Everything from Inside Xbox: Assassin’s Creed, Dirt 5, Vampire, and more

By Mark Delaney May 7, 2020

The Inside Xbox event for May 7 brought more than a dozen new gameplay demonstrations, including several world premieres. All of them showcased the first-ever look at gameplay on the upcoming Xbox Series X console.

Contents

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Dirt 5
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2
Everything Else
Xbox Game Pass
Smart Delivery

In case you missed the show, we’ve recapped all that happened in the swift, 30-minute presentation, which served as the kickoff event of Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest. Here’s what was revealed, and what it means for the next generation.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: First Look Gameplay Trailer | Ubisoft NA

We already knew Ubisoft would be making the Valhalla gameplay world premiere during the show, and as the biggest game of the stream, it served as the closer to send people away wanting more. You can catch that reveal above and see how the Viking tale will take players away from their Nordic homeland and into England — where they may not be so welcome. How do you think it looks on next-gen hardware?

Dirt 5

DIRT 5 | Official Announce Trailer | Launching October 2020

We already knew about Ubisoft’s big reveal, but the Inside Xbox show debuted other big games we’d not yet heard about. One of the biggest was Dirt 5, from storied racing outfit Codemasters. The studio was just this week teasing multiple projects in the works, and now we’ve seen the first one in all its muddy glory.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 - Official Next-Gen Trailer | Inside Xbox

The sequel to a game nearly as old as Xbox itself made its gameplay reveal during the show. The first-person bloodsucking RPG has the backing of countless fans of the original cult classic from 2004, and today they and other viewers got the first look at a twisted trailer featuring the world’s worst Christmas decorations.

Everything Else

In total, 13 games were shown off, including three that will hit Xbox Game Pass at launch, and nine that will utilize Smart Delivery. That means players can buy the game once and play it on all Microsoft platforms for no additional charge.

Here’s the rest of that slate.

Bright Memory Infinite kicked off the show with a first-person action-shooter hybrid that brought wall-running and stylish executions into the next generation. Scorn, the long-in-development horror title from Ebb Software, introduced its Giger-like art but didn’t show gameplay. Chorus showed off its space flight and combat game with a heavy dose of sci-fi bass, but only showed minimal gameplay.

Call of the Sea felt like the mystery of Firewatch and the orchestral strings of BioShock in a single trailer, while The Ascent brought totally different vibes as a cyberpunk co-op Diablo-like. In one of the coolest reveals of the day, Bloober Team (Layers of Fear, Observer) revealed its latest horror title, The Medium, featuring music that unmistakably belongs to longtime Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka.

Anime fans will want to keep an eye on the next project from publisher Bandai-Namco, Scarlet Nexus, while Left 4 Dead fans may have a newcomer in Second Extinction, which looks like the classic zombie shooter only it takes place on snowy mountains – and there are dinosaurs.

It was only recently that the Yakuza series came to Xbox at all, but today it was revealed the next game, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, will be an Xbox Series X launch game.

Xbox Game Pass

Three of the 13 games shown today will be hitting Game Pass on their launch days: Scorn, Call of the Sea, and The Medium.

Smart Delivery

Nearly all of the games shown today — nine in total — will allow players the chance to upgrade to the next generation for free with Xbox Smart Delivery, while EA briefly interjected to reveal Madden NFL 21 will offer players a similar free upgrade if they buy Madden NFL 21 on Xbox One by December 31, 2020, and upgrade to Xbox Series X by March 31, 2021. The nine Smart Delivery-enabled games are:

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Call of the Sea
Chorus
Dirt 5
Scarlet Nexus
Second Extinction
The Ascent
Vampire: The Masquerade -Bloodlines 2
Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Xbox promises more news no less than monthly as we head toward the Series X launch this fall. This is a schedule the company calls Xbox 20/20. The Xbox Game Studios showcase will take place in July, which means we can look forward to something else on the way for June.

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Topics

Gaming

All cross-platform games (PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC)

Two squads of heroes clash in an Overwatch 2 trailer.

Cross-platform support is becoming more important in the world of video games. Multiplayer hits like Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 and Fortnite have pushed crossplay into the limelight, and now most AAA multiplayer games release with at least partial cross-platform support. Finding every cross-platform game is no easy feat, though, so we did the hard work to bring you a comprehensive list of games that support crossplay.

Unfortunately, there aren't any rules when it comes to crossplay, so each game handles the feature a little differently. To make matters more confusing, certain backward-compatible games on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X still support crossplay on the most recent hardware, even if there isn't an official release for that hardware.

Gaming

Is Baldur’s Gate 3 coming to Xbox?

A mage holding a flaming object.

After years in early access only on PC, Baldur's Gate 3 is finally here in its final state. This CRPG has the internet buzzing about just how long and varied the experience can be. What's even better is that it can be played in co-op, though with limited cross-platform features. Those looking at the game may notice that there is only ever mention of a PC and PlayStation 5 version, which obviously raises the question about Xbox consoles. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't have any exclusivity deal with PlayStation, so why isn't it on Xbox, and will it ever be?
Will Baldur's Gate 3 come to Xbox?
https://twitter.com/Cromwelp/status/1685821620756021249?s=20

The latest update from Larian states that it will be able to release Baldur's Gate 3 on Series X and S sometime before the end of 2023, but with the S version not having split-screen coop.

Gaming

The impending Xbox 360 Store closure makes me wary of Game Pass’ future

I'm an avid Xbox Game Pass user, often trying almost every game that comes to the service and closely following the games coming to and leaving the service each month. Following some recent announcements by Microsoft, though, I've been thinking a lot more about something else about Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft's current digital-focused Xbox storefronts and ecosystem: what happens when it all goes away?
Microsoft announced last week that it will shut down the Xbox 360 Store in July 2024. After that day, it will be impossible to buy games, movies, or TV shows digitally on the Xbox 360 store; it's just like what happened with the 3DS and Wii U eShops earlier this year. That announcement also came not long after Microsoft revealed it would replace Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass Core in September. With these changes, Microsoft is stamping out any support or focus its giving to the Xbox 360's era as a platform. As someone who grew up mostly playing Xbox 360, seeing these things I grew up with go away is saddening. It's also making me think about the day this will eventually happen to Xbox Game Pass or the store on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Frankly, I'm not as concerned that Microsoft is going to do it anytime soon. Microsoft has given no indication that it plans on abandoning Xbox Game Pass. It's a really successful subscription service heavily integrated into all of its current platforms, there are titles confirmed to launch day one on it into 2024 and beyond, and Xbox initiatives like Play Anywhere and Smart Delivery ensure that at least some version of most Xbox games are available on other platforms. While I expect it to be the primary part of Microsoft's gaming strategy over the next decade, as someone who mainly played Xbox 360 growing up and is now seeing its storefront and subscription service go away, I'm now thinking about what the end of the Game Pass era will look like.
These recent actions have indicated that Microsoft will eventually be willing to do the same to the storefronts and subscription service we're currently using. Even after the backlash PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all faced from these announcements, Sony is the only one that has backtracked its plans to close down older digital storefronts, at least temporarily. Xbox Game Pass is the current hotness for Microsoft, but what happens come the day it isn't? A lot more games are digital-only or tied to a subscription this generation, and those are the games most at risk of being lost if a digital storefront shuts down.
What happens to the Xbox console versions of games like Pentiment or Immortality on Xbox once Xbox Game Pass and the current iteration of the Xbox Store are shuttered? Yes, they can be played on PC, but the Xbox console version will be lost forever. And right now, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any publicly shared plans to permanently preserve those experiences, nor has it done so for all of the Xbox 360 digital games going away. Game preservation is a significant problem facing the game industry, and Microsoft has just made a move showing that it's on the wrong side of that effort.