Tag: Gamescom

A Lazy Sunday Gamescom-Adjacent Post

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Here we are, the last Sunday of this month in which I completely arbitrarily decided to try to see if I could blog every day, and it certainly had nothing to do with any kind of event organized around BLogging in AUGUST. It’s hard to imagine: only 6 more posts to go, and I have 2 in the can in case of emergencies and then there’s my usual monthly recap (mostly redundant this month but I still plan to do one). So I only need three more ideas and I’ll have made it! Yay go me!

But anyway, once again I’m going to call out a few games I’ve seen while watching Gamescom and Gamescom-adjacent coverage (which I am STILL doing, by the way…there’s SO much. Currently watching the Future Games Show coverage which I think just ‘happened’ to come out during Gamescom though I’m not 100% sure). I don’t bother talking about games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or Star Wars Outlaws since I figure we all know about those. I like to share somewhat lesser-known games that just caught my eye for some reason (or in some cases, no particular reason!)

Redacted is a rogue-lite with what appears to be a lot of permanent upgrades you can purchase between runs. I can’t really do TRUE rogue-likes where you completely start from scratch every run. I just don’t have the patience. I need something to make me feel like I’ve made some kind of progression each run. Redacted is by the same team that did The Callisto Project but has a VERY different aesthetic. Bright and colorful and low on the gore. The premise is that you’re a guard in a prison on Callisto and the prison is overrun by beasties. There’s one escape pod left and you have to get to it before one of the prisoners (of which only a few are left) do. So you’re fighting monsters, you’re fighting these prisoners, and if you find the corpse you left from your last run, you can fight that. It’ll be as powerful as you were last time you died, so there’s a lot of risk there, but if you beat it you get back an upgrade that you had on that run. Big risk. big reward. Anyway here’s the trailer

Staying in the world of rogue-lites is 33 Immortals. This isn’t a new announcement but I’m mentioning it because there’s a beta running on Game Pass this weekend and I’ve tried it. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about it, but suffice to say that assuming it ships in good shape and isn’t full of bugs, I’ll be picking it up. The premise here is that you join 32 other players on a map chock-full of baddies. If you wander off on your own you’ll probably die, but herding 32 strangers is hard, right? And there are these mini-dungeon areas you’ll find that have even tougher enemies but again, going in alone is almost certain death so you have to kind of organically join a crowd and hope everyone goes in there. As with Redacted there are permanent upgrades you can purchase between runs so you’re always getting a little stronger. And once again, bright and colorful graphics. Here’s a 9 minute segment from the Xbox Gamescom coverage about the game:

Eternal Strands is not a rogue-lite! It’s fantasy game featuring mostly magical, physics-based combat, from what I can see. It’s from Yellow Brick Games, one member of whom is Mike Laidlaw who used to be with Bioware. I don’t actually know a lot about this one other than what is in the trailer, but I just got a good vibe from it. Maybe it’s because I followed Laidlaw back on ‘good’ Twitter so I feel that weird artificial connection to him that you get when you 1-way follow someone on social media. Ha!

Now if you know me, you know I love nautical themed games and I love pirates, even though, yeah I know REAL pirates weren’t, and are not, nice people. Just let me have this, OK? Rogue Waters is a pirating tactics game. It has both ship-to-ship and cutlass-to-cutlass combat, and just to be clear these are Saturday matinee pirates, get me, matey? It is not 100% clear how the ship-to-ship fights play out but once you’re on the enemy deck it appears to be pure tactics gameplay. Guess we’ll see when it comes out at the end of September.

Last up is Lost Skies which just caught my attention because grappling hooks and gliding. I love flying in games almost as much as I love captaining a pirate ship. This is another game I know almost nothing about but the very short trailer enchanted me, even if I can’t quite articulate why.

Oh, one last bonus game that doesn’t quite fit in the ‘you might not know about this one’ bucket, and that is Warhammer 40K Space Marines II. I’m sharing this just because I thought this was going to be another horde-mode co-op game like Vermintide but it is not. It’s got a proper single player campaign… two of them in fact. You CAN play these co-op but you don’t have to. And there’s PvP too if that is your thing. Here’s a 10 minute segment from the Xbox Gamescom show:

Man there’s a lot of games coming out, aren’t there? We all need more free hours in our days. We need a device that lets you step out of the time flow to a pocket dimension where you can play as much as you want, then step back into real time refreshed and ready for life’s annoying responsibilities. Someone invent that, please. I realize while you’re inventing it you probably won’t have any time for gaming, but y’know, just take one for the team, OK?

Gamescom 2024 Day 1, Xbox Version

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There is a LOT of Gamescom footage flowing into YouTube and I, dear reader, are burdened with the need to spend my days working, so I didn’t get time to watch much of it. I wound up picking the Xbox feed since I’m pretty pro-Xbox in general. From that 2.5 hours of footage I’ve plucked two very different games that caught my interest.

The first is kind of a cute skiing game called Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders. This team’s first (?) game was Lonely Mountain: Downhill and it was about riding a bike down a mountain. I played it and it was OK but it happened to come out somewhere around the time Descenders came out, which was also about riding a bike down a hill. Riding a bike down a hill is a bouncy frantic activity though and neither game really grabbed me. (Those are all Steam links since I know most of my readers are Steam users rather than Xbox users.)

But I always enjoy chill skiing games like Ubisoft’s Steep. Snow Riders didn’t get much more than a gameplay trailer with commentary but I kind of fell in love with it:

It just looks so mellow and relaxing, doesn’t it?

Switching gears in a pretty radical way, the other game that really caught my eye is Atomfall. (I think this might have been on Opening Night Live but until I saw a longer look at it, it didn’t make too much of an impression.) This is a kind of sci-fi/folk horror game that is trying to capture the vibe of British sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960 like Quatermass and early Doctor Who. In it, a region in northern England is quarantined after a nuclear power plant catches fire. Five years later the region is still quarantined and no one really knows why, but the folks living there are really having to scrape by. Who YOU are is a mystery that you’re trying to solve. You play in first person and the game gives you no clues as to who you might be. It seems a bit rpg, a bit action-adventure. Combat is a mix of melee and guns, though ammo is very rare. There’s a lot of scrounging for materials for crafting, but it seemed more like The Last of Us crafting (ie making molotov cocktails and other smaller items) than say Fallout crafting where you’re making entire guns and armor and so forth. In addition to combat there seems to be a significant amount of puzzling and mystery solving.

Anyway here’s the trailer:

And here’s yesterday’s Xbox Gamescom stream all queued up to the Atomfall segment, it’s about 20 minutes long:

That’s not all that looked interesting, of course, but these were both new to me and each caught my interest in a different way. There was also a lot of content about Diablo IV, Starfield and some new games as well. And while I admit I fast forwarded through it, they devoted a good chunk of time to new accessibility peripherals. Not a bad first day for Xbox, but like I said, there’s a lot of other content from the show to be found if search YouTube for Gamescom.

Not sure I’ll do this kind of post every night of Gamescom… I’m really starting to run low on spoons this week. But we’ll see; tomorrow Xbox is talking about Fallout 76 (and of course lots more).

Notes on Gamescom 2024 Opening Night Live

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When I was mentally listing blog post topics last week I thought for sure that Gamescom Opening Night Live would be easy blog fodder. I’d just embed a bunch of trailers with a minimum amount of text and be done with it. Then I watched and y’know, I don’t think I’m going to do that. First because honestly there weren’t that many trailers that got me super excited on their own, and second because anyone can just go to YouTube and find trailers themselves.

I did, against all odds, actually take notes while I was watching so I think I’m just going to transcribe those to share the things that caught my attention. (By the time I finished watching the show it was almost 10 PM and that has helped me decide to abbreviate things somewhat!) Assuming I can find it, I’ll end with a trailer for the one game I’m most excited about. Hint: It wasn’t even in the main show, it was in the pre-show!

So basically in no other order than “this is what order stuff came up in the show” here’s what I jotted down.

We Harvest Shadows is some kind of horror themed farming game being created by a single dev, who calls it an “anti-cozy” game. He said during the pandemic Animal Crossing was a great way to remain sane but then he wanted to make a game that kind of twisted that. There’s a demo on Steam that I intend to check out at some point. I am just intrigued by ‘anti-cozy’.

Path of Exile 2 hits Early Access on November 15th.

Dune Awakening is coming to PC in 2025. It looks like it’ll be a great game if you’re one of those people who has a guild-full of friends, but to me it looked far too group oriented to be of much interest for me to play. It might be the kind of game I’d watch streams of, though. Also I wonder how varied the biomes will be cuz, y’know, desert planet.

Genshin Impact is coming to Xbox on November 20th. Always glad to see games stop being console exclusives. Hoping it does well enough that Hoyoverse brings Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero to Xbox as well.

Bethesda has added a vehicle, the Rev-8, to Starfield as of last night. I haven’t had time to try it out yet. Also the expansion, Shattered Space, is due out on September 30th.

Secret Level is not a game, but an anthology series based on a bunch of games and coming from the folks who did Love, Death and Robots on Netflix. Secret Level hits Amazon Prime on December 10th and I’m really looking forward to it. Aww heck, I guess we can squeeze in a trailer for this.

Peter Molyneux is back. He’s older and who knows, maybe a little humbler? He’s working on a godgame called Masters of Albion that takes a bit of Black & White, a bit of Fable and a bit of Dungeon Keeper and mixes them together in a game where you build up your city by day and by night have to defend it against monsters. The day part seems to be all in ‘god mode’ but at night you can possess a fighter and go fight in 3rd person, or zoom out to smite enemies in god mode. We’ll see. He at least wasn’t promising that this will be the ultimate game of all time. Maybe with age comes wisdom.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on Xbox and PC on December 9th and Microsoft has announced that it’ll be coming to PS5 in spring 2025. If you haven’t taken your cynic pill yet today you might entertain the possibility that they were planning for it to be an Xbox exclusive then changed their minds (since MS is so pushing the “Play Anywhere” mantra) but since the PS5 version started late it’ll come out a little later. I just think a deliberate “timed exclusive” of just a few months doesn’t do anyone any good, so I’m going to choose to believe this is the team playing catch up after changing course to make the game non-exclusive. Call me naive if you will.

And yeah, those are my notes which isn’t a lot from 2.5 hours of show (30 minute pre-show, 2 hour main show). Not saying there weren’t a ton of games shown but so many of them I just felt like I did with Masters of Albion: we’ll see. I’ve mentioned before that I’m becoming a little less susceptible to hype in my old age. My gamertag used to be “Jaded” and I’m starting to think I should have kept it.

OK now for my personal Game of the Show. You who have stuck with me during the years of once-a-month recaps know I was obsessed with Snowrunner for a long time, but I always thought “This game would be so much better if you could choose to repair the roads that you’re going to be using over and over…it’s crazy knowing you’re going to have to make a dozen trips and just dealing with the huge mud holes and stuff every time. Let us lay down bridges or whatever wherever we like!”

Well RoadCraft, from the Saber Interactive who made Snowrunner looks like EXACTLY that game and I can not wait to play it! Here’s the trailer which is pretty much all I know about the game.

This of course is just the opening night of Gamescom so I’m sure we’ll get a lot more gaming news over the next few days, so maybe I’ll have another post about it later in the week. Oh and if you want to watch the whole show, it is of course available on YouTube!

This is Where My Gamescom Opening Night Recap Should Be

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First I have to let you in on a little secret. I write most of my blog posts the night before I post them. I’m not a morning person at all so the idea of getting up and writing a blog post is just…horrid. So really I’m writing this Wednesday night. This is how the sausage is made!

Second, work was a hot mess of headaches on Wednesday. I was super busy troubleshooting and meeting all day. When I was done I was irritable and tired.

OK with that out of the way… Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom Opening Night was yesterday and I watched it, but you might have to as well if you want to know all that went down. It aired at 2 PM local time so I couldn’t watch it live. But y’know, how “live” was it anyway? Watching it after it streamed was good because I could fast forward through bits I didn’t care about (new Super Monkey Ball game, yet another Lego game).

I was taking notes at the start, then I opened a beer and put down my pencil. Honestly I didn’t miss too much because I felt like the show was really front-loaded in terms of announcements. They claim there were 40 games there, plus half a dozen or so during the pre-show. I didn’t count. I did, however, almost nod off a time or two.

I can’t honestly say if the show was bad or if I was just so angry at my work day that any sense of objectivity went out the window.

Here’re the few things that did catch my eye.

The show opened with a trailer for the new Saints Row game, called, as best I can figure, Saints Row. I’ve never really connected with Saints Row games because they all seem super dude-bro in tone, but this time out it seems like the devs have realized that the gaming audience is diverse and we don’t all like to play as human fist-bumps. (The image at the top of this post is your crew this time out.) The trailer was CGI, but at the very end of this segment is a few seconds of gameplay, which looks just as over-the-top as we expect from a Saint’s Row, but the vibe seems very different to me. In a good way.

The other new game that caught my attention was a new Marvel game, Midnight Suns. No gameplay (again) but it’s being done by Firaxis and they’re calling it a tactics RPG. Given the studio, I’m hoping for and expecting Xcom: Marvel Superhero edition. I remember seeing Wolverine, Dr. Strange and Ghost Rider in the trailer. We’re supposed to see actual gameplay on Sept. 1st. Here’s the CGI trailer though it doesn’t even HINT at what the gameplay will be like.

We got some release dates. Halo Infinite is coming December 8th, and Horizon Forbidden West is coming Feb. 18, 2022. Also Horizon Forbidden Dawn got a 60 FPS patch on PS5 so might be time for a replay.

The “creator of Lara Croft” has a game coming out called Dream Cycle that goes into Early Access on Steam on September 7th.

Jett: The Far Shore intrigues me even if I can’t quite figure out what is going on. At least we see some game play, and it’s coming October 7th so not long to wait.

And…that’s about all I have. Oh, they mentioned the next big update for Valheim is called Hearth & Home and then backed it up with an animated trailer that told us nothing. It’s coming September 16th though so we can try it then.

The last spot, the final big reveal slot, was devoted to the Director’s Edition of Death Stranding which seemed like a weird choice because while it has added some stuff and now will look better on PS5, it still is just a refinement of an existing game. Keighley loves Kojima though, so in a way this made the show feel like a Keighley production. Back to Death Stranding Director’s Cut: I’m not completely convinced the additions will make it better. Seems like more combat now, and gadgets like thrusters so you can just jump down a cliff. Hmph.

Again, maybe it’s because I’m tired and in a lousy mood, but I wasn’t too impressed with the show, quite honestly. But I’m not trustworthy! Don’t listen to me. Watch the whole thing for yourself!

Xbox at Gamescom 2021

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Gamescom 2021 starts today but Microsoft got a jump on the show by having their event yesterday. I watched it and thought it was pretty good, though not at that “you gotta watch this!” level of hype-ometer-busting excitement.

If you missed the show and don’t need some sorry old man recapping it for you, here is the full presentation:

Too busy to devote an hour+ to watching? Great, that’s my cue!

OK Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. If you tuned in for game announcements, you had to be disappointed. The only non-indie (?) title they showed that I’d not heard of was Stray Blade, a 3rd person action-rpg featuring melee combat in a fantasy world. It’s coming in 2022. Here’s the presentation, snipped from the above video.

Stray Blade looks in my wheelhouse with lots of exploration and the kind of combat I enjoy but it’s early days. I’ll keep an eye on it though. Oh, the image at the top of this post is from Stray Blade, courtesy of Microsoft.

The other new game announced was Into The Pit, an indie rogue-like. I’m kind of over rogue-likes right now so I almost forgot about it, but here’s the trailer for that one.

Everything else that was showed was stuff we knew was coming (though some titles, like The Gunk, we haven’t heard much about). The show started with Dying Light 2 (out this December) and ended with Forza Horizon 5 (out in November). Both are looking great so far. Halo Infinite was nowhere to be seen, which seemed odd.

Some news items that caught my interest:

Xcloud, Microsoft’s game streaming service, is coming to Xbox consoles this holiday for Game Pass Ultimate members. This seems like a no-brainer and I wonder why it has taken so long, but now Xbox One owners will be able to play Xbox Series X|S games on their console (at 1080P) via Xcloud. Also, given the limited drive space on the Series X|S I can certainly envision uninstalling some games and just playing them via Xcloud inorder to save space, or ‘sampling’ GamePass titles via Xcloud before deciding to download them. What I’m really curious about is whether I can hook up a mouse and keyboard to my Series X and play PC Xcloud titles on the console.

And speaking of PC games on console, Crusader King 3 is coming to console. What?! They are calling it an “adaptation” rather than a port, so it’ll be interesting to see how much they have to simplify things to make the game playable with a controller. I mean I assume that’s the challenge. I’ve never gotten very far in CK3 on PC because it makes my brain hurt.

Really, that’s all the big news. A bunch of Humble Games are coming to Game Pass, and MS Flight Simulator, Wastelands 3, Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 all have expansions coming soon. (I don’t mean to sound dismissive about these expansions. Learning about them had me hankering to play both Wasteland 3 and State of Decay 2.) There was a segment on Age of Empires IV (out this fall for PC) and Psychonauts 2 (out today!).

As for me personally, I’m excited for Forza Horizon 5 and Dying Light 2, but I was excited for them anyway. And I haven’t played an Age of Empires game in forever so I’ll give Age IV a go, I’m sure.

There’s another event today, “Opening Night at Gamescom” or something like that. Its being hosted by Geoff Keighley of The Game Awards fame, so it’s not sponsored by any one company. Hopefully we’ll see some new games revealed at that event.