Microsoft’s Xbox Summer Showcase was unexpectedly exciting, with a torrent of impressive-looking games from a range of well-loved franchises and some entirely fresh titles too. Despite some misgivings over the future of the Xbox brand and an underwhelming reveal of new hardware, the games themselves were enough to carry the day – and the Digital Foundry crew has convened to discuss the highlights and lowlights in a DF Direct special.
I won’t go into every game discussed by John, Alex and Oliver in the 102-minute episode – which included the likes of Doom: The Dark Ages, Perfect Dark, Gears of War: E-Day and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater – so instead I’ll pick out some of my own personal highlights, starting with Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. The original Stalker PC game from 2007 was janky, weird and completely captivating, so it’s incredible to see a proper sequel finally close to the finish line. What was shown looked impressive – significantly more refined cinematics, storytelling, shooting and technology, yet with all of the grimy atmosphere of the original, from unknowable anomalies sparking away to a band of stalkers playing guitar huddled around a campfire. Heart of Chornobyl looks to keep the emergent AI, relatively wide play areas and verticality of the original too, but with everything realised in significantly higher fidelity.
The new game is one of many from the Xbox Showcase running on Unreal Engine 5, with Nanite geometry and Lumen global illumination evident in the trailer – though it’s not clear whether it was hardware or software Lumen, with hardware being preferred by Alex for scalability reasons. The entire trailer was also shown in what looked to be native 4K. That means that the Series X version of the game will likely look a fair bit different, and even PC users may need quite beastly hardware to run the game at that resolution without resorting to upscalers like DLSS, XeSS or FSR.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:17 Doom: The Dark Ages0:11:05 Perfect Dark0:20:42 Gears of War: E-Day0:28:53 Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater0:40:39 Fable0:49:43 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl0:59:18 Call of Duty: Black Ops 61:07:17 Indiana Jones and the Great Circle1:15:54 Other games – Mixtape, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, South of Midnight, Atomfall, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, State of Decay 3, Age of Mythology: Retold1:24:36 Updated Xbox Series consoles1:31:35 Phil Spencer: more Xbox games are coming to other platforms
We’re likely to know more when hardware requirements are revealed ahead of the game’s September 5th launch, which is set for Xbox Series X as well as PC Game Pass, Steam and the Epic Games Store. Expect Alex to take a close look at this one in due course!