A brief overview of Gamescom's Opening Night! (Gamescom Opening Night 2024)

     Well friends, we're still in news mode for video games, and Gamescom just kicked off in Germany this week. Geoff Keighley was on the scene Tuesday night to have the Opening Night Live showcase, and while the show went on for two full hours, there weren't all that many announcements that caught my attention. I'm hoping that this will be a slightly shorter affair than some of my previous write-ups have been for that reason, but there was a lot of stuff shown! Let's get started, and I'll point out some things that stuck out to me from the two-hour long event.

Another Geoff Keighley Production!

    In a sense, it's good to see something headed up by Geoff Keighley, since I've learned that most of the things that he focuses on (which is to say the companies that pay him) are not the types of games and experiences that will super appeal to me. There are a lot of shooters, strategy games, town building, Overwatch and other MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena) type games, with a few bits of horror sprinkled in for good measure. There aren't many platformers shown off here, but that's fine, it's not for everyone. What I do have to question is the fact that there was what felt like a 10 minute long presentation for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 where they showed very little action. I also just can't believe we're at a point where they're on the 6th Black Ops game, but that's beside the point. The series has never really appealed to me, and while others were totally on board at first, I think most of the people in the community are pretty tired

    One of the first announcements of the show was actually the one that I was the most excited about from the whole show, which was the announcement of Borderlands 4. The Borderlands movie is out right now and doing terribly, the last time I checked, it had a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I hope this game will be good for the series as a whole. We got the announcement of Goat Simulator Remastered... I don't know why we would ever need that, but the trailer was really funny and made fun of a lot of games that have been remade over and over again. There was a new trailer released for the Persona 3 Reload Aigis DLC which revealed that you can do a challenge battle with Joker from Persona 5! As you know, I love Persona 5, so I'm always happy to see the leader of the Phantom Thieves step into the spotlight. in Persona 5 Royal, there was an opportunity to face off against the protagonists from Persona 3 and 4, so I assume this will be something akin to that, still very cool. Black Myth Wukong came out the same day as this presentation, but they showed off a launch trailer at the show, which seemed kind of odd to me. Don't Nod Montreal is working on a new game, clearly in the vein of Life is Strange, but another studio is working on the new game in that series, so the original developer of the series is making Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. Infinity Nikki was shown off last year for the first time I think, and I still don't understand what it's going to be, but it looks really interesting. Described as an "Open World Dress Up game," it's definitely one to keep your eye on, as weird as that sounds!

    We got an extended look at Dune Awakening, the upcoming MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online games) based on the Dune franchise, I've never been one for games of that type, but I do hope that Dune fans or people who play MMOs will be happy about this. There were two games that looked like Little Nightmares, there was Little Nightmares 3, being developed by Bandai Namco and Supermassive Games, and then Reanimal, which is a game from the original developers of the first two games in that series. Very weird how often franchises are being taken away from smaller developers nowadays, I wonder why that is.We got a new trailer for Monster Hunter Wilds, which a lot of people are really excited about, but I've never been very interested in the series, despite multiple times I've tried to get into Monster Hunter World. The monster designs look really cool, and I'm sure people will have a great time with this new title. We got a trailer for Civilization VII, which is also a big deal for some, but as I said, I've never been super into Strategy games of this type. I say that, but I do love Age of Mythology, which is being remade and releasing at the beginning of September. There was a trailer for Age of Mythology: Retold in one of the commercial breaks of the stream, so I was very happy about that one at least. 

    Marvel Rivals was shown off, which is Marvel's entry into the all encompassing space of Overwatch clones, and they revealed Captain America and Winter Soldier as new characters that are being added, as well as the release date being December 6, 2024. Hopefully it'll be a fun time, especially since Overwatch 2 has not lived up to any expectation of the quality that was promised before it came out. Speaking of Blizzard, the company behind Overwatch 2, there was a long sequence where they talked about the impact of World of Warcraft and celebrating the 30th anniversary of that game, among many other milestones. They talked briefly about the new season of Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, as well. It felt like these folks from Blizzard were on stage for a long time, but talked about almost nothing, which is convenient because to me, it seems like they as a company just waste everyone's time, exactly what they did here. 

    Getting back to cool things that I was interested in, there's a new series from the makers of "Love, Death, and Robots" coming out on Amazon Prime Video called "Secret Level." There will be 15 episodes that each focus on a different video game franchise, and from the trailer, we saw inspirations from Mega Man, God of War, Pac Man, Sifu, and many others. It's coming out on December 10, so I'm really excited for that. Peter Molyneux showed up with a new game called Masters of Albion. It looked like it's still early on in the process, but it looks like a cool take on the town management simulator, then allows you to take control of one of the warriors to take down some enemies attacking the town at night. You can also attack in "God Mode" with lightning or other elemental powers.

    Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was shown off as the penultimate announcement, it's looking really good, and Troy Baker is voicing Indy for the game, he gave a bit of insight into what it's like to play the character and also what it's like to play the game before the release date was revealed. It's coming out December 9 for Xbox and Gamepass, then coming to PS5 in Spring 2025, which is a nice reveal! Ever since Zenimax Media was bought out by Microsoft, there has been an uneasy tension over whether there would be any more Bethesda games on Sony's consoles, especially after Starfield was released as an Xbox and PC exclusive. It's nice to see that it won't always be the case, though I am still not expecting Elder Scrolls VI on PS5 whenever it comes out. Mafia: The Old Country was the final reveal for the awards, and while I did play a lot of the demo for Mafia II back in the day on the Xbox 360, I haven't put much thought into the games since then.

    Before I finish this post (which is much longer than I originally thought it would be), I have to shout out another game that didn't really seem to be part of the show, but Nikoderiko is a game that looks right up my alley. The comments on the trailer called it, "Crash Bandicoot meets Donkey Kong Country meets Rayman," and they don't look to be too far off. It looks like a really cool 2D/3D platformer, and David Wise (the composer for the Donkey Kong Country games among many others) is composing for it. I'm really excited for it, as well as many other games coming really soon, and I won't have to wait long, since it's coming out in October!

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! I hope you didn't mind me bashing the multibillion dollar corporations too much this week, I just didn't care for a lot of the things shown here. It was an alright show, and I hope a lot of people liked it, I just wasn't the biggest fan. Hopefully there was something here that you were interested in, and I'm glad that we have so much coming up so soon, so it's really not a big deal. I hope you'll all have a good week and I'll talk to you again soon! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed reporter, signing off!