Was Microsoft's Xbox Showcase 2023 the best games event of the summer season?
DF reacts to Fable, Forza Motorsport, Avowed and Starfield.
The Xbox Showcase 2023 might have been the most interesting presentation of the not-E3 season, with Fable, Forza Motorsport, Avowed and Starfield leading a pack of other titles coming to Microsoft Xbox consoles and PC. To discuss the proceedings, a trio of Digital Foundry members - John Linneman, Oliver Mackenzie and Alex Battaglia - sat down to provide some insight and analysis into the titles as shown for a special Digital Foundry Direct. There's plenty to get excited about here - alongside some more questionable decisions that also deserve a critical eye.
Note that this article focuses on the bigger games detailed in the conference in the interests of time and space, but the video embedded below contains our full reactions.
The Xbox presentation kicked off with the first footage of Fable, the long-awaited RPG sequel to 2010's Fable 3. The game is under development at Playground Games and uses the same engine as Forza Horizon 5 - the first time this engine will be used outside of a racing game! Given how lush FH5's environments were though, it makes a surprising amount of sense for an open-world RPG too.
- 00:00:00 Overview
- 00:02:32 Fable, South of Midnight
- 00:11:32 Star Wars Outlaws, 33 Immortals
- 00:17:30 Payday 3, Persona 3 Reload
- 00:25:35 Avowed, Sea of Thieves
- 00:31:31 Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2
- 00:42:12 Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
- 00:47:27 Forza Motorsport, The Elder Scrolls Online, Overwatch 2
- 00:56:35 Jusant, Still Wakes the Deep
- 01:01:09 Dungeons of Hinterberg, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
- 01:08:13 Cities: Skylines 2, Metaphor ReFantazio
- 01:12:24 Towerborne, Clockwork Revolution
- 01:18:04 Series S 1TB
- 01:20:58 Starfield first impressions
The cutscene-like footage showed gameplay elements and was labelled as 'in-game footage', confirmed after the show to be running on Series X. The facial animation evident on Richard Ayoade's character looked brilliant, and there's clearly a lot of potential for the game to impress on a technical level when it releases, presumably in 2024.
The next major title was Star Wars Outlaws, a gorgeous-looking open-world game from Ubisoft Massive. The trailer provides a flavour of the universe and the quality of Outlaws' (cinematic) visuals without much in the way of gameplay - which has since appeared via the Ubisoft Forward event and detailed in an Eurogamer interview. Based on the Xbox Showcase trailer though, the title ought to use Massive's Snowdrop engine, as featured in a wide variety of games from Tom Clancy's The Division and its sequel to the Mario + Rabbids titles and XDefiant. The game seems to exist along similar lines to the cancelled Amy Hennig Star Wars project, which is enough to make it quite an exciting prospect.
Avowed was another highlight from the conference, with sword-and-sorcery gameplay along similar lines to Skyrim in the world of Eora from the Pillars of Eternity isometric RPG series. The game looks like it's targeting 60fps and uses Unreal Engine 5, although no specific UE5 features like Lumen or Nanite are highlighted in the trailer.
The interesting thing here is that the trailer showed a drastically brighter art style and more whimsical theme compared to the darker Avowed trailer that revealed the game in 2020, perhaps suggesting a shift in direction over the past three years. Obsidian remains a god-tier developer in the eyes of many PC gamers, so fingers crossed that they know what they're doing.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a game close to the hearts of many PC benchmarkers thanks to its huge CPU and GPU requirements, so it was nice to see a classic year-titled followup in Flight Simulator 2024. The new game seems to offer more to do, with activities such as taxi services, rescues and building, while the trailer's reflections hints toward some (at this time unconfirmed) graphical advancements too. A Dune content pack for FS2020 was also revealed, with an ornithopter flying over Arrakis, and it'll be interesting to see how the game handles an entirely fictional space after being based so heavily on real locations, photogrammetry and so on.
Forza Motorsport is a key tentpole of Microsoft's first-party content, but the game was only featured in a short trailer this time around, with more footage in their Forza Monthly stream yesterday. The 'in-game footage' in the Xbox Showcase trailer unfortunately wasn't defined as being Xbox Series X or PC, but it showed off high-quality RT reflections in the garage. Unfortunately, based on the Forza Monthly footage, it looks like RT reflections aren't enabled while racing, with cubemap reflections updated every other frame instead - slightly disappointing then.
As well as the game announcements, Microsoft also announced a black Xbox Series S console with a 1TB SSD for $349. This model makes a lot of sense, given how limiting the 512GB of storage was on original Series S hardware with no disc drive and relatively expensive expansion cards - but it also brings it into close contention with the PS5 Digital, which has less storage but much more powerful hardware for $50 more. Throw in a 1TB SSD into that PS5 Digital for $50, and suddenly you have a very capable machine with 1.66TB of storage for $449...
The Xbox Showcase was closed out by a deep dive into Starfield, which we'll devote a whole Direct to soon. For now though, our initial impressions of the presentation were quite positive - it spelled out exactly what the team's goals were in developing the title, how its features work and what the game is overall. The 'NASA-punk' aesthetic looks great, both in-game and on the branded accessories revealed alongside it, and the game genuinely looks beautiful in a way that we haven't seen from Bethesda in the past.
Overall then, Microsoft's show was the most impressive they've done for years - John says it's the best one they've had in the last decade! - and the breadth of games on show was something quite special, with quite a few titles showing incredible potential. Some flaws remained, of course - the technical presentation of some games in the stream was marred by sub-par frame delivery and incorrect black levels - but things do seem to be improving. It all tees up what looks to be a busy period for Microsoft's studios, and no doubt a hectic time for the Digital Foundry team as well in covering it all. Bring it on!