The Gamescom 2025 Announcements that Raised My Brow
Geoff Keighley tightens his stranglehold on the vaguely interesting trailer scene
CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE
Well, this year’s Gamescom has come and gone. I rarely pay much mind to these games industry trade fairs since E3 was made casualty to COVID, and even before then, I was wearying of the major players’ increasingly undisguised corporate sycophancy. But this year was different in that, for the first time in awhile, I actually wanted to hear one announcement in particular as soon as it was made — we’ll talk about that one at the end.
I figured that would be about as good an excuse as any to go through the whole list of announcements and tell you a little about the ones that caught my attention in some grander fashion than just “oh, looks neat!” (e.g., Resident Evil Requiem) or “oh, it’s about damn time!” (e.g., Silksong). Hype aside, the nature, timing, and character of these announcements can tell us a lot about the industry’s direction. I should be clear that I’m not exactly hyped for most of the below, but they all got my synapses firing for one reason or another, and that’s cause enough to talk about them. There’s no shortage of high-quality reportage on the event itself, some of the very best of which is to be found here on Substack, and what follows is very much not that. Expect instead my reflections on the announcements that resonated with me either because they look exciting to me personally or because I can’t take my eyes off of some unfolding farce.
As I presaged last week, what follows is a considerably different format from The Spieler’s usual fare, but not the new normal. I’ve got a couple big-ass pieces in the works — in particular, I just whipped through Just Cause 3 in a very short time and I absolutely have to tell you about it. That’ll be next week. Watch this space, and do be sure to Subscribe if you haven’t yet so that you don’t miss it.
Alright, enough front matter. Let’s begin with what may as well be the most industrially consequential order of business.
ROG XBOX ALLY X
I’ll start with a take that I can’t believe I’m not seeing everywhere. Dear God, Microsoft, how much are you paying the lads who come up with the names for your hardware? And what did you do to upset ASUS’s lawyers such that they insisted you further pollute it with their ROG imprint? This one isn’t even a box, for goodness’ sake! I thought we’d reached the height of self-parody way back in 2013 when everyone was calling the Xbox One “the Xbone” only for y’all to gobsmack me anew with “Xbox Series X” last time around. What’s next? The Xbox Xcrement? The Xbox Low-TeXtosterone?
Borderline Dadaist naming conventions aside, I think Microsoft’s decision to retreat from standalone gaming hardware and embrace the handheld PC is a wise one given the Xbox’s tribulatory past few years. Valve’s Steam Deck has moved more units than a Soviet field marshal playing Hearts of Iron IV, and I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for Big Green to formally enter the souped-up handheld market. There’s been relatively little effort on display to differentiate the… sigh… ROG Xbox Ally X’s feature set from its competitors, which leads me to believe that Microsoft may leverage its supply chain advantage if not actively sell under cost in order to make it a more compelling value proposition than the Deck et al. But reps from ASUS and Microsoft have thus far been tight-lipped about MSRP, mouthing the usual excuses about “macro-economic conditions” and whatnot. Guess we’ll see.
That the device was built for Windows 11 is an automatic DQ in my book, but I’m just a disgruntled Linux nerd and I recognize that most of the core gaming audience doesn’t share my vitriolic, preoccupying hatred of modern Windows. Besides, early hands-on coverage suggests a rosy first impression of the hardware itself. It could be a real competitor at the right price, but if the thing costs as much as or more than a Steam Deck, I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t just pick up one of those instead unless one was jonesing to play a specific Windows-only game on the go. I welcome your perspective in the comments if you’ve found another reason to get hyped, though.
CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS… WHICH ONE IS THIS, AGAIN?
Oh, yeah. The seventh. Good Lord, we’re still doing this?
What sticks out about BLOPS 7 is that I remember anything from the trailer whatsoever this time around. Let me explain: I played BLOPS 1 in 2010 while squarely in its target demographic and, though I didn’t really care for the game itself, it was noteworthy at the time for was then some fairly intrepid narrative risk-taking. Compared especially to the early Modern Warfare games’ cavalcade of jingoist fever dreams,1 there was at least something to admire in the setup. Problem is, Call of Duty in general and the Black Ops games in particular have by now spent so many installments trying to one-up their own gonzo trailerbait setpieces that diminishing returns have set in. I watched the trailer for this new one, saw a massive highway interchange warping into an impossible loop as if in a Christopher Nolan film, and my eyes glazed right over.
I’ll at least cop to some cautiously optimistic curiosity with regard to the premise behind that sequence — the folks on stage were making noises about “weaponizing fear,” ostensibly taking direct inspiration from the Batman: Arkham games, and that at least sounds like they’re making an effort. The hallucinatory terror sequences were always the most stylistically arresting and conceptually interesting parts of Rocksteady’s finest, and I suppose it’ll be amusing to see what the most bloated triple-A budget imaginable can achieve with that framing device… on YouTube, anyway. I expect BLOPS 7 will cost as much as a Fabergé egg and take up more drive space than the Criterion Collection, so I’ll leave the legwork to whichever folks are still reliably buying Call of Duty in 2025.
THE OUTER WORLDS 2
After winnowing out the hype-mongering and paid influencer coverage, I get a strong impression that the core CRPG audience is largely apathetic about Obsidian’s latest. That’d certainly explain the anemic pre-order figures, as well as Microsoft’s hasty backtrack on the proposed $80 pricetag. I played TOW1 when it was new, banking on the promise of a first-rate, Obsidian-developed RPG to finally stop me reinstalling Fallout: New Vegas every eighteen months or so. No such luck, I’m afraid. It played pretty well, the writing had occasional flashes of spirit, and it kept me engaged long enough to roll credits. But where F:NV was a generationally brilliant RPG made by a skeleton crew of passionate nerds who worked their asses off to produce a beloved classic of the medium in record time, TOW1 carried the unmistakable veneer of a corporate product trying to optimize for broad appeal.2
That all said, I get the impression that Obsidian had considerable latitude with regard to the sequel’s ground-level design. The so-called “Flaws” system, for instance, sounds like a straight-up great evolution of the earlier Fallout games’ Traits3 system. The example that sticks out in my memory is a Flaw called “sungazer” or something like that, which gives your character temporary health regeneration at the cost of blurring your vision if you stare directly at the sun for long enough. I think that sounds goddamn hilarious. I can imagine any number of ways that this could be screwed up, but I can just as easily imagine it being a tightly designed and mechanically impactful addition that’d give the franchise some stand-out personality. We’ll have to see down the line — I won’t be getting this one at launch unless hell freezes over and I become significantly richer by late October.
BLACK MYTH: ZHONG KUI
Last year’s Black Myth: Wukong by Shenzhen-based studio Game Science was notable for being, by my reckoning, the most internationally significant video game to come out of China thus far. I still haven’t gotten around to playing it myself, but I was very impressed by the production value and by the sheer pace at which a studio previously unknown among the gaming mainstream cleared twenty million sales for its debut (non-mobile) title. It’s my understanding that the developers at Game Science are generally expected to work from 9 AM to 9 PM six days a week (the so-called “996” schedule well known to modern Chinese office culture), which I suppose makes Game Science the most ethical triple-A employer on the planet at time of writing. How inspiring that they managed such a successful and critically lauded debut without a crunch period!
Okay, sarcasm over. I’ve got my eye on the Chinese games industry for the same reasons I’ve got my eye on the nation’s manufacturing concerns at large: their output is gargantuan, their international profile is growing apace, and we Americans might well owe them rent in a few years’ time if that perplexing chip deal with NVIDIA ever goes through. Besides, Chinese folklore is a rich and severely underutilized source of inspiration for popular media in general and for video games in particular. BM:W was a nifty, FromSoft-esque take on Journey to the West, and a follow-up about the king of ghosts in hell strikes me as an inspired choice for this studio (look up my man Zhong Kui if you don’t know what I’m on about — dude was as hardcore as aspirants to the imperial bureaucracy get).
All we got at Gamescom was a context-free teaser trailer, though, and I believe Wukong took the better part of six years to develop. It might be a long-ass time before we have this one in-hand.
BORDERLANDS 4 IS WORTH $200, SAYS GEARBOX CEO
Oh, for fuck’s sake…
KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2 DLC
Regular readers may recall that, even all these years later, I’m still processing an unresolved psychological complex induced by a profoundly negative experience with KC:D1. I’m only half-exaggerating — I earnestly want to give it another try, but every time I think about reinstalling, I remember my unbearable boss fight against Runt and my bloodstream saturates with cortisol anew. Thing is, at least three other writers whose opinions I deeply respect tell me it’s fantastic. The same folks can’t get enough of the sequel,4 and I’m certain that peer pressure will overcome my hot-headed obstinacy before long.
The newly announced Legacy of the Forge DLC caught my eye mostly because of how unusual it comes across as content for a sprawling open-world RPG of Kingdom Come’s nature. The premise is that our boy Henry comes into possession of a highly customizable forge that the player can operate as a business and use as housing. My closest point of (admittedly tenuous) comparison is Hearthfire, the second major DLC release for Skyrim, which always puzzled me at the conceptual level — I never quite understood why I’d want to put down roots and build a house in an RPG whose foremost gameplay elements are adventure and exploration. But LotF postures itself as narrative-driven at its core, apparently tying its central conceit to Henry’s father and to Kuttenberg’s local concerns. Here I must again defer to you KCD-lovers: will this one get you to start a new game, or are you going to wait for Mysteria Ecclesiae this coming Winter?
DAIMON BLADES
The pièce de résistance, and the main reason why I bothered tuning into Gamescom in the first place! Or, as a small fraction of you will better know it, “the latest from the E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy lads. And, gosh, this reveal trailer dropped to goddamn crickets. I guess I shouldn’t have expected the next mass-cultural zeitgeist from Streum On Studio, given their notoriously inscrutable back catalog. But when I tried to look up “Daimon Blades,” my search engine confidently insisted that I must’ve meant “Diamond” and tried to sell me saw blades instead.
Anyway, this is not in fact E.Y.E 2, as was breathlessly speculated by a small contingent of gamers with exotic tastes. I guess you could call it a prequel, in the sense that the Qin Unification was the prequel to Orange Chicken: it takes place in the same universe, about 2,000 years before the events of E.Y.E.5 It looks all but exclusively melee-oriented, it’s building on the crazy-ass lore from its 2011 antecedent, and it’s surely the most gorgeous-looking game to which Streum On has yet put its name. Better yet, the recommended PC specs are halfway reasonable! Not quite so reasonable that my antebellum-era GTX 1080 will deign to give me a playable framerate, but this might just be the title that gets me to scrape together some cash and shell out for a nicer one.
Why’s that? For one thing, it’s been fourteen years since E.Y.E, and its ragtag band of superfans (among whom I proudly count myself) has been waiting for a follow-up ever since. For another, I’m really encouraged by Streum On’s trajectory of late. They recently separated from Focus Home Entertainment to become fully independent and, if early indications are accurate, this seems to have been the right call. Daimon Blades is shaping up to be exactly what I want from the creators of E.Y.E: aesthetically bombastic; tightly focused on core gameplay; and above all, unapologetically batshit in its every aspect. The thing launches into Early Access a week and change from now, softly targeting a full release next Summer. I’ll need more than ten days to save up for a new rig, I’m afraid, but you’ll probably hear more from me about DB before long regardless.
Thanks for reading to the end! There were dozens of announcements at Gamescom that I didn’t mention — any of them got you excited? Failing that, care to vent about the dreary state of contemporary games industry trade shows? Tell me about it below!
Although, to give credit where it’s due, Infinity Ward was definitely ahead of the curve on the whole “arbitrarily bellicose Russia” angle.
Nevertheless, I’ll probably give it another go in lieu of shelling out for the new one at launch. I’ve been meaning to explicate my complicated feelings about this game for some time.
Those let you select from a variety of highly impactful boons during character creation that come with proportionately aggravating trade-offs.
By the way, I’d like to hear from you in the comments if you’ve played the Brushes with Death DLC already released for KCD2, or indeed any of the major DLC for the first game. How’s Warhorse’s track record with post-release content?
My analysis of E.Y.E’s deep lore puts this at around 395 CE, which I believe to coincide with the foundation of the Secreta Secretorum. Anyway, thanks for taking time out of your busy day to dignify my footnoted analysis of E.Y.E’s deep lore. How you holding up? Have you had enough water to drink today?
I think the best we can do about the ROG XBox Ally X is buying a regular ROG Ally X, format it and install Steam OS or Linux. That way we have an excellent piece of hardware without the pesky Windows stuff.
I'm not even a CoD hater: I actually quite like the series but at this point I don't know what could convince me to buy one save a remaster of the original Black Ops. it has run its course threefold.