It’s Gamescom time! What’s Gamescom, you ask? It’s a giant multi-day game festival held in Cologne, Germany every year for over a decade. Despite racking up larger attendances, it used to be seen as the little brother of E3, LA’s similar show, but with that show well and truly dead, Gamescom is now the undisputed king of the summer events.
In recent years Geoff Keighley, of Game Awards and now Summer Game Fest fame, has hosted an Opening Night Live stream, and that’s what we’re here for today. ONL is not usually a place for back-to-back game announcements, but you can expect to see deeper dives into known titles, with a surprise or two thrown in for good measure. Keighley has confirmed the showcase will include the following:
After the main event, there’ll be even more streams to watch this week. Namely, there are three streams from Xbox, each focusing on a unique slate of upcoming games. You can watch all of them via the Xbox YouTube page or the official Twitch page. The company hasn’t said how long each stream will last, but it’ll be popping up individual trailers after the fact. The Xbox streams start at 9AM ET each day from Wednesday August 21 to Friday August 23.
You can watch the event in the livestream above, and follow along with Senior Reporter Jessica Conditt, Contributing Reporter Kris Holt and Executive Editor Aaron Souppouris in our liveblog below.
Live36 updates
We seem to visiting the museum of busted games in this trailer… what’s going on here?
Here’s that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign trailer. Do you like bikes? I hope you like bikes:
Agreed, Kris. The newest Call of Duty looks pretty great and action-packed. The sound design does it for me, too. Pew pew!
Last year’s Modern Warfare 3 campaign was so boring, it soured me on all things Call of Duty for a while. Black Ops 6 already looks much better (and hey, it’ll be on Game Pass, so no need to shell out $70 for it).
While we’re dreaming up new games, there is a big Blops reveal happening…
I could definitely see someone adapting Civil War (the Garland movie, not the Marvel one) into a game. Playing a journalist in a warzone actually sounds like a great pitch for a game.
OK, hear me out: Black Ops 6, but instead of guns, you only have a camera. Eh? Eh?
I also care about Blops 6, but I might just watch the trailer for Directive 8020 again right now.
Randy Pitchford has been hinting for a while that Borderlands 4 was in the works, so it isn’t a huge shock to see it here. But a 2025 release date is sooner than I would have figured.
Borderlands 4! And it looks gritty gritty. Maybe they’re taking a new direction after the movie flopped so ridiculously hard?
Here’s that trailer for Borderlands 4. Very dramatic:
Monster Hunter and Indiana Jones are all well and good, but I’d be fine with some more random horror trailers, please.
I don’t know about that, but I do know I’m excited to see Supermassive do something a little different. Here’s the trailer:
Even more delicious-looking horror there with a first peek at Directive 8020, the next Dark Pictures game from Supermasssive. Is it just me, or did that character look like Lashana Lynch?
OK, we’re officially one minute away from the pre-show being over and the real show beginning.
Directive 8020 is here to prove me right on the horror front. And it’s from Supermassive Games? Hell yeah.
I feel like horror games are having a real moment right now and I’m very into it.