Reaction: Xbox's 2024 Showcase Felt Like A Throwback To The 360 Era, In The Best Way Possible

Was a very good show, well paced etc.

Let’s hope the actual games deliver and are as good as the trailers looked.

It was amazing. It left a solid impression. No remasters nor emptiness. No, Xbox's brought not just a stream of high-quality Xbox games in the pipeline, but heavy hitters in 2024 and 2025 and even amazing third-party announcements for Game Pass on top of the recently added Octopath Traveller II. In short, a lot of first-party and third-party content:

Call of Duty Black Ops 6
Doom Dark Ages
State of Decay 3
Perfect Dark
Fable
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Avowed
Gears of War E-Day
...+ third-party games like Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid Delta...

They killed it. I was hoping to see a little bit more of Fable considering it's out next year but I think that was own personal over expectation. I imagine they'll hold a direct earlier next year for those releases.

@Jaxx420 I reckon anything with a 2025 date will be under consideration for Dev Direct next year. Exciting times!

One of the best showcases I can remember. Easy 9/10.

I was pleasantly surprised by how good South of Midnight looked. It and Indiana Jones fill holes that Xbox had in it's game genre variety.

Flintlock, Avowed, Indiana Jones, Flight Simulator, CoD and Stalker 2 all on GamePass for the rest of the year. Good stuff.

It was a pretty great lineup of triple-AAA first-party titles with some interesting third-party games mixed in. Someone said the showcase seemed to have this “there’s something for everyone” feel and I definitely agree! This was a very much needed showcase for Xbox, and them providing updates for their already announced games was actually on my wishlist for the showcase! I did wish some of the games, such as Perfect Dark, got release dates, but hopefully we’ll find out soon. That game is apparently supposed to get a deep dive at some point.

The comebacks of older IPs was definitely one of the best parts of the show, and I absolutely love seeing older games get modern revivals. Now, if we could get a new Banjo game then that would be splendid!

I thought the graphics looked good in Perfect Dark but the game did not look good. Just me.

I don’t like what they’re doing with Fable, I don’t think they can pull off what made 1 and 2 so magical. Can you choose male or female like the originals? Probably not in 2024.

E Day has me excited I just hope they do Dom and Marcus justice.

There was more to like away from the big releases made for ‘modern audiences’ imo, with games like Expedition 33 standing out.

Gears of War E day FTW

@Kieduss oh you knowwwww it

After the summer showcase which was 15 sec ad after 30 sec ad, these trailers were solid. Last year’s show really was great as well … does anyone remember the Starfield hype? Xbox needs to do more of these … every 4 months!

Quite an impressive lineup, most excited for
Gears of War though no release date was very disappointing 😩
Avovowed
Indiana Jones
State of decay
Fable
Not that keen for Cod any more , to many fanboy would be soldiers for my liking , though a good mix of games that should cater for most players.

Still in utter awe at the overall quality of that showcase. Absolutely blew me away and again, I was expecting a great show so it’s not like I went in with low expectations. Just a brilliant showcase all the way around.

And Phil all but confirming the exact kind of handheld I would want to see Xbox release. It’s funny how fast the momentum can shift in this industry. Xbox needed a big show and they delivered in spades.

I'm all caught up, objectively brilliant showcase. I'm not really into CGI only trailers but at least we have confirmation of the exciting games in development. I'll be happy with most arriving late 2024/into 2025 as the backlog continues to grow!

@FraserG The live chat here was literally one of the best experiences I’ve ever had on this site the off-topic discussions I had with others before the show were so fun! It was way better than YouTube live chats since everyone was so kind and respectful during the livestream unlike the live chats on YouTube.

@Fenbops Many people (me too) share your concerns about Fable as you can see on other threads, but that's exactly why Gears of War E-Day touched me. Perfect Dark looked great, what did you not like? I just hope it has a lot of gadgets and classic gameplay, not just run or whatever. The trailer was a lot of running, I bet it's just a fraction of one of the early missions. It must a stealth game, the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark type, of course!

It was great but taught they would of dropped some Activision stuff on gamepass hopefully gears will come quickly and isn't years away

@RicketerCricketer That's nice

It was great but it was missing some big bombshell to make it one of those E3s/showcase we talk about years later.

@abe_hikura

Gears was that for me. I was excited for Gears 6, but am infinitely more excited for a prequel. Has the real potential of Gears of old. That was a bombshell reveal as never in a million years expected it.

Xbox truly gave us something special to the point that even the PlayStation gamers are asking Sony to do the same....or at least that what I read at Push Square.

Nintendo fanboy here admitting that was a great show by Xbox. Mostly there was loads of gameplay shown which is always welcome, still too many games CGI only but overall not bad at all. Minor quibbles about lack of release dates but overall extremely impressive. Best show I've seen from any of the big three for quite a while.

An amazing show that made me believe in Xbox once again. At some point I was like: ok, stop with these trailers already! I can only find so much time for gaming haha. Looking forward to Avowed, Indy, MGS, South of Midnight, Flintlock, Perfect Dark. Hell, I may even play CoD since it’ll be on GP day one 🙂 the Game Pass effect.

@Banjo- I’m not a big fan of stealth games 😂 I just wasn’t impressed with what was shown, Perfect Dark was never about the story to me, it was about getting a group of friends together on an N64 and playing 4 player split screen at 15fps against bots or each other 😋 🤣 it was a blast with fun weapons.

I’m still kind of sad they created a new studio full of top top talent and instead of making a new IP they decided to build a new game around an old one. Kind of fits in with what the industry does now though industry wide.

Standouts to me were:
Indy, Expedition 33, Gears E Day and Mixtape.

Just because this isn't a complete travesty like summer game fest or state of play doesn't mean this is good. Doom was the one good thing about this. We get a gears of war prequel that no one asked for (we wanted gears 6), no banjo kazooie, no everwild, a perfect dark game that looks too generic and doesn't have rare involved, no xbox handheld, too many 2025 games, and a huge focus on a badly aging game series with black ops 6. It would have been a complete disaster if it wasn't for doom.

It was great, E3 levels of great.

@Danny272 I didn’t want Gears 6. I don’t care about bland Kait or her story, very much happy they’re doing a prequel instead, I just hope it’s good.

Would have liked to have seen a handheld announced too.

@Danny272 I figured I'd see what sales looked like in the store yesterday and Gears 5 was cheap, so I went to check reviews.............
Seems like a lot of people didn't want Gears 6, because they hated 5.

@CallMeDuraSouka Because Xbox didn't give this as much of a push and a lot of reviews were mostly critical of the idea of having a female lead

@Fenbops We already knew how Marcus came to be the character he was, we don't need a nostalgia cashgrab to remind us of this. Gears 6 was the game many waited for to conclude the gears saga.

Zero jrpgs… despite Octopath 2 shadow dropping on game pass, Xbox having great relations with sega Atlus and square Enix, and what about all the rumors about mistwalker remasters and fantasian? Yet… nothing. Xbox has the opportunity to change the idea that “there are no jrpgs on Xbox,” yet they didn’t. There was also like two indie games.

@Danny272 I do see your point to be honest. Everything looked great, but I was mostly excited about DOOM and GoW too, but that's looking like next year. A lot of the other games don't really appeal to me, but I will give them a try.
I did like the in-depth look at Black Ops 6, but I'm surprised there was no other mention of the recent Activision deal.

It was excellent Perfect Dark looked amazing. I'm still not sure about Fable yet need to see more. Only real small disappointment was no older CoD games got added to Gamepass thought that would have happened by now.

This is simply how all show cases should be from the big 3.
Especially the one last thing to show you at the end.
It did remind me of the old Sony on stage as well.
Which is a good thing.

I wasn't on the live chat, but with some friends sharing beers and hot-dogs, as anual tradition. But I share the exciment and enthusiasm with you, guys.

@RetroMan71 the big deal about black ops 6 is extra frames of movement. That's literally the big feature in this. What a joke

As a fan of videogames, throwing all fanboy stuff to the side, how could you NOT be impressed by that showcase?!

Black Ops 6 upgrade just went live, and it is $30.

@Danny272 "Extra frames"? Do you mean the realistic range of motion?

My only complaint is that I don’t really like Gears of War. I would have loved to see something Forza Horizon related. They did naff all for the 10th anniversary back in 2022 and FH5 is getting a bit long in the tooth. Even a rerelease of 1-3 so that we can actually buy and play them would have been ok.

@theduckofdeath It's literally just more frames of movement instead of trying to make gameplay unique

@RIghteousNixon This is also why I would like to see a Halo: Contact Harvest. I think the origins of these conflicts would be interesting to paly through. This Gears could be a real horror story.

@Danny272 That is just one significant change they added. It is not trivial. If you play a lot of shooting games (1st and third person) over the years, you will notice little annoyances like not being able to aim straight up or straight down (especially over railings), bullets hitting obstacles that appear to be cleared by the muzzle, stiff crouched and prone positions, heavy vulnerability peek around corners to the off-hand side, etc. Any improvements to aiming and movement (especially on console) are appreciated.

The improvements to aiming in the dive and prone positions look pretty good to me. Time will tell. You will have a chance when outnumbered and sandwiched between enemies. MGS4 did something like this in the prone position, to a lesser level.

The studio(s) stated that they have more showings before release. MP and Zombies will get more time; however, they are not going to reveal all the changes before release (and no one should want them to).

Perfect Dark and Gears of War definitely gave me some early-360 era vibes, which is a great thing, and the DOOM announcement brought me back to when I heard DOOM 3 was going to be on the original Xbox. Best MS game show in a long time.

@theduckofdeath What you mentioned are flaws with shooting. A few frames of extra movement aren't going to rectify it. The aiming system needs to be revamped

I think it might have been the best presentation I have ever seen. So many games I wanted.

@jesse_dylan This is just one (long) show, and they have others coming. Persona 3, 5, 5 super-deformed, 4 is coming, Methaphor Refantasmo, Secrets of Mana, Octopath 1&2...There are plenty of JRPGS and JRPG-inspired games on or coming to Xbox. There could be even more if Xbox were a Japanese company, but hey...

Indie games are added to Game Pass every month. No shortage there.

@theduckofdeath I realize that, which is why I'm sad there was zero mention of any Japanese game in the entire showcase, particularly when Mistwalker/Xbox seem to be working on some stuff together, and when they have stuff going on with Sega/Atlus and Sq-En. They should have a separate showcase if they're going to omit it entirely. They shadow-dropped Octopath 2 with zero mention anywhere.

Great show that perhaps could have really pushed some Xbox console sales. Immediately followed by a bumbling Phil Spencer saying they're putting more exclusives on PlayStation 5.

I swear it's difficult to like Xbox anymore....

@jesse_dylan MS does partner shows now (two a year?). So there's Developer Direct, Partner Showcase, and Xbox Summer Showcase (yesterday). Then externally there's GamesCon (August), Keoughley's Summer Showcase, Keoughley's Game Awards, and I think there was a Japanese showcase last year. Those are just the shows I can remember.

"modern audiences"

Yeah they smashed this out the park, felt like MS of old for sure, I can remember those days like it was yesterday and it was always magical this time of year. Over the years gaming in general has been so stagent and since E3 was abolished, nothing has quite been the same. but kudos to who ever did the lineup on this one, not just the games, but everything just ran so smoothly and consistently. Credit is where credit is due.

Amazing line up and so much game pass day one

I really liked this format. Very small bits from leadership, the rest was trailer after trailer and gameplay after gameplay of a ton of games coming to XB. Microsoft's size with XBox Game Studios, AKB, and Bethesda is starting to show. They didn't even bring half their studios to the show!

It was a simply incredible showcase, I agree with every word of this article.

Absolutely incredible showcase and it still didn’t show Double Fine, 343, Mojang, Rare (outside of SoT update), Arcane (remember we are getting Blade on top of all of this) and all the partnerships they have like with Toys For Bob and IO interactive. Crazy!

That really was a great watch. Came back to Xbox this gen after being PS4 last and that helped settle any doubts for the next few years with the stuff to look forward to!
Even the dedicated PS5 dudes in my watch party were getting hyped up and tempted by some Xbox hardware. Wild scenes!

Looks like all the crying about console exclusives a couple months ago, was for nothing.

It did feel like a throwback to the 360 days. It made me feel like Microsoft is back on top again.

Great showcase with something for everyone. Just like the good ole days.

It was a great show but let’s face it, after spending so much on activision etc, it really should have been!

The showcase was great, but now Microsoft has to actually deliver on the games. To be honest, we've spent a lot of time waiting and waiting for games that come out after numerous delays and are 7/10 if we're lucky. They've gotten better overall but some of these games need to hit a little harder