You also get rumors. It could be the title we’ve been waiting for.
Microsoft has announced that on January 18 at noon Pacific, you can watch Xbox Developer_Direct ’24 on YouTube, where you’ll get a sneak peek at four of the first-party, internally developed games. The presenters will be the developers themselves. We’ll see the first gameplay video from Indiana Jones, announced three years ago, developed by MachineGames and produced by Todd Howard; a deeper look at Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment’s first-person action RPG; new gameplay and details on Ara: History Untold, Oxide Interactive’s turn-based strategy; and finally, a behind-the-scenes look at Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II from Ninja Theory.
After the show, at 1 p.m. (making the broadcast an hour long), ZeniMax Online Studios will jump right into The Elder Scrolls Online 2024 Global Reveal, which will showcase the new zone, storyline, and features. The founders of Oxide Interactive, for example, worked on Civilization V, so they’re not doing anything new in terms of genre; Obsidian has always been into RPGs like this; MachineGames might be a surprising turn of events to try something like this after the Wolfenstein games, and it’s about time the world saw it, because we really first heard about it in 2021; and Ninja Theory will talk about their ambitions and care for the game.
Tom Henderson wrote on Insider-Gaming that Microsoft is keeping this broadcast because it wants to release the Indiana Jones-invasion game during 2024. The leaked documents from Activision’s acquisition of Blizzard reveal that the Redmond-based company originally planned a release in fiscal year 2022 (and for them, the start date isn’t even April 1st, it’s JULY 1st!), so a 2024 launch seems entirely realistic, and in the three years since the announcement, the studio has had plenty of time to get development right.
Activision Blizzard’s games will not be discussed; they will be covered by Microsoft later in the year.
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