Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 Preview: Stop Living In The Past, Go Be The Future

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 has had one of the strangest second lives in gaming. A decade of DLC, a fanbase that never really left, and a sequel that almost felt like it was never coming. Now it's here, and after DualShockers got to experience the joy of a great Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 presentation at Summer Game Fest, we can say the wait at least bought the team time to rethink what this series is actually for.

The pitch is simple on paper: you're no longer cosplaying as a Time Patroller reliving Goku's greatest hits. You're stepping into Age 1000, a future built specifically for this game by Akira Toriyama before his passing, where the legends are gone, and it's up to you to fill the gap they left behind.

Two Races, One Demo, and a Lot Left Unsaid

Before any of that, there's character creation, and the demo only really scratched the surface of it. We were shown two default characters built for the presentation: Sen, an Earthling, and Age, a Saiyan, each with visibly different stats tied to their race on screen. The team was clear that these are just two of several races players will eventually be able to choose from in the full game, though exactly how many, and what they bring to the table, is still being kept under wraps.

It's a small detail, but it tells you something about how this game wants you to think about your character from the very first menu. Race isn't cosmetic here, it's a mechanical choice that ripples into stats, abilities, and eventually the kind of player you become in West City.

West City Has Grown up, and so Has the Hub

The demo shown opened in your character's apartment, which doubles as your customization space and, charmingly, a room you can actually tidy up to make it feel lived in. From there it's a short trip down to West City itself, now a sprawling, technologically dense hub that the demo treated less like a menu screen and more like an actual place worth walking through. Future Trunks shows up loitering outside your apartment complex, because, apparently, in Age 1000 even your neighbors are time travelers.

West City is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Previous Xenoverse games treated their hubs as glorified lobbies between missions. This one is being built as the actual emotional center of the game, the place where you encounter characters and stumble into side stories rather than just queue up for the next fight. Gamma-1 fills the role of mission-giver early on, and watching the team hand out a quest from inside the hub itself, rather than through a disconnected menu, made the city feel less like set dressing. Whether that translates into something worth lingering on remains to be seen, but the ambition is clearly there.

Squad Combat Finally Gets a Reason to Exist

The actual mission structure will feel instantly familiar if you've played either previous Xenoverse game: head out from the hub, link up with companions, fight your way through a string of encounters toward a boss. What's changed is the emphasis on your three-person squad actually mattering moment to moment. Companions can shield you, revive you mid-fight, and contribute distinct abilities rather than just standing around as decoration.

That squad dynamic got its biggest spotlight during the demo's boss fight against Broly, where a downed teammate needed an active revive rather than a convenient respawn. One squad member's ability to throw up a barrier was used specifically to block a wave of Broly's ki blasts, buying the rest of the team room to reposition rather than just tank the hit. It's a small thing, but it's the difference between a squad that exists for flavor and one that exists because the fight genuinely asks something of it.

Soul Switch Is the Mechanic Doing the Most Work

The systems doing the heavy lifting here are Soul Assist and Soul Switch, and they're built to solve the same problem from two different angles: how do you make a custom Earthling or Saiyan feel connected to Dragon Ball's actual cast without just handing them a cameo. Soul Assist calls in a Dragon Ball character to land a guest attack mid-fight, with the demo showing Vegeta dropping in to deliver a Galick Gun on command. Soul Switch goes further, temporarily transforming your character into someone like Future Trunks, borrowing their moveset, their ultimate attack, and even their general fighting style for as long as the meter holds.

Watching a generic custom Earthling morph into Future Trunks mid-combo, complete with his signature sword attacks, was genuinely the best part of the demo. Tellingly, the team built in a real cost to using it. Switching refills your attack meter on activation, which means the decision of when to pull the trigger becomes a genuine read on the fight: do you switch to survive a tough exchange, or save it to maximize damage when an opening appears. It's a system that lets the game have its cake and eat it too. You get to be your own original character, but you're never more than a meter charge away from briefly becoming someone the franchise actually built its name on.

Combat Still Has That Familiar Dragon Ball Shape

Underneath the new dressing, this is still very much a Dragon Ball fighting game at heart. Flight, ki blasts, comboing lights into heavies into super attacks, all present and accounted for. The key system adds an interesting layer, since breaking an opponent's key opens them up for serious follow-up damage, while losing your own key puts you on the back foot. Perfect Guard timing recharges it, which gives even the defensive side of combat something active to engage with rather than just holding a block button.

Super attacks themselves are customizable on a per-loadout basis too, and the demo leaned on a noticeably amped-up Super Kamehameha as the character's equipped ultimate, the kind of wide-area hit clearly meant to close out tough encounters rather than chip away at them. The team made a point of saying that matching the right super attack to the right encounter, rather than defaulting to whatever feels strongest, will matter more this time around. Saiyan players get their own flavor of escalation through awakening skills, including the option to push all the way to Super Saiyan 3 mid-battle, while Earthlings lean more on utility and support options like the ones shown off in the demo. It's not a dramatic reinvention of how Xenoverse fights, but it's a noticeably more textured version of it.

Worth Watching, Not yet Worth Hyping

Dimps has earned a strange kind of patience from this fanbase. Ten years of support for a game that, by most accounts, aged roughly as well as you'd expect a 2016 anime game to age, is the kind of loyalty most franchises don't get to bank on twice. Xenoverse 3 is clearly trying to use that patience to actually evolve the formula rather than just reskin it, and the West City hub, the squad mechanics, and Soul Switch all point in a promising direction.

What DualShockers saw was a short, carefully managed slice, and the team was upfront that none of it reflected the final visuals or content. Age 1000 is a good setting on paper, built personally by Toriyama as one of his last contributions to the franchise. Whether Dimps can stretch that setting into a game worth the decade-long wait is still an open question, but for the first time in a while, it feels like one worth asking.