The Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase has become the most important event of the annual summer gaming festival formerly known as E3. There were fewer RPG announcements during this year's showcase than I'd hoped for, but what we did get was pretty interesting. Obsidian finally formally announced Pentiment, the historical RPG from Josh Sawyer whose title was leaked last year. Set in 16th century Bavaria, Pentiment is a narrative RPG in which players will assume the role of Andreas Maler, a monastic illustrator at fictional Kiersau Abbey who finds himself caught up in a series of murders over a twenty five year period. Not much is known about gameplay other than that it owes more inspiration to indie titles such as Night in the Woods than to Disco Elysium, but the game's heavily stylized appearance is already proving to be extremely divisive. Pentiment has a Steam page and will be launching this November. For more details about the game's premise and visual style, check out Josh's interview with IGN.

So that's nice, but obviously the highlight of the evening was Bethesda's space RPG Starfield. Originally announced way back in 2018, Starfield was recently delayed to early 2023 and Bethesda have revealed little about it other than a few sporadic dev diary-style videos. However, any angst about that was surely wiped clean by the fifteen minute gameplay reveal they released today. To keep things brief, the game is very much Skyrim/Fallout 4 in space, including outpost construction and an improve-by-use perk-based character system. Of course, it also features space travel, including ship management and arcadey space combat, across over a hundred star systems and a thousand planets. Are you hyped, Codex?


That's it for this year's Xbox showcase. Unfortunately, Obsidian's other titles and inXile's unannounced game were a no-show. Perhaps something interesting will show up during the PC Gaming Show later today, though.