What to Expect From Xbox in 2025

ign.com:

I’m starting to feel like Charlie Brown from The Peanuts comics, and Microsoft is the Lucy who keeps pulling the football away right as I go to kick it. Every year I write this feature, and every year I say that this looks like The Year™ where everything comes together for Xbox. Last year, in fact, I specifically said, “Looking ahead to 2024, that positive momentum looks set to continue and, with any luck, snowball.” Microsoft arguably didn’t live up to that for the first 10.5 months of the year, with only the visually-full-but-gameplay-empty Hellblade 2 dropping in May after many years of waiting. But to the big-spending publisher’s credit, it did end the year extremely strong, dropping three exclusive bangers in a row: STALKER 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and my personal vote for Game of the Year in 2024 and the game that I think is the best Xbox exclusive in years, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

So, can Microsoft keep that positive end-of-2024 momentum going into 2025? Call me Charlie Brown if you must, but yes, I genuinely believe that 2025 could be Xbox’s strongest and most bountiful year since at least 2021, when it dropped Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, and Psychonauts 2. Let’s dig into why I’m optimistic…

Xbox’s 2025 kicks off rather quickly and, from everything we can tell, rather impressively with Obsidian’s first-person fantasy RPG Avowed, due to be released on February 18. This “Skyrim Lite” is set in the studio’s established and well-loved Pillars of Eternity universe, it’s supposed to be around the same meaty-but-not-gargantuan 25-40 hours long as Obsidian’s most recent first-person RPG The Outer Worlds, and it’s impressed us more and more every single time we’ve played it, including quite recently.

Next, while it doesn’t have a firm release date yet, id Software’s unexpected zag of a prequel, Doom: The Dark Ages, is almost a lock for 2025. In fact, I’d wager an In-N-Out Burger lunch that it drops in the first half of the year for two