After the surprising number of RPGs that showed up at E3 earlier this year, one might have expected Gamescom to have an even greater RPG presence. But judging by the nominees for best roleplaying game at Gamescom - Wasteland 3 and two JRPGs - that may not have turned out to be the case. Indeed, Wasteland 3 was the only RPG of interest to appear at Microsoft's Inside Xbox Gamescom event today. inXile appear to have taken criticisms of their E3 trailer to heart and produced a much more serious one this time. It's narrated by the Patriarch, the elderly warlord that has invited the Rangers to Colorado to help settle his succession dispute. This is our first real look at Wasteland 3's user interface, including a glimpse of the game's character screen at 1:18. It appears that the character system has been significantly altered, including what may be some sort of character class implementation. We won't have to wait long to find out what that's about, since the alpha comes out in two days.


There isn't much to report about what happened during the rest of the day. I was hoping Baldur's Gate 3 would make another appearance at Google's Stadia Connect presentation, but instead all we got a was a very brief Cyberpunk 2077 trailer which appears to contains a few snippets from the gameplay video that's supposed to be coming out in the next couple of weeks, along with a slightly longer dev diary video. Another thing I could mention is the brief Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 trailer published by Paradox earlier today, which announces support for NVIDIA's RTX ray tracing technology, with a voice over by the Toreador lady from the original announcement trailer.



As for the Gamescom opening event itself, this year hosted by the ever-hustling Geoff Keighley, it was a complete waste of time. But hey, at least Wasteland 3 won that best RPG award. We'll see what else pops up during the rest of the week.