Microsoft had plenty of Xbox games to push at E3 back in June, but the publisher held off a couple of its most intriguing projects, choosing instead to unleash them this morning during its media event at the Gamescom conference in Germany. Quantum Break, the new game from Max Payne creator Remedy Entertainment, kicked off the festivities.
It was the first we’ve seen of this time-manipulating shooter since last year’s Gamescom, and it looks to have gotten a major makeover. Gone is the generic 30-something hero of prior demos. He’s been replaced by the slightly less generic 30-something visage of Shawn Ashmore—Iceman from the X-Men movies—who is portraying the main character, Jack Joyce, in both the game and the live-action TV series tie-in. When a time travel experiment goes wrong, Joyce, now gifted with the power to freeze time, leaps into action in an attempt to prevent the end of time itself. Opposing him in this quest is Paul Serene—played by Aidan “Littlefinger” Gillen—Joyce’s former partner and head of the villainous Monarch Solutions corporation. Quantum Break is scheduled for release on April 5, 2016.
We also got a first look at Scalebound, the new Xbox One exclusive from PlatinumGames and Devil May Cry director Hideki Kamiya. While the scale of the game, described as an open-world role-playing game, might dwarf anything Platinum has created in the past, the cocky, pretty-boy hero is not much of a departure for Kamiya. He’s pretty much Devil May Cry’s Dante with a set of Beats headphones and a magical dragon arm. Also, he has a giant dragon friend that fights alongside him, and sometimes up to three other players can phase into his game for cooperative battles. Scalebound is due out in 2016.
Crackdown 3 also received a proper debut at the event. The sequel is in development at Reagent Games, a new studio headed up by Dave Jones, director of the first Crackdown. It follows a similar structure as the beloved original, with players controlling superpowered cops as they run, jump, and shoot through a crime-infested city. The trailer’s big selling point was the amount of damage you can do to the metropolis, claiming a new multiplayer mode will feature “100 percent destructible environments.”
Microsoft also announced that Creative Assembly, the studio behind the Total War series, is developing a sequel to Halo Wars, the real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe, which will be released on both Xbox One and PC next fall.
And following up on its big E3 news about Xbox 360 games gradually being made playable on the Xbox One, Microsoft announced that its backward compatibility feature will launch for free in November of 2015 with support for “over 100 titles.” It might not be every Xbox 360 game, but at least that’s 100 more backward compatible titles than the PlayStation 4 has.