Sunday, 11 November 2018

Inside Xbox - X018 Special [Events]


Largest Inside Xbox ever, eh? I can get behind that. A lot of announcements for things and trailers shown – even if there wasn’t the explosion of new reveals that some hoped for.

There were a lot of Game Pass announcements. Sixteen, in fact. I’m not going to list them all, but Supermarket Shriek looked fun, and I might try out a few of the others. Thief of Thieves is already on the service, so I can certainly see myself going for it. I admittedly haven’t been as active in trying out stuff recently, owing to a lot of Forza Horizon in the past month.

And speaking of Forza Horizon, the newest expansion for the fourth game got announced as being the largest expansion created for the series yet. From the little we saw of it, Fortune Island is looking a great place to explore. I’m ready to get into it next month. There’s also more drift cars coming in the form of more additions to the Gymkana pack.

Crackdown 3. Larger than the first game while staying similar to its format, the multiplayer is the thing that got shown off. That destruction looks superb, and the mode of Wrecking Zone is simply an excuse to just go crazy in 5v5 battles – using every surface and wall to hide or ruin someone’s day. This is my next big game on Xbox, and I’ll be happy to lose myself to yet another world.

Kingdom Hearts 3 got a new trailer here, but the obvious announcement of bringing The Story So Far to the platform that hasn’t had any of the story seems to have been left on the floor yet again. I can’t complain too much, as there’s obviously going to be some form of story catch-up within the game, but it would be good for the other platforms to get the same love as Playstation.

InXile and Obsidian join Microsoft Studios, a rather cute hand-crafted trailer announced cats and pandas coming to Minecraft, Sea of Thieves gets the players more involved with The Arena, and a wacky trailer announced some Black Friday deals. Several other things were also shown off, including games featuring keyboard and mouse support on Xbox One.

It was certainly an enjoyable two hours with a good pace. The largest Inside Xbox is also the last for this year. Whenever I watch one of these, I always feel it doesn’t matter much about the announcements. It’s the atmosphere that makes it worth watching. While usually there isn’t the excitable crowd surrounding things, the informal nature of the presentation makes it worth the watch.