The Studio: RPG Royalty Under Xbox

inXile Entertainment was founded by Brian Fargo — one of the original creators of the Fallout franchise at Interplay in the 1990s — alongside veteran developers including Chad Moore (Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines) and Jason D. Anderson (Fallout 1 and 2). The studio became part of Xbox Game Studios in 2018, joining a roster that already included Obsidian Entertainment.

Their previous titles — Wasteland 2, Wasteland 3, and Torment: Tides of Numenera — were beloved by RPG fans for their deep reactivity, branching dialogue, and meaningful player choices. Clockwork Revolution represents everything those games were, rebuilt at ten times the scale and ambition, in a full first-person AAA engine.

Fargo has described it as "probably 10 times bigger" than Wasteland 3 in terms of scope and budget. A Fallout and Wasteland veteran on the project called it "the most complex game I've ever worked on." The studio hired talent from Rockstar Games, Bungie, and Blizzard Entertainment to improve cinematics, narrative interactions, lighting, animation, and gunplay — a clear signal of the production values being targeted.

The Setting: Avalon, City of Steam and Oppression

Clockwork Revolution takes place in Avalon — a stunning steampunk metropolis powered by steam technology and defined by deep class inequality. Set roughly in the spirit of 1895, the city is driven by social conflict, mechanical innovation, and a monarchy that controls every aspect of life through technological and temporal means.

The city's ruler is Lady Ironwood — an aristocrat who has used time travel to carefully manipulate history and cement her power, shaping Avalon exactly as she wants it to be. The lower classes live under her iron grip while the wealthy elite enjoy the fruits of a society optimized entirely for their benefit.

You play as a rebel who stumbles upon an incredible device — the Chronometer — that allows you to travel into the past. What you discover is that everything you thought you knew about Avalon has been manufactured. And now you have the power to change it.

The Core Mechanic: Time Travel With Consequences

The Chronometer is the heart of everything in Clockwork Revolution. It allows the player to visit past versions of Avalon, alter historical events, and return to the present to observe the resulting changes. These alterations can be minor or seismic — affecting individual characters, entire districts, social conditions, and the balance of power within the city.

This is not a simple rewind mechanic. Changing the past creates butterfly effects that ripple forward in time in ways the player cannot always predict. Save a person who would have died? Their survival may have consequences decades later that you never intended. Destroy a piece of infrastructure? The city that awaits your return may be fundamentally different. Every trip to the past is a gamble with the future.

According to the studio, Clockwork Revolution contains approximately 30% more content than any single player will see in one playthrough — a design philosophy that encourages replaying the game to discover alternate paths, different consequences, and entirely separate narrative outcomes.

Gameplay: First-Person RPG Meets Fallout 4's Blueprint

Clockwork Revolution is a first-person action RPG — the studio's first venture into the FPS space — with a character creation system, dialogue trees, attribute distribution, and weapon customization built on top of a genuine shooter foundation.

Character creation features multiple attributes including agility and social skills, with traits and effects visible from the start. The gunsmith system allows players to craft and modify weapons using parts scavenged from across Avalon — six distinct sections of each weapon can be individually tinkered with, allowing for an enormous variety of personal arsenals.

Combat uses steampunk-era firearms — revolvers, lever-action repeaters, and modified Gatling-style guns — alongside more advanced steam-powered equipment that blends the historical aesthetic with genuine sci-fi fantasy firepower.

The team has explicitly stated their goal is to "bring the level of reactivity from our isometric titles into something first-person" — meaning the dialogue depth and world reactivity of Wasteland 3 translated into a BioShock or Fallout 4-style first-person experience. The game has already been written to over 750,000 words of dialogue — a staggering volume that reflects just how much narrative depth is being built in.

The Characters: Lady Ironwood and the Insufferable Aristocracy

The Xbox Games Showcase 2025 trailer introduced several memorable characters representing Avalon's ruling class — including an irate talking doll that quickly became one of the most discussed moments in the game's marketing. The aristocracy of Avalon is depicted as insufferable, self-satisfied, and utterly committed to the system that benefits them — making the revolution feel genuinely earned rather than morally abstract.

The game allows players to be good, evil, or anything in between — without predetermining these choices or pushing toward a specific moral outcome. Every playthrough can be genuinely different depending on how players choose to use the Chronometer, who they align with, and which version of Avalon's history they ultimately choose to create.

Platforms, Game Pass, and When to Expect It

Clockwork Revolution is confirmed for PC and Xbox Series X/S, with day-one availability on Xbox Game Pass. No specific release date has been announced — the trailer at Xbox Games Showcase 2025 simply stated "coming in due time" — but a late 2026 window is widely expected based on development progress and a LinkedIn profile leak from a former senior writer that listed 2026 as the game's release year.

The Xbox Games Showcase 2026 is the most likely venue for a release date announcement.

Conclusion

Clockwork Revolution is the RPG that Xbox players have been waiting for since inXile joined the family in 2018. It carries the creative DNA of Fallout, the world-building depth of Arcanum, and the narrative reactivity of Wasteland — now rebuilt at a AAA scale with time travel mechanics, first-person combat, and a steampunk city that changes every time you visit the past.

Brian Fargo has spent decades making games that let players truly shape their worlds. Clockwork Revolution is his most ambitious attempt yet.

Avalon has been built on lies. The Chronometer is in your hands. The question is not whether to change history — it is which history to build.