When the Xbox Showcase opened with the digital face of Richard Ayoade, I audibly whooped in the press room at Microsoft's LA event. Fable is already a game I was looking forward to despite only knowing the name to that point, but Richard's appearance won me over even more.
It also helps that what they showed looked incredible too - and given Microsoft's talk about how 1st party games wont't be 100% CGI trailers, I'm holding them to that level of visual fidelity with the full game.
Fable looks like it's going to have that whimsical feel of old, complete with the dry British humor many of us loved from the first three, and I'm eager to see more from Playground Games, who took the helm of the franchise after Lionhead Studios was shuttered.
Starfield also impressed me, finally, as the deep dive that Bethesda and Microsoft took is something that they should really do with every major release moving forward. While I need to go back and watch it again to get some of the stuff I missed while I was writing it up yesterday in our live blog, I can say the level of depth to the systems and how they are all just interconnected to this one experience is exactly what I want out of an open-world RPG.
Foamstars from Square Enix was also a massive surprise for me, and might be one of my favorite games they had playable at Summer Game Fest Play Days. The team-based multiplayer shooter where you replace bullets with highly dense foam was a blast to play. It looks like a Splatoon clone at first glance, and you can definitely feel the influence the Squid Kids had on the team behind the game, but in practice it's so much more.
Foam itself is dense and has volume, meaning it's not just something you're going to throw down on the floor to give you a speed boost, but you can build walls, bases, chokepoints and more to trap enemy players. Each character felt unique to play, from the The Baristador, who can lay down a ton of foam at once with his hose-like gun, but isn't nearly as mobile as Soa, the dual pistol weilding all-arounder, there is something there for everyone. We'll have more about our time with Foamstars in a separate article, but it was definitely one I'm still thinking about two days after playing it.
What about you? What have you seen so far from Keigh3 that has you looking forward to the future of gaming?
