Square Enix Presents Returning This Summer

Video game company Square Enix is announcing that its "Square Enix Presents" digital showcase will be returning later on this year. The livestream show will see another installment at an unspecified date this summer.

The home to franchises like Final Fantasy, NieR, and other popular franchises announced the inaugural Square Enix Presents show last week. Sticking true to its description, the event revealed several long-rumored releases, along with new insight into existing and already-announced titles' upcoming additional content.

Debuting at 10AM PDT this morning, Square Enix Presents delivered a variety of exciting news. The biggest standout of the broadcast was the announcement of Life is Strange: True Colors. The game's extensive trailer revealed a lot about the highly-anticipated title, with one of the biggest surprises being the return of Steph, a character from Life is Strange: Before the Storm. The game is set in the small rural town of Haven Springs, where new main character Alex Chen must utilize her psychic empath powers to uncover the mystery surrounding her brother's mysterious death. A first for the series, Life is Strange: True Colors will be ditching the episodic format in favor of a full game divided into chapters.

One of the other major titles focused on in the stream was Outriders. Releasing an Outriders 101 trailers today, the post-apocalyptic RPG shooter from developer People Can Fly gives much more insight into the title's plot, classes, and post-campaign content. Beyond explaining the protagonists' backstories, the video goes in-depth with the game's four classes: the close-range Trickster, long-range support-type Technomancer, medium-range fire-using Pyromancer, and the Devastator, an earth-elemental tank class. While players may already be familiar with the classes thanks to the extensive Outriders demo, it also touches on Expeditions, which will effectively be post-campaign raids that feature enemies of the highest difficulty.

Aside from the two aforementioned titles, Square Enix Presents revealed much, much more. Some of the trailers were reveals for Just Cause: Mobile, an AR Space Invaders, Balan Wonderworld, and the next-gen version of Marvel's Avengers. While Marvel's Avengers got off to a rocky launch, it appears developer Crystal Dynamics is far from done working on the superhero game. In addition to revealing all of the visual enhancements of the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the title will be free to those who own it on last-gen, Marvel's Avengers: Black Panther War for Wakanda was unveiled as the game's next major expansion. While details remain scarce, players can expect to travel to the nation of Wakanda in a war against Klaw, the same villain in 2018's Black Panther.

Square Enix Presents joins a long line of digital showcases as video game companies continuously adapt not only to the ongoing pandemic, but to the ever-increasing digital accessibility of its audience. Given that summer is the same time when major gaming announcement events happen, like E3 and Gamescom, it'll be interesting to see what else Square Enix has up it sleeve later this year.

When Square Enix revealed its upcoming project developed by Luminous Productions called Project Athia, fans were quick to notice that this was in fact a working title. In the months to follow, the exciting project would fall into obscurity, but the hype for it returned almost immediately when Square Enix showed it again at March's Square Enix Presents. Closing out an already impressive show, Project Athia was given an official name and fans were able to see more details about characters, story, and setting. Forspoken will release sometime in 2022 on PS5 and PC. That isn't the only thing revealed, however.