Gamescom 2026 is in full swing, and there's already a bunch of big wins emerging for Xbox.

My Gears of War: E-Day campaign preview just went live (and it looks amazing), a metric ton of Gamescom titles just got revealed for Xbox, and we have even more goodies being announced throughout the week (stay tuned for tomorrow ...). But, here's a personal big win that I'm very excited about.

The Witcher 3 is inarguably one of the best games ever made, and it's getting a big remaster version on September 29, 2026, and is also COMPLETELY FREE for users who own the existing game.

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"Remastered is a free upgrade for players who own The Witcher 3 on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and includes both Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions. It is also available for pre-purchase on Battle.net and Nintendo Switch 2."

Update: I missed this part on the initial write up, but yes, The Witcher 3 is also coming to Microsoft and Blizzard's Battle.net. It's part of a wider initiative to open up Battle.net to third-party developers so I'm told, which we should hear more about at BlizzCon 2026 in September. Stay tuned for that one.

Furthermore, CD Projekt RED revealed in the small print that it also grabs Xbox Play Anywhere support, finally bridging the gap between Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Ally versions. It'll also get FSR 4.0 support on the Xbox Ally X, giving it massively improved performance.

Here's just some of the changes you can expect in the free update:

• Improved combat flow, with new finishing moves and skills.
• Boosted traversal with more intelligent and dynamic vaulting, platforming, etc.
• Overhauled visuals, with improved lighting and spell effects.
• Improved monster AI, giving them new moves of their own.
• Revamped horse riding.
• A complete Cyberpunk 2077-style overhaul of the skill tree.
• Armor transmogrification.
• Improved photo mode.
• A variety of other smaller enhancements, such as boosted looting systems, UI interactions, tutorial modernization, HDR improvements, lighting overhaul, Xbox Play Anywhere, and more.
• DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4.0 (great for Xbox Ally), Path Tracing on high-end systems, raytraced hair (wtf?), and more visual features.

Witcher 3 expansion "Songs of the Past" gets teased, too!

CD Projekt RED also recently announced that The Witcher 4 is slated for 2028, with yet another Witcher 3 expansion slated for later in 2027.

Additionally, CD Projekt RED also showed off the first teaser trailer for the third and final Witcher 3 DLC, titled "Songs of the Past."

"This full-fledged third expansion takes the White Wolf on a new adventure to the peaceful realm of Letten, where dark secrets lurk beneath the surface… Coming in 2027."

In the trailer, we catch a glimpse at a new hook-like tool Geralt has for pulling in enemies, as well as twisted nature-oriented enemies.

CD Projekt RED has been over-delivering almost none-stop since Cyberpunk 2077's launch, which disappointed users on PS4 and Xbox One owing to its performance. Fast forward half a decade, and Cyberpunk 2077 was fully revived and revamped, it had an award-winning TV show, and now we're getting an absolute mountain of free content for Witcher 3, the game that helped CD Projekt RED claim its top spot at the RPG pile.

Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 are deep in development as well, and there's every reason to think they too will continue CD Projekt RED's path towards legendary status.

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Gears of War is having something of a renaissance right now, as The Coalition go all out to put the franchise back on the map.

Gears has been one of the most consistent Xbox staples in the brand's history, popularizing the third-person shooter genre with its gritty storytelling and bleak world. Gears 4 and 5 experimented away from the formula a bit, and perhaps got lost in the weeds in some ways as they sought to give the franchise new footing. After a successful Gears of War: E-Day beta event, increasingly it's looking like the key to Gears' future may, in fact, lie in the past.

Recently, I was lucky enough to go hands-on with two missions from Gears of War: E-Day's campaign, set during the initial attacks from the vile Locust swarm.

E-Day follows a younger Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, worn down already from a major civil war that society had only just begun to recover from. Then, subterranean horrors emerged from the ground, bringing with them a whole host of terrifying war beasts and brutal makeshift weaponry in a legendary surprise attack that would eventually leave humanity on the brink of extinction.

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E-Day is about those early years, and if the full game is even close to as good as what I experienced last week, Gears of War: E-Day could cement its place as the best Gears of War story in history.

A painstakingly detailed, reactive world

The original Gears of War is very much a product of its time, but also its setting. The game is essentially post-apocalyptic, taking place years after E-Day, with much of civilization already reduced to grey-brown ash and ruins.

Given that Gears of War: E-Day takes place at the very start of the war, The Coalition had to approach it like it is: a very different beast, ultimately. The stakes are far higher; there are still survivors running around, trapped in their homes, and The Coalition weaves that bleak reality into every pixel of E-Day's presentation and gameplay.

Taking place in the town of Kalona, the levels I experienced are right up there with the most painstakingly detailed urban environments I've experienced this gen. It feels less like it's designed specifically as a gameplay canvas, and more like it's designed to feel lived in. The Coalition absolutely delivered here, while still sneakily dotting the map with chest-high (and now shin-high) walls to hide behind with its dynamic cover system.

If you played Gears of War's Siege mode beta, you might already have some idea of what I'm talking about with regard to environmental detail. Car tires puncture and deflate under gunfire, windows shatter, and cover deforms, giving E-Day a sense of life that was missing from the older games.

The town is full of storefronts and interiors, without even a whiff of copy-and-paste. Gears' campaign seems to connect linear segments into wider areas, complete with a mapping tool that was reminiscent of Silent Hill's own. Marcus will sketch notes and routes on the map as you move, which opens up exploration opportunities and side objectives for unlocking weapon mods and equipment for your loadout, as well as lore-enriching collectibles.

It's still unmistakably Gears, complete with a rough prototype chainsaw lancer machine gun, canned execution animations, atop a more dynamic cover system. But it also feels fresh in a way that many franchises struggle with several games deep. I dare say The Coalition cooked here.

A darker, more desperate tone

Gears of War: E-Day is every bit as violent as the previous games, although I feel like we're getting more up close and personal with the reptilian Locust than ever before.

I mentioned stakes in the intro, but there's a keen sense of vulnerability for a C.O.G. that has been caught with its collective pants down — NPCs are seen fleeing the warzone, being gunned down (or worse) in cold blood, as wretches screech through, devouring up the remains.

This first wave of Locust is chaotic and visceral, armed with the ballistic equivalent of axes and clubs intent on murdering anything and everything with a human pulse. The top brass have no idea what's going on. One day, everyone woke up to murderous, hungry monsters writhing out of the ground, and E-Day leans hard into that dark fantasy.

Marcus' self-assured stoicism hasn't fully hardened in E-Day; that sense of inexperience is oddly exposing, giving E-Day a tangible sense of vulnerability. The Coalition uses the game's side objectives to tell short stories within the game's world as well, giving you opportunities to see how regular civilians are being slaughtered en masse in the Locust feeding frenzy. It's an extension of the side-objectives system The Coalition seemed to explore a bit in Gears 5, although I'd argue it makes a lot more sense in E-Day's dense urban climbs. It doesn't rely on vehicular traversal, which arguably tripped up the game's pacing a bit in 5, and there are fewer engine limitations on injecting new areas on the fly.

Speaking of the engine, I think Gears of War: E-Day is probably the most visually impressive game I've played so far this gen. The Coalition are without a doubt the masters of Unreal Engine, perhaps surpassing Epic Games itself. The visual density, the lighting quality, the detailing, all while running at 60 FPS in an inexplicably crisp resolution, demand wonder and immersion like few other developers can muster.

The visuals and music delivery make Gears of War: E-Day's darkly cinematic presentation all the more evocative as you scrape through the blood-soaked streets of cities that are undoubtedly in the process of total destruction.

The Coalition takes Gears to the next level with total and complete confidence

There's little room for hope in Gears of War: E-Day. We all know the conclusion. But for the first time, we're going to experience that hopelessness firsthand.

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Right after playing through the E-Day campaign preview, I loaded up the original Gears of War to do a direct comparison. It's easy to forget sometimes just how far we've come in terms of visuals, presentation, gameplay fidelity, and general polish. It's also easy to fill in the blanks with your imagination — that's practically what we had to do back in the day, playing games at 480p.

The Coalition and other developers working on legacy franchises have some of the toughest jobs in the business. How can you deliver experiences that compete with our nostalgia-tinted imagination? How can you exceed expectations that are, in part, misremembered through fragments of fading memories?

The Coalition's answer seems to be: "you have to over-deliver."

If Gears of War: E-Day's full campaign offers the kind of quality I experienced last week throughout — I'm confident it'll not only be remembered as the best entry in the franchise ... Gears: E-Day could also represent the starting point for a new decade of an Xbox dominated by The Coalition.

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The big AI era isn't going as some might've hoped.

OpenAI and other big companies are losing billions chasing artificial intelligence technology, and it's only clever accounting and circular investments keeping the entire industry afloat. OpenAI specifically is in hot water, with spending commitments through to 2030 coming scarily close to $1 trillion dollars, and is operating purely on the basis of handouts from the likes of SoftBank, NVIDIA, Oracle, and Microsoft. OpenAI is looking to spend $50 billion in compute alone in 2026 on roughly $25~ billion in revenue, revenue which is also made up at least in part with IOUs.

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Despite the scary numbers, OpenAI is trucking along on faith and fumes alone, as companies' belief in the tech keeps the firm alive, for now.

Yet, even Sam Altman is having doubts about the impact of large language models. In a new podcast, Altman lamented "economic inertia" for the lack of adoption, and also called out the AI industry for making the tech seem "scary."

"A lot of the people building AI have been off saying there's a 25% chance we're going to destroy the world ..."

Altman effectively blamed those pesky humans for not adopting ChatGPT and other AI products, lamenting that "people keep using their tools in the same way" they had previously been using them.

"I thought when we got to [ChatGPT]-4, which was back in 2023, I thought very quickly after that there'd be much more disruption, with the software business up for grabs right away. I was wrong about a few things, one of them, in terms of the speed ... the economy just has so much inertia. People keep doing the same things they're doing, they keep buying from the same company, they keep wanting to use their tools in the same way ..."

Altman implied that the "slow" pace of change would make the "transition" to AI "smoother." Elsewhere in the podcast, Sam Altman remarked that AI leaders had "not done a very good job" explaining AI tech, referring to the broad backlash to the technology.

"I also think a lot of the people building AI have been off saying there's a 25% chance we're going to destroy the world ... and yeah, we're going to race ahead and do it because otherwise those bad guys will do it first. Or it's like, 'man, this thing is going to be really terrible, and 50% of the jobs are going to go away in the next year, and we hope you are all okay,' but it seems really scary.

We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated. We certainly have not done a good job ... even if people have had answers like, 'well, there's going to be universal basic income, or work will be optional', or whatever. There's been very little discussion from people about how and why it's important that people have more power and freedom in the world, not less."

My take: Altman just doesn't get it

I think the key issue with this AI tech is that most people just don't find it very useful. I work in an industry that, at least on paper, should benefit from some kind of automagical writing tool. The problem is that it loses so much nuance and accuracy that, even if I wanted to use it for work, I literally can't.

I think a lot of these very technical, mathematically-inclined dudebros pushing this format have little knowledge or understanding about how and where this technology should be applied. Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, gaming platforms, and other services are actively trying to filter out AI content, as it is repeatedly proven to decrease engagement — users actively hate it. Companies that are using tokens to try to boost productivity are finding that they're actually just boosting costs, and that they're simply finding a new bottleneck in the finite amount of addressable customers.

LLMs undoubtedly have uses, but when 90% of the compute is being spent on utterly unproductive use cases, the economics simply seem primed to implode. If you're spending tokens for the sake of spending tokens, and it doesn't lead to any discernible increase in sales — what is the point? You could use AI to make hundreds of slop video games, but people already have more than enough to play built by an ironically more affordable human workforce.

RELATED: Ed Zitron talks to us about Microsoft, OpenAI, and the future

In the future, I think we'll find AI probably ends up as a tool of governments in things like law enforcement and medical fields. Specific industries will benefit from tools that can parse and summarize large, complex data sets, albeit with the unfortunate knowledge of LLMs' penchant for hallucinations and outright lies. Just yesterday I asked Copilot to find some links to some old Windows Central articles I did. It just straight up lied and gave me some completely made-up links instead. Extrapolate these simple mistakes to medical fields or military applications, where lives are literally at stake ... is it worth the risk?

Perhaps the issue is that AI's inaccuracy renders it only viable in low-stakes businesses ... and those low-stakes businesses simply won't see a real return over doing things the "old way," which Altman describes as economic "inertia."

Perhaps it's not inertia. Perhaps the AI business model is just not the disruptor it was cracked up to be.

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Last July, Xbox users finally got their hands on one of the most viral games of the past couple of years. The celebrations were shortlived.

Wuthering Waves is a free-to-play gatcha RPG, similar to the likes of Genshin Impact. Wuthering Waves is available on every platform now, including Xbox, consoles, mobile, and PC, complete with a high-quality story and decent combat depth.

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The game is incredibly popular and has amassed a global audience across every platform, landing itself 30 million~ players across its versions. It won the Player's Choice award at last year's Game Awards, and continues to find growth owing to large free content updates.

Unfortunately, though, the Xbox version is broken.

Wuthering Waves (affectionally nicknamed WuWa by the community) recently got a sizeable content patch, adding new story beats and features to the game. The update has, however, once again put a spotlight on the Xbox version, which seems more broken than ever.

"The situation has worsened as I’ve progressed through the game. I’m currently in Lahai-Roi, and it’s been impossible to play for 40 minutes without the game closing unexpectedly," one user wrote on Reddit. "I play on Xbox Series X, but the same bug persists even on Xbox Cloud Gaming, where high local processing power isn't required. Other players have reported similar issues."

The most recent video showcases new visual glitches introduced in this week's patch, where textures get stretched infinitely across the playspace until the game crashes.

Users have been tracking Wuthering Waves' lack of quality on Xbox since the game launched, and had hoped it would be improved in subsequent updates. Sadly, things have gotten worse rather than better.

There are theories that Wuthering Waves on Xbox is a port of the iOS and Android version of the game, owing to a lack of shadows, foilage, and other post-processing improvements. The PlayStation 5 version is is far far better looking, far less crash-prone, and generally more performant than the Xbox Series X version. This absolutely shouldn't be the case in a game designed to run on low-end mobile phones.

We've reached out to Wuthering Waves' developer Kuro Games via their PR firm to get a comment, but I would be surprised if they offered one up.

If they thought the Xbox audience wasn't worth providing a high-quality port for, I'm confused as to why they bothered spending the money to deliver a port in the first place. Genshin Impact and other HoYoverse gatcha games like Zenless Zone Zero run incredibly well on Xbox. HoYoverse also did dedicated launches for Xbox, complete with bonuses and freebies for new players joining the ranks via Team Green.

Wuthering Waves' treatment of the Xbox audience by comparison has been a sad joke.

There's also some blame to be levied at Microsoft here I would argue. PlayStation demands that developers create visual parity with their multiplatform versions within reason. Xbox's certification processes are also notoriously strict compared to other platforms — what's the point of those apparent strict rules if they allow games like Wuthering Waves to launch in such a lamentable state? It makes Xbox look inferior for one thing, and treats Xbox customers like second class citizens in the other.

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Either way, it sucks for Wuthering Waves fans on Xbox that Kuro Games doesn't seem to consider them worthwhile. I would recommend players stick to HoYoverse options instead. Hopefully Honkai Star Rail makes its way across to Xbox in the future too. PerhaHoYoverse' next big games come to Xbox on day one as well, further reducing the need to consider Wuthering Waves as an option.

If Kuro replies, I'll be sure to update this piece, but I wouldn't hold my breath. They don't seem to care about the Xbox version even slightly.

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