Over the past several years Microsoft has made quite a few major acquisitions, adding new teams to Xbox Game Studios. One such team is inXile Entertainment, though it has flown under the radar due to its focus on the CRPG Wasteland 3. Now that Wasteland 3 is behind it, fans are curious what might be next for inXile. Many have figured that the team would continue making CRPGs, perhaps even Wasteland 4, but a new hint from the studio could mean a radical new direction.
The hint comes via the official inXile Entertainment Twitter account. To start, the official Xbox account tweeted a fun post asking what game people should play next. Attached to it is a gif that's rotating through game genres and platforms, so followers can click it to pause and find out what to play next. A response from inXile joined in the fun, saying, "Pulled NEW + FPS + RPG," with a thinking emoji.
In other words, inXile's hint appears to be that it's working on a "new" project and that the new project is both an FPS and an RPG. The Wasteland developer has yet to announce a new project, of course, but it would be quite the troll to so clearly state "new FPS RPG" without having an intent behind it. So a direct mention would perhaps hint that a more formal announcement might be coming soon, perhaps hinting at inXile's presence at E3 2021.
This isn't the first time that inXile has been hinting to be working on an FPS, mind you. Job listings for inXile Entertainment from January teased a project involving "new first-person shooter gameplay features" and a "next-generation action role-playing game." That news had no official follow-up, however, with inXile only ever going so far as to confirm it was working on two separate RPG projects going forward. The second project was still in pre-production at the time, but what the first project might be remains a mystery.
This studio isn't inexperienced with regards to first-person games. In 2018, inXile released The Bards Tale 4, a first-person dungeon crawler. Prior to that came The Mage's Tale, a first-person VR prequel to The Bard's Tale 4, with VR FPS Frostpoint VR following that. It's possible that the team responsible for these games within inXile is now working on the new project.
First-person shooters and first-person RPGs seem to be Xbox Game Studio's wheelhouse now. Obsidian Entertainment is working on Avowed, Bethesda's working on Starfield and Elder Scrolls, Arkane's working on Deathloop and a new game, plus there's GhostWire: Tokyo, Halo: Infinite, and the Gears franchise. The next several years are going to be very exciting for Xbox, just as soon as these first-person games start actually being released.