Yeah.

Missed the Direct live, just got caught up. My thoughts:

Avowed

The Good

• The developer that did damage control on the one forum after the Summer Showcase trailer underwhelmed people promised graphics improvements, specifically in the lighting department, and I do indeed see some upgrades since 7 months ago
• The gameplay and questing seem good

The Not So Good

• Graphics, though improved, are still pretty underwhelming for an Unreal 5 current gen exclusive game. When watching it on my phone initially, the graphics seemed better, but after just rewatching it on my 27" 1440p monitor, I see alot of noticeably low res textures in the environment especially, character models are only so-so. 
• Some of the animations still look kind of wonky, just as the did 7 months ago. 
• Would have liked to have learned more about character creation, skills, classes, etc.

Indiana Jones

The Good

• Harrison Ford likeness rights and a decent imitation of his voice
• A good imitation of a John Williams Indiana Jones musical score
• Story seems interesting
• I was worried they would go 1st person when we learned that Machine was making it and that they didn't seem to be hiring any former Naughty Dog or Crystal Dynamics devs for lead or senior positions (people familiar with 3rd person adventure games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider), but honestly they seem to have made 1st person work in a convincing way for Indiana Jones, I was pleasantly surprised
• I wouldn't exactly call it a graphical showcase title for Xbox Series, but It does at least look like a generational improvement over Wolfenstein 2/Youngblood running on Xbox One X, noticeable graphics improvements over Machine's previous work

The Not So Good

• Fairly non-committal release window of just 2024, when every other game shown had either a date or a narrowed down release quarter

Hellblade 2

The Good

• Looks gorgeous as always
• Sound design seems great
• Finally a release date, and it's only about 4 months away

The Not So Good

• Would have liked to have seen a bit more combat

Visions of Mana

The Good

• Was nice to see Xbox offer to showcase the work of a 3rd party JP studio, especially since it's the first ever Mana game for Xbox, good way to get Xbox fans interested so that they hopefully buy the game and the port is a success for Square, prompting further ports
• Pretty art design
• Good soundtrack
• Combat looks more fun than other recent Mana games

The Not So Good

• Was really hoping for a Gamepass shadow drop of some earlier Mana games, especially the Trials of Mana remake, and sadly it didn't happen, wasted opportunity.

Ara

Don't have too much input to offer here as 4X is not a genre I have ever played, but it does look like a pretty good strategy game at least. Later release date than I would have liked to have seen though, especially since it was originally supposed to release in 2023. 

Overall Impressions

The Good

• Still a good format for presenting games in Q1 of each year
• Better games on display than last year overall
• Was nice to see a JP game on display even if it wasn't exclusive

The Not So Good

• Xbox appears to have a major release pacing issue yet again this year, it appears their only release for the first half of this year will be Hellblade 2, while everything else like Ara, Avowed, Flight Simulator 2024, Indiana Jones, Towerborne and possible releases for Forza Horizon 6, Contraband, and Oblivion Remaster will all end up stuffed into the 6 months of the 2nd half of the year (or delayed into 2025 to avoid overstuffing). 

Idk, I'm a bit iffy on Avowed myself; so far I'm not impressed by what I've seen of it. But I think Hellblade 2 and Indiana Jones both looked good. I thought Ara looked great as well. Not much shown really on Vision of Mana but I love JRPGs so that's a W there as well just for it being there at all.

Just finished it. Gonna read the comments, hope I won’t see people complaining.

Avowed Deep Dive - Xbox Developer_Direct

4K Babeh.

Love the environments.

Wands looks so fun to use, Lol.

Pistol looks fun too so now I debate whether I use a sword and wand or sword and pistol.

The key-art is so fucking good.

I sure hope it is not that that short. They had an in-engine trailer ready for the December 2019 The Game Awards, which means development would have needed to begin probably 6 months before that. So we're looking at 5 years of development time approximately with a team size rumored to be around 80-100 devs for the last 2.5 or so years, compared to just 20 devs on Hellblade 1. With a longer development cycle and a development team 4-5x larger than the first game, I would say they should have had the time and development resources to at least go from 8 hours playtime to 20 hours playtime. Only 10 or so hours would be kind of disappointing. 

Hope Avowed gets its own Developer Direct in June where they can delve properly into the RPG mechanics, maybe show us a quick quest, some companion interactions, consequences and choices, show us a city and talk about the main story, the things people love Obsidian for, they need a full fledged 30-40 minute showcase to really dig deep into the systems.

Every RPG should get their own Dev Direct.

They definitely need to do a deep dive at some point, like Starfield got last year. Obsidian games are known for their deeper RPG systems (for instance they made both KOTOR 2 and Fallout New Vegas much deeper than the proceeding game in each series by Bioware and Bethesda respectively), but I'm not really seeing that deep RPG in Avowed so far unfortunately. It kind of just looks like Skyrim with better graphics and more weapon and spell choices allowing for better combat than Skyrim. Does it have a class system of any kind, skills trees, attributes, background choices, culture/Religion system, etc.? Those are all things that deep RPG's have, including Obsidian's own Pillars of Eternity, which is set in the same world as Avowed.

I really hope they didn't make the mistake of making a somewhat watered down Skyrim-like RPG lite, releasing right after Baldur's Gate 3 blew up into a phenom that has people wanting super deep WRPG's again, really poor timing if they made that mistake. If this is what Carrie Pattell came up with after the soft-reboot, makes you wonder how Chris Parker's original build of Avowed compared, was it better or worse? It looked darker at least if that CGI teaser was any indication at all.