward to the game, but this just heightened their excitement for it. The extended showcase which aired a couple of days later added more info on games and also provided a small glimpse of all the FanFest events from around the world too.

With all of the constant Twitter chatter of “will they or won’t they?” with the Activision/Blizzard/King purchase it was good to see a small moment in time where that was pushed aside to allow people to get excited over new games again and remind us that it’s not all about Call of Duty. Will we see another event and showcase like this? That’s for the future to decide but I hope this year does show the Xbox team that like the Developer Direct at the start of the year (where they announced Hi-Fi Rush), they can market their platform as good as the competition.

And I enjoyed my time there too, so was more than good enough for me. 🙂