Mikami got a great sense of humor as well lol.

Actually Jeff Grubb leaked Hi-Fi Rush and gave details about the game and was also saying that it could show up at this direct.

Really liked the format of the show, I thought it would be developers sitting down and playing through some gameplay but it was better than that and I was looking forward to that, Lol. It had a lot of gameplay, information and it felt very well paced even with 5 titles stretched across 43 minutes and I thought they all got good showings. Also the graphic design is beautiful, Lol.

- Minecraft Legends looks very fun, I was a big fan of Dungeons, I thought it was severely underrated, I was also expecting an April release date too, day one play for me.

- Forza Motorsport looks beautiful, it sounds like it has a lot of improvements and a nice amount of content on launch.

- Looking forward to the next ESO DLC...Not a huge fan of Morrowind's environment but Hermaeus Mora is awesome and nice to see more of the map filled out, Lol.

- Redfall looks great and I definitely saw some of those "Far Cry" comparisons coming through, May is a fine date, another day one play for me.

- Still shocked that they shadow dropped Hi-Fi Rush, Lol. It looks awesome, I'm getting a blend of Sunset Overdrive, Jet Set Radio and a bit of ReCore vibes from it. The heck are we going to do with Prediction League for Hi-Fi Rush? Lol. Likely playing it.

- Only L is that Forza Motorsport didn't get a date, I'm going to go ahead and guess that I was right about the hiring freeze hurting development, I'd now guess that Forza Motorsport is an August or September release.

NOW GIVE ME STARFIELD.

I remember him leaking the name but I do not remember him leaking any real deals about the game.  Also he did not leak that it would arrive today or anything along those lines.

Not surprising IMO. Everytime they do a big generational ugrade, it launches with fewer tracks than before. Next one will have ~25 tracks and the one after that 30 since they can simply copy paste the 20 they recreated for the current game. I just hope they also re-used some of the fantasy tracks from previous games.

Do we even know when we'll see Starfield? I liked the idea of it getting it's own showcase, but I figured they'd want to make it known when that's happening. An update on that is more important than the Forza release date to me.

So, my thoughts on the showcase:

Format

On the one hand, it is nice to let the developers talk about their own games and show off gameplay. On the other hand, I'm not sure that what was presented was enough, coming off a year with no AAA exclusives and an Xbox no-show on The Game Awards. I see no reason why they needed to delay the Starfield showcase for it's own show later on, and I think they should have at least shown a 30 second teaser for Starfield with the date of the Starfield developer direct and the release date/window for the game itself. 

I also think they needed to show the 2nd January Gamepass update here, the fact that there wasn't one tells me that January really is just 5 new games added to Gamepass, by far the weakest monthly Gamepass update yet, considering we usually get between 14 and 20 games added to Gamepass per month. This sends a really bad message about the future of Gamepass.

Overall, this felt weaker than Playstation's State of Play digital shows and Nintendo's Directs. The format has potential, but needs some work for future developer directs. 

Minecraft Legends

Looks better than I expected but still not my type of games.

Forza Motorsport

The game looks great graphically, the new audio and simulation stuff they talked about all sounds promising, and they announced that it will have more cars on release than I was expecting it to have, I figured 350 cars at most since it only entered full development in late 2019, so 500+ is nice for sure. However, the track count of 20 is disappointing, only 3 more than FM5 and 2 less than FM6. I was disappointed they didn't talk about the story mode/campaign at all, in the past they said they wanted to make the game more accessible to Forza Horizon fans by improving the campaign, it would have been nice to see which improvements we could expect to see on the campaign. The seeming delay on the game is also very disappointing.

HiFi Rush

I am legit impressed that Xbox managed to keep this hidden as well as they did, the game is releasing today and not even an ESRB rating for it leaked early from what I saw, all we got was Jez and a few other leakers stating the name and saying it looked like Jet Set Radio art wise, but nothing about the release date. The game looks fun and I will try to play it at some point.

ESO

Nothing too surprising here, nice to see them announce that the earlier expansions will be made free for a limited time.

Redfall

The gameplay and open world design seems solid, but I can't help but feel underwhelmed by the graphics. At one time, Arkane was pushing pretty hard on a technical level with their new Void Engine for Dishonored 2, in some ways Dishonored 2 looks better than what we have seen of Redfall even though it is 1 generation older. However, after Dishonored 2 underperformed in terms of sales, it feels like Bethesda pulled the plug on Arkane being able to push the limits on graphics, instead forcing them to scale back on graphics to cut down on their budgets and increase their chances of financial success. Deathloop from Arkane Lyon was underwhelming graphically (though made up for it in strong art design), and now Redfall from Arkane Austin looks even more underwhelming to me. Muddy textures, pixel shimmer galore during movement, doesn't look like the graphics have improved at all since their E3 demo 6 months ago. And unlike Dishonored and Deathloop, it doesn't even have strong art design to fall back on, both the graphics and the art design feel underwhelming this time around. 

Official VGChartz Twitter poll on rating the Direct.

I pretty much echo all the sentiments. Really liked the show. Format, presentation, everything. Nice surprise with Hi-Fi Rush as well, and it's definitely giving Sunset Overdrive vibes. Only thing that's disappointing is no date, or even general release window for Forza still, outside of the incredibly meaningless 2023.

Hi-Fi Rush barely leaking probably says more about Bethesda than it does Xbox Tbf, Lol.

Jez says that Bethesda is a lot harder to leak than Xbox and it seems that's true in others experience as well.

Can't even get a month leaked for Starfield, nobody has a damn clue, all that leaked for Starfield was a couple of years old development environment images too, their biggest leak recently has been Redfall's release date which says a lot, Hi-Fi Rush was trademarked years ago, Lol.

It's less Xbox getting better, it's more that Bethesda is just 1000x more secure than Xbox, Lol.