Recently, a large data base leak from NVIDIA gave us a wealth of new codenames for potential and "speculative" upcoming games from various publishing partners. Some of those codenames revealed lined up with other rumors I'd previously heard, including the likes of Project Indus, which appears to be a 4X strategy game project led by Oxide, coming to Xbox and PC some time in the future. Thanks to Jeff Grubb of VentureBeat, we may have uncovered yet another upcoming Xbox Global Publishing partner project.
I'd heard about a potential Wu-Tang Clan themed game some months ago, but Jeff Grubb verified my information on his podcast, adding extra weight to the info I'd received. Funnily enough, a viewer of the podcast asked Grubb if the developer was Brass Lion Entertainment, which lined up directly with what I'd heard also.
Brass Lion Entertainment is a relatively new studio comprised of industry vets. We believe that they're building an action RPG currently codenamed Shaolin in partnership with Xbox.
In details I revealed on my Xbox Two podcast, I've heard that Shaolin is a third-person melee-oriented RPG complete with four player co-op. The campaign is planned to run for a couple of dozen hours, complete with a rich endgame comprised of seasonal content drops and other updates. You will be able to obtain loot, weapons, gear, and so on, in both procedural endgame dungeons and more tailor-made events. Also, it appears that legendary hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan themselves will be heading up the game's sound track. Brass Lion co-founder Manveer Heir recently put a tweet looking for potential hires to work on an upcoming "unannounced action RPG" with an anime aesthetic.
Until we get an official announcement, there's every chance some of the plans for this game may change, of course. But it does appear that the project is going ahead. The design brief I received is now a few months old, but the 'Shaolin' codename appears in far more recent documents too, suggesting that the project is moving forward.
If it pans out as planned, it represents another compelling game Microsoft is exploring for its growing army of exclusive titles for Xbox Game Pass. We've seen many of them already from the likes of Avowed, State of Decay 3, and Starfield, but even some of the rumors we've uncovered like Project Dragon, Cobalt, and now Shaolin, speak to a truly broad and diverse lineup that will be hard for competitors to catch up with in the very near future. Microsoft has never given this much investment to its upcoming Xbox games lineup before, and it's very clearly starting to bear fruit.
