Microsoft’s E3 stage show included no shortage of tantalizing titles for the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs, but one of the biggest surprises was the time the company dedicated to VR gaming. At Monday morning’s conference, Microsoft announced both an important new partner, and VR compatibility for one of the most popular games on the market — Minecraft.
A new partnership with Valve will make its VR headset, the Vive, compatible with the Xbox One. Microsoft announced a similar partnership with Oculus just last week, which will see the Rift shipping with an Xbox One controller, and the ability to stream Xbox One games through Windows 10 PCs.
But Microsoft’s VR announcements didn’t stop there. It will introduce a new version of Minecraft that takes advantage of Microsoft’s “mixed-reality” hardware, the HoloLens. Microsoft had previously displayed the HoloLens’ reality-augmenting features back in April, but this was the first live demo of the system’s gaming capabilities.
In an on-stage demo shown from the perspective of someone wearing the HoloLens, a Minecraft world was projected onto a table, where presenters used voice commands and gestures to manipulate the environment, peeking inside buildings by leaning into them and exposing underground caverns by lifting them up by hand. The game will also support traditional controllers, but Microsoft emphasized what would be possible through these more intuitive controls. It was an impressive display, and the world-crafting gameplay of Minecraft seems like a perfect fit for the mixed-reality system.
Microsoft’s VR partnerships and Minecraft adaptation show it’s ready to push into VR in a big way, but it won’t be alone at the show in making that thrust. The Swedish game studio Starbreeze promises to make a splash with its high-res, wide-angle StarVR, and Oculus showed off their Rift headset at a pre-E3 conference the other day. Sony has yet to show off their new Morpheus headset, so we’ll have to wait and see what comes of that.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.