I’m starting to feel like Charlie Brown from The Peanuts comics, and Microsoft is the Lucy who keeps pulling the football away right as I go to kick it. Every year I write this feature, and every year I say that this looks like The Year™ where everything comes together for Xbox. Last year, in fact, I specifically said, “Looking ahead to 2024, that positive momentum looks set to continue and, with any luck, snowball.” Microsoft arguably didn’t live up to that for the first 10.5 months of the year, with only the visually-full-but-gameplay-empty Hellblade 2 dropping in May after many years of waiting. But to the big-spending publisher’s credit, it did end the year extremely strong, dropping three exclusive bangers in a row: STALKER 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and my personal vote for Game of the Year in 2024 and the game that I think is the best Xbox exclusive in years, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
So, can Microsoft keep that positive end-of-2024 momentum going into 2025? Call me Charlie Brown if you must, but yes, I genuinely believe that 2025 could be Xbox’s strongest and most bountiful year since at least 2021, when it dropped Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, and Psychonauts 2. Let’s dig into why I’m optimistic…
A Fountain of Fantasy and Firearms
Xbox’s 2025 kicks off rather quickly and, from everything we can tell, rather impressively with Obsidian’s first-person fantasy RPG Avowed, due to be released on February 18. This “Skyrim Lite” is set in the studio’s established and well-loved Pillars of Eternity universe, it’s supposed to be around the same meaty-but-not-gargantuan 25-40 hours long as Obsidian’s most recent first-person RPG The Outer Worlds, and it’s impressed us more and more every single time we’ve played it, including quite recently.
Next, while it doesn’t have a firm release date yet, id Software’s unexpected zag of a prequel, Doom: The Dark Ages, is almost a lock for 2025. In fact, I’d wager an In-N-Out Burger lunch that it drops in the first half of the year for two reasons: 1) Doom Eternal shipped in March of 2020, meaning that in just a few months, it will have been a full half-decade since the last Doom (which itself followed four years after Doom [2016]). In other words, it’s time! Particularly since the idTech engine is already firmly in place despite the jump to a new console generation. And 2) I’d bet another In-N-Out lunch that the long- and eagerly anticipated reboot of Fable being cooked up at Playground Games – which, remember, got tagged with a 2025 release window in its Xbox Showcase 2024 trailer – is going to be Xbox’s big Fall/holiday game at the end of the year. That means Doom probably ships before the holidays. But whenever it does – and remember that it’s already confirmed to be a multiplatform release on day one – it’s probably going to kick some serious ass for Xbox next year, judging by how good id Software’s last two Doom games have been.
Back to Fable: in my opinion, the revival of Fable has higher potential – both critically and commercially – than almost anything else in Xbox’s portfolio short of Call of Duty, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout. We’ve seen Playground’s take on the British-charm-tinged action-adventure-RPG a few times now, and each time it’s been crystal clear that not only does Playground “get” Fable (it’s British itself, which no doubt helps), but that the game looks absolutely incredible as well. Who knew that the ForzaTech engine could render a jaw-droppingly beautiful fantasy forest just as well as a racetrack?
There’s one other huge reason to be optimistic about Fable, and that’s Playground’s track record. Simply put, this studio has not only never missed, it’s never made anything less than a consensus 9 out of 10. Its last game, the aforementioned Forza Horizon 5, was IGN’s 2021 Game of the Year. And it clearly is being given plenty of time to cook, as Fable was formally announced in 2020 with work having already been done prior to that. Microsoft knows it can’t fumble Fable a second time, and I couldn’t be more excited about what has been shown so far.
Next, while it certainly isn’t nearly as big a name as Fable, we can’t forget about South of Midnight, the third-person action-adventure from We Happy Few developer Compulsion Games that’s leaning heavy into the folklore of the bayous of the Deep South. This one’s nothing like the developer’s past games, which is admittedly riskier but also more intriguing. Microsoft has tabbed this one for 2025, so consider South of Midnight as something of a wild card for next year.
Another smaller-name Xbox exclusive that I think everyone will be talking about if it comes together when it finally ships in 2025 is Replaced. It’s a pixel-art, cyberpunk-styled side-scrolling action-adventure game that oozes style and, as I discovered when I played it over the summer, is much deeper than I expected. Replaced has the potential to join the long list of legendary Xbox-exclusive indies that includes games like Limbo, Braid, and Inside.
Finally, don’t forget about Xbox’s actual biggest franchise (since they now own it), Call of Duty. It’ll stay on PlayStation, of course, but Xbox fans will get it day one on Game Pass. The 2025 Call of Duty is rumored to be a future-set Black Ops 2 sequel, so perhaps Treyarch is handling the campaign on this one after Raven Software did a stellar job on this year’s Black Ops 6 campaign. And the other, much quieter juggernaut in the Xbox portfolio, Minecraft, will probably get some kind of big in-game content, what with the Minecraft movie on the way.
What About Hardware?
Barring a 180 from Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s previous comments, Microsoft won’t be pushing a mid-gen upgrade to the Xbox Series X (an Xbox Series XX, if you will) in 2025, if ever. And though a handheld Xbox is in development, we’re unlikely to play it or even see it in the coming year.
So should we expect any new hardware in 2025? Probably not – at least in terms of raw horsepower. The Xbox Series S got a storage upgrade in 2024, as did the Series X. And we’ll no doubt see a bevy of new special-edition controllers and maybe even that upgraded controller codenamed Sebile mentioned in the FTC leaks from over a year ago, but 2025 does not appear to be the year for Xbox to drop any new silicon.
Anything Else?
Rare’s Everwild appears to be in limbo and/or development hell, as we haven’t seen or heard from it in years. Might it reemerge in 2025? Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, Halo is being reset at the studio level, which in my opinion means the next Halo game is likely to either be a reboot of the franchise altogether or a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved. Either way, it’s going to be built in Unreal Engine 5, and it’s probably going to take a while. InXile’s steampunk RPG Clockwork Revolution was announced in 2023 with a release window of “coming in due time.” The Outer Worlds 2 has been revealed, and we now know it is coming in 2025, so that means Obsidian plans to ship two first-person RPGs in the same year.
And speaking of first-person RPGs, will that rumored Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster actually happen? How about Contraband, from Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios, which was in the 2021 Xbox Showcase and hasn’t been seen or heard from since? All we know is that it’s “a co-op smugglers’ paradise set in the fictional world of 1970s Bayan.” Should it reemerge in 2025, it’s unlikely that it also ships next year as well, given the usual PR/marketing cycles on big-budget games.
The wild card for 2025 is Double Fine, the endlessly creative and versatile studio headed by game design legend Tim Schafer that is coming off of 2021 Game Awards Game of the Year nominee Psychonauts 2. I’d expect Schafer and the studio to announce their new project soon, but as to whether it actually comes out in the next 12 months is anybody’s guess.
Finally, anything from this year’s Xbox Showcase that didn’t have a release year at the end of the trailer can safely be assumed to be a 2026 (or later) release. That means I’m not reasonably expecting to play Gears of War: E-Day, Perfect Dark, or State of Decay 3 in the next year. And that’s OK! It finally feels like Xbox is starting to pump out not just a steady stream of first-party games, but a consistently good stream of them. This is what Xbox has been building towards since they first started acquiring studios in 2018 to try and fix their first-party games problem, and dammit I think this is the year they finally do it. Please don’t pull that football away from me again, Lucy-Microsoft.
