After Microsoft shuttered beloved studios Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks on top of previous layoffs at Activision Blizzard and 343 Industries, it was hard to imagine it would then have maybe the best showcase of 2024's non-denominational summer videogame announcement and marketing week, and yet, here we are. Below are the six biggest reveals from the showcase, arranged in order of which ones I thought of first while making the list.
Doom: The Dark Ages
I mean, it's more Doom: hell yes. We're going back in time to when the Doomguy was just a wee Slayer getting his start in the eternal war of light vs. dark (though not as far back as 1994's Doom).
You can tell it's medieval because Doomguy has a big old House Stark wolf pelt cape now, as well as a rad as hell combination Captain America shield and chainsaw. You can read more about Doom: The Dark Age's first trailer and how it fits into id's wider catalogue in our coverage of the reveal.
Dragon Age: Veilguard
Oh my god, finally. After years of concept art teasers, one development reboot, switching back and forth between live service and single player, and a ton of senior BioWare people leaving to form their own studios, we've finally got a first real look at what the fourth mainline Dragon Age (though you're not supposed to call it Dragon Age 4) is all about.
Varric's back (woohoo) as well as Scout Harding from Inquisition, otherwise it's new faces all the way down for the rest of the crew. They look like fun archetypes, though PCG senior editor Robin Valentine thinks they look like hero shooter characters, and it's gonna be the party banter and campsite/home base approval conversations that tell us whether they're real winners or not.
We've got a bunch of reasons to be nervous about Veilguard, but we'll have a better sense of the Dragon Age sequel we've been waiting a decade for when BioWare shows off an extended gameplay preview of The Veilguard on June 11, and the RPG is currently set for a fall release.
Call of Duty Black Ops 6
The first Call of Duty after Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard showed off the series' trademark sense of tact and gravitas for the horrors of American imperialism in its reveal trailer and subsequent extended look.
Just kidding: It's the go-go '90s, baby, and that kooky Saddam Hussein is up to no good. Wake up, Samurai, we have a city (Baghdad) to burn (with air to surface missiles).
Whatever schoolmarm scolding I can muster over the series' "playful" sense of history, the game itself does look weirdly rad? Come for the sumptuous interiors of Saddam's palaces, stay for a snappy new locomotion system CoDBlOps 6's developers have dubbed omnimovement.
For helpful background lore on the story of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, check out the Blowback Podcast's first season about the Iraq War.
Perfect Dark
This wasn't supposed to happen! Perfect Dark was revealed in 2020 only to go silent for years, with the only word being that its project director left and another, bigger studio was brought in to assist on development. Those are not the encouraging signs of a healthy development. And yet.
Perfect Dark's first trailer is a real stunner, promising at minimum a more open-ended, thinking man's FPS along the lines of the original game or MachineGames' Wolfenstein reboot. But I've got my hopes up for the 2020s triple-A answer to Deus Ex I wasn't sure would ever happen.
Flight Sim
Paying homage to the PC's honorable "Dad game" roots, the next entry in the ubiquitous Microsoft Flight Simulator series is coming November 19. We're getting an unprecedented amount of structure in this one—it's more of a "game" if you will, one where you can cater to passengers, take the role of an air ambulance pilot, and even photograph wildlife.
Gears of War: E-Day
Look, I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but I absolutely called it on PC Gamer's Chat Log podcast that we'd see a new Gears of War at this showcase. Perhaps wisely, Microsoft is eschewing the sequel continuity focused on Marcus Fenix's son that formed the basis of its post-Epic entries in the series, instead returning to Gears' glory days in a prequel about the earliest days of the Locust war.
Yep, that's a young Marcus squaring up with a Locust in somebody's weirdly normal-looking house, and an equally babyfaced Dominic "Dom" Santiago saving his keister. I can only assume this will be another over the shoulder shooter in the style of early Gears, but we don't have much to go on at this point aside from a cutscene trailer, though apparently it was all in-engine, so we know this one's going to be a looker at least.
