Xbox had its best E3 in years, but two brands died before it could happen

Here’s the thing about Xbox: Strictly speaking, there are no longer any Xbox exclusives, and that hasn’t been the case for a while. Its console exclusives are all proudly coming to PC. Xbox is a consumer gaming hardware brand – yes, that box that sits under your TV – but it’s also a Windows app, an Android app, and part of a larger game publishing portfolio run by Microsoft, which makes sense as a platform-agnostic business. It puts games on Switch and PlayStation. It even streams games directly to your TV, console-free. Does that mean there’s no longer any reason to own an Xbox? Well, that’s entirely up to you. Xbox is an American gaming platform, and the USP of America, for better or worse, is that it’s a choice.

That said, we’ve largely moved beyond the old paradigm of which box is best. Each major platform owner has its own proposition, its own image, its own price barrier to entry. So it doesn’t matter whether the games shown on Sunday night are exclusives, console exclusives or timed exclusives: the point is, they’re Xbox games, no matter where they’re played. Xbox games look great.

We’ve got major updates to legacy IPs that have felt chronically undervalued until now, while Spencer & Co are stuck in a lengthy acquisition limbo, fighting PR battles over whether X game will appear on competitor Y’s box, or seriously throwing hundreds of people out of work while gleefully spending tens of billions on said content. Fable and Perfect Dark look fantastic, with both games getting new gameplay trailers that hint at a careful application of the look and feel of those properties while not hesitating to update them for modern tastes.

Fable’s Bowerstone and sparse woods feel familiar, yet have details and implied interactivity that the original game didn’t. Joanna Dark brings her re-creation of a sci-fi world to life with an acrobatic flair that the N64 could barely capture. Classic IPs as you remember them, rather than as they really were, seems to be the guiding principle for both projects.

More classic IPs are about to usher in a new round of blockbuster returns. Doom: Dark Age promises to bring the freshest interpretation of the old FPS series since Doom (2016). Flight Simulator 2024 looks to be the most comprehensive update ever, taking Flight Simulator 2020 and adding actual operations beyond finding houses and unloading them. First-party studio Machine Games showed more traditional Tomb Raider and Uncharted archaeology game Indiana Jones and the Grand Circle adapted from a first-person perspective, which looks more and more like a worthwhile and well-observed work in the series. Even your actor Troy Baker soundly fits into the role played by Harrison Ford. Maybe a better impersonator could be found, but Baker’s performance is so realistic that it leaves him a lot of room to make his own choices. This is exactly what you really want when re-imagining an iconic character: a performance that makes the audience feel immediately at home, free from the creative constraints of previous works. It’s a holy grail, if you will. Ahem.

We saw enough of both old and new to call Xbox’s presentation a success, of course, but that wasn’t even a third of what was on display. We got Avowed, the third entry in Obsidian’s upcoming Pillars of Eternity series, which the studio’s legions of fans can’t wait to get their hands on – if Outer Worlds was their in-house take on Fallout, Avowed is their Elder Scrolls. It was at least a welcome rest stop on the long road ahead for TES 6. We also got a more substantial look at third-person action-adventure game South of Midnight. Annapurna Interactive’s Mixtape is a coming-of-age skateboarding adventure game with a licensed soundtrack from the likes of Devo and Iggy Pop. Starfield’s major content update was announced by Beyoncé, while the game’s major expansion pack, Shattered Space, is set to release later this year and has now finally been fully revealed.

Perhaps most importantly, and this seems to be a trend across the industry, but was very noticeable here, the Xbox showcase was light on live service games, multiplayer games, and MMOs. Of the games that were included, most were live games: Fallout 76, TES:O, World of Warcraft, etc. We saw a range of interesting and/or exciting single-player games of varying scope and scale, from studios with varying headcounts, and they made up the vast majority. It wasn’t a lot, but GAAS is doomed, and it feels like something we’ve had to put up with for the past few years.

So, to summarize: the console wars are over (as they always have been for anyone with a mental age older than 9), Xbox is good again and everyone is benefiting, Game Pass will still be a great deal in 2025 whether you buy an Xbox or not, and there are so many great games coming out that you won’t be able to play them all before you die. You know, that’s a good position to be in. Sort of. Look, everything dies, and it’s not Phil Spencer’s fault in the least.

Sony’s stuff is good too.