I had a browser tab open at work yesterday with the Xbox Games Showcase muted and captions on, refreshing between calls like a lunatic. This is apparently just what June looks like now instead of E3. I miss E3, for the record. Not the actual content of E3, which was mostly PowerPoint slides and Reggie Fils-Aimé doing bits, but the idea that all the showcases happened in one physical building in LA and you could pretend the industry still had a center of gravity. Now it's Summer Game Fest kicking things off Friday night with Geoff Keighley doing his solemn host-voice thing, and then a rotating cast of individual publisher streams all week, and Sunday was Xbox's turn.
Anyway. Silksong.
If you don't follow this, some background: Team Cherry's sequel to Hollow Knight has been "coming soon" since 2019. It's become the industry's long-running joke, the thing people mention in the same breath as Half-Life 3, except Silksong at least gets dragged out for a trailer every year or two to remind everyone it's real. It showed up again Sunday with new footage and, for the first time in ages, something that actually sounded like a timeframe instead of a shrug. I want to be excited. I am, a little. But I've watched this exact scene play out at three or four previous showcases now, and I've trained myself not to actually believe a Silksong release claim until the game is installed on my Series X and the achievement list has populated. Call it a personal policy.
The rest of the Xbox stuff was fine. Gears of War: E-Day is a prequel, going back to the original outbreak, and I'll admit it got me a little sentimental — I bought the very first Gears of War on 360 at midnight in 2006, which feels like it happened to a different person. The Outer Worlds 2 stuff looked competent. Fable got another gameplay chunk and I still can't tell if it's going to be genuinely funny or just quippy-adjacent in that slightly exhausting modern way, all raised eyebrows and fourth-wall winks. I'll reserve judgment. What I won't reserve judgment on is the pacing of these shows in general — forty-five minutes of trailers back to back with zero context, no pause, just vibes and a logo at the end, and by minute thirty I've lost the thread of what's even a game versus what's DLC versus what's a mobile spinoff nobody asked for.
I also want to note, because nobody else seems to, that these showcases have fully absorbed the worst habit of movie trailers, which is cutting everything to a licensed song that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with getting a TikTok clip. I don't need a needle drop for a Persona announcement. I need thirty seconds of actual UI.
Tomorrow's WWDC, which I assume half the tech blogosphere is already pre-writing posts about based on Mark Gurman leaks. I'm not staying up for the keynote. I'll read the recap Tuesday morning with coffee like a normal person, because my phone works fine and I have made peace with not needing to know about iOS naming conventions in real time. That's a genuine change in me from, say, 2013, when I would've had a live-blog tab open. I don't know if that's maturity or just being tired.
One more thing while I'm complaining: can we stop doing the "and now a word from our sponsor" mid-showcase ad breaks disguised as content? Xbox did this with a whole segment that was just soda. I get that these things cost money to produce. I do not need to watch a beverage commercial between a JRPG trailer and a horror game reveal, my brain physically will not process the tonal whiplash.
Going to go re-download the original Hollow Knight tonight, honestly, just to have something to do with my hands while I wait and see if Silksong actually shows up this time.