With Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest kicking off today with Microsoft’s Inside Xbox showcase - which was touted as the first big unveiling of gameplay from the highly-anticipated Xbox Series X - many were excited to finally get to see what the next generation of consoles could offer. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was there and promised to deliver some brand new gameplay, while Microsoft teased that a number of high profile names would turn up and unveil some significant world premieres alongside revealing exactly why players should invest in next-generation hardware this fall.
However, following the brief 30-minute showcase, it seems some fans weren’t too pleased with the major console manufacture’s offerings, with Twitter users starting the trend #Xbox2020 to complain about the broadcast. It seems Microsoft was fairly liberal with its use of the term gameplay, with fans calling out the company for promising footage of the Xbox Series X in action and not delivering.
The broadcast, which showed off a handful of trailers for a number of new and pre-existing titles, was incredibly light on gameplay, with most of the footage being cinematic trailers or hastily strung together gameplay montages. While players were no doubt expecting to watch some in-game footage, instead it was mostly just conceptual trailers that didn’t offer much of an example of how the Xbox Series X played or what its new capabilities could achieve. This came to a head in the heavily-hyped Assassin’s Creed Valhalla segment, which, while advertised as showing gameplay, merely dealt out a fairly short in-game cinematic trailer that lacked any real view of what it would be like to play the game on the Series X.
Twitter has since been flooded with fans voicing their displeasure with the stream, with one user claiming “just found #XboxSeriesX’s momentum after their World Premiere Gameplay Reveal,” alongside an image of a steeply declining graph. Another stated “Microsoft dropped the ball hard on #xbox2020. This is almost as bad as last generation,” while a third chimed in, claiming “This was frustrating boring and not at all what I and probably many others expected.”
It’s clear that many feel the broadcast was something of an overhyped waste of time, with Xbox claiming it would be players’ first look at true next-generation gameplay when instead it was merely a chance to show off some new cinematic trailers. Evidently, Xbox will have to really display what makes their console special when it holds its series of monthly conferences throughout 2020.
