Key insights from Opening Night Live 2024

Geoff Keighley took to the stage in Cologne, Germany, to share numerous trailers.

Good evening! 🇩🇪 Chris and Kevin drop by with our first Gamescom update.

So, Geoff Keighley’s annual Eurotrip kicked off tonight with Opening night live — we’ve just returned from the epic two-hour trailer-athon, which had the usual assortment of big triple-A sizzle and video game variety, including stuff like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Dune AwakeningAnd Monument Valley 3.

You can watch the full two-hour presentation here , but if you’d rather review the key points (together with our highlights), here they are:

• Fresh from the back of the less than great movie, Borderlands 4 is now officialThe film will be released next year and will undoubtedly outperform the film version.
• Civilization 7 is coming in February 2025.
• As predicted, Microsoft confirmed that the new Indiana Jones game also coming to PS5. Are looks pretty good.
• British game designer Peter Molyneux made a surprise appearance on stage to announce a new game: Masters of Albion. Chris Dring on gamesindustry.biz spoke to Molyneux about this new titleand how these are “last chance for redemption“. This old video from People Make Games is definitely worth watching if you want a summary of his career to date.
• The studio behind Love, death and robots announced a new anthology series called Secret Level. Each of the 15 episodes will feature one (or more) gaming IPs, such as Armored Core, MegaMan, Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, Spelunky and more.
• We have a very brief overview in a brand new mafia game, ‘The old country‘ is set in Sicily in the 1900s.
• Although it was not specifically shown during Opening night live, Hardware maker Zotac has officially launched the ‘Zotac Zone‘, their take on a portable gaming PC. It’s available for pre-order now for $799, has an AMD 8870U and is one of the first Windows-based handhelds with upcoming dual trackpads. Zotac is here in Cologne, so we’ll be checking out their device and reporting back.
• Not a highlight, but I was a little disappointed to hear that Hearthstone is now 10 years old. …turns to dust

As for our ✨ personal highlights:

Chris Brandrick: Uncharted was always the Indiana Jones of gaming, so it’s nice to see Indy get a fair shake at the action-adventure whip. It’s also nice to see usTwo return to Monument Valley with a third newcomer – all three games are coming to Netflix later this year. The first two are pure puzzle-solving delights, and this next one looks like more of the same. Yes, please.

Kevin Wammer: While I was excited to see Peter Molyneux on stage, I’m most intrigued by Dune: Awakening. I started reading the graphic novelsso this is a universe that i really like. although i’m still not sure how funcon pulls off everything we saw in this trailer. oh and we got to see phil spencer.

Enough for today (Chris: I woke up at 4am, it’s time to sleep). Tomorrow we’ll be up early for day one of gamescom 2024. You can follow us on Mastodon And Instagramand we’ll be back tomorrow with more from the show floor.