Geoff Keighley took to the stage in Cologne, Germany to share trailers-a-plenty.
Guten Abend! 🇩🇪 Chris and Kevin dropping in with our first Gamescom update.
So, Geoff Keighley’s annual Eurotrip got underway this evening with Opening Night Live — we’ve just got back from the two-hour epic trailer-athon, which had the usual assortment of big triple-A sizzle and videogame variety, including the likes of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Dune Awakening, and Monument Valley 3.
You can watch the full two-hour presentation here, but if you'd rather catch-up with the key takeaways (along with our highlights), here they are:
- Hot off the back of the less-than-stellar movie, Borderlands 4 is now official. It’s launching next year, and will no doubt fare better than the silver screen version.
- Civilization 7 arrives in February 2025.
- As predicted, Microsoft confirmed that the new Indiana Jones game is also coming to PS5. It’s looking rather good.
- British game designer Peter Molyneux made a surprise appearance on stage to announce a new game: Masters of Albion. Chris Dring over at gamesindustry.biz spoke with Molyneux about this new title, and how this could be his “final shot at redemption”. This old video from People Make Games is well worth a watch if you want a recap on his career so far.
- The studio behind Love, Death & Robots announced a new anthology series called Secret Level. Each of the 15 episodes will feature one (or several) gaming IPs like Armored Core, MegaMan, Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, Spelunky and more.
- We got a very brief glimpse at an all new Mafia game, ‘The Old Country’ is set in 1900s Sicily.
- While it wasn’t shown specifically during Opening Night Live, hardware maker Zotac has officially released the ‘Zotac Zone’, their take on a handheld gaming PC. It’s up for pre-order now for $799, features an AMD 8870U, and is one of the first Windows-based handhelds to future dual trackpads. Zotac is here at Cologne, so we’ll be checking out their device and will report back.
- Not a highlight, but I was kinda depressed to learn that Hearthstone is 10 years old now. …turns to dust
As for our ✨ personal highlights:
Chris Brandrick: Uncharted was always the Indiana Jones of gaming, so it’s nice to see Indy getting an honest crack at the action-adventure whip. It’s also lovely to see usTwo returning to Monument Valley with a third new entry — all three games are coming to Netflix later this year. The first two are utter puzzle delights, and this next one looks like more of the same. Yes please.
Kevin Wammer: While I was excited to see Peter Molyneux on stage, I’m the most intrigued by Dune: Awakening. I’ve started reading the graphic novels, so this is a universe I’m very much into. Though, I’m still unsure on how Funcon will be able to pull off everything we’ve seen in this trailer. Oh, and we got to see Phil Spencer.
Enough for today (Chris: I was up at 4am, it’s time to sleep). We’ll be up early tomorrow for Day One of gamescom 2024 — you can follow along on Mastodon and Instagram, and beyond that, we’ll be back with more from the show floor tomorrow.
