E3 2019 - Microsoft

Boldly going where no conference has gone in a while, things start with a new IP we'd merely heard of before, Outer Lands. It appears to be familiar Fallout style in a new space-faring setting. Considering its production under Obsidian, those responsible for most of the good Fallout games, there is still some promise for this title.

Two people from Ninja Theory appear on stage proving their company name entirely accurate as only one of them dressed in all black and stole Matt Lee's face for disguise. They introduce their new game Bleeding Edge which looks to essentially be Overwatch in a Borderlands aesthetic.

Next up is Minecraft Dungeons which looks to essentially be Gauntlet in a Minecraft aesthetic. Phil Spencer arrives who looks to essentially be a jargon teleprompter in a mid-life crisis aesthetic. One noteworthy phrase was him claiming they have the "largest showcase of games on any stage this year" which considering Nintendo and Sony have both dropped out is a snide way of celebrating a rather feeble win by default.

A first person Blair Witch game of all things gets a trailer, a mere twenty years after the film. It looks like about a hundred other first person horror games but with a triple A graphical polish.

Cyberpunk 2077 gets a rather meaningless story cutscene with drama involving characters we don't know and the whole thing feels like a waste of time until the very end reveal that is Keanu Reeves somehow being in the game.

I guess that's where all the Witcher money Gwent.

The man himself proceeds to come on stage and chew the fuck out of the scenery in that detached, ambiguously self-aware way Hollywood actors often do at these events. The crowd hype couldn't be higher right up until they see the 2020 release date. Having played the frankly stupidly expansive Witcher 3 of the same developers, expecting a release this year seemed far-fetched to me. All the same it was a stony cold silence that washed over the crowd that otherwise never shuts the fuck up.

Spiritfarer is a cutesy little puzzle, platformer game with an artstyle like a heartwarming children's book and a vague plot with bestiality undertones. It seems like Microsoft always has at least a couple of games like this to show off and then they vanish off the face of the Earth with no review or reception anywhere. Perhaps it's just a bit outside of my usual radar.

Speaking of which they're still going ahead with the Battletoads thing. Like, they're actually making that...I don't know of anyone with any desire to play that unironically. Lassoed back to the formula we get the compulsory trendy pop song indie game montage. Right on cue and strictly regimented to show no more than an epileptic spasm of footage for each.

The bloody titles and pop ups constantly promoting exclusivity, world premieres and preorders get more screen time than this. 

From what I could glean there's a lot of isometric dungeon crawlers, pixel art shoot 'em ups and...nope, never mind. The fuckwitted visual operator unfathomably still employed has kept up his habit of switching to a pointless wide shot of the audience sitting in the dark.

A lady who will unfortunately spend the next several years being reminded how to pronounce "Imperator" promotes the actually increasingly good value Game Pass coming to PC. This essentially negates the need to ever buy an Xbox console so its value is a little baffling from a business perspective but don't look at a horse's mouth gift as my grandmother used to say...Shortly before she was arrested for equine trachea smuggling.

In the time it took me to write that joke, several other trailers played and none were interesting enough to prevent me from it so that one's on Microsoft.

Matt Booty has dedicated his life to looking as unassuming and uninteresting as possible to distract from his embarrassing surname. That was until he became the head of Xbox Game Studios and his name was plastered on a massive screen and announced loudly in front of thousands.

Matt said nothing of any great importance but did sound like he'd been shouting for hours at someone backstage, possibly telling them to stop laughing. To assist in the prevention of laughter he brings out Tim Schafer who introduces a rather lacklustre Psychonauts 2 trailer.

Weirdly Lego is going back to Star Wars and creating a game featuring all nine films of the "Skywalker Saga" and more weirdly I'm fine with this. Perhaps it just sounds appealing conceptually since we were shown no gameplay and little else, or perhaps the writers of the Lego Star Wars games are better than anything the franchise has produced mainline or otherwise for some time.

"12 Minutes" is a story-driven, time-loop affair which looks like it'd be pretty dramatic from almost any other camera angle. The top down view doesn't seem to have any purpose beyond a gimmick to initially stand out.

A Gears 5 conceptual trailer made by one of the angsty music video undergraduates I used to work with tells us almost nothing and evokes little more than mild cringe.

"It represents Capitalism."

Clancy Brown promises more info later at an event that isn't this one so he might as well have just projectile vomited into the crowd for all the usefulness that was. He did however claim they're trying to take Gears 5 in new directions never seen before...like "Arcade mode."

Another CG Gears 5 trailer appears to lean into the far more interesting horror aspect of the series until a dreadful remixed hip hop bollocking punctures the atmosphere and the trailer deflates like a bean bag full of melted sausage. Some pyrotechnics and pantomime tone setting had me half expecting a zombie Cliff Bleszinski to stagger onto stage but instead I just fell for the same trick again where a supposed horror atmosphere is a rug pull for something utterly dumb. In this case, a tie in with the new Terminator film.

Appealing to the niche crossover market of car enthusiasts and Lego fanatics comes a truly bewildering Forza Lego expansion which does actually at least succeed in making Forza look more interesting. That was a bar so low as to be underground though so it isn't saying much.

I'm sorry to whichever poor bastard had to assemble that but it wasn't worth it.

Crossfire X got a bizarre amount of build up for a purely CG trailer that looks so much like an unbelievably generic military action movie shooter as to possibly be an intentional parody. Probably wishful thinking on my part.

It is worth mentioning just how much stuff isn't worth mentioning in this Microsoft conference by the way. For several years now they've felt long and exhausting and not in a sexy way. Pointless add ons and tie-ins are starting to drag down the goodwill towards games that could well be fantastic but for some reason aren't allowed to stand on their own two feet.

Teeth-grindingly unfunny Funko Pop mobile spin offs, WWE wrestlers live playing Gears Of War, the sacred tradition of hauling a fucking car on stage even if it is made of Lego and the ongoing mystery no one cares enough to solve that is "Mixer." It all gives a very "weird uncle who doesn't really get your hobby and who kind of ruins it with shit he thinks is cool instead" vibe.

Moving on, the E3 hallmark of terrible camerawork lead me to believe we were seeing an Avatar game but mercifully it was just Borderlands 3 and some glowy blue tattoos . The game seemed fine if a bit try-hard in its edginess. After all, nothing says a punk rock aesthetic like censoring a middle finger to the camera.

Finally we get a short CG teaser of Elden Ring, the collaborative project of From Software and George R. R. Martin. There's little to tell beyond the familiar mysterious and epic tone. Themes of light and dark, life and death. It's typical of From Software to be secretive regarding details but suffice to say everyone is still riding on the names attached to this production rather than anything we've actually seen yet.

Fiddy Spence returns to introduce the next generation Xbox Console, which means a featurette of devs talking about amazing grafix, less loading times, bigger graphix, cross platform play, better graphical framerate and more powerful graphics.

It's apparently called Project Scarlett and I could show a picture that says the same thing but frankly this guy deserves to be seen more.

I want to believe it keeps going off-camera as well.

Announcing the console will launch with the new Halo leads into a CG trailer where some stranded chap runs into Master Chief and explains that humanity lost most and/or all of everything somehow. Seems like standard Halo stuff. I haven't followed it closely since Reach but it seems the game still hasn't regained its former glory from back when Bungie was developing.

Overall I think the best summary of events was my earlier use of the phrase "Win by default." Microsoft did have a lot of games but remarkably few of them sparked any interest for me. On top of this they also had a lot of stupid shit that actively instils me with ire and I genuinely don't imagine earns them any favour with any kind of crowd. Whatever their "expanding horizons" or demographic intentions might be, in my opinion it's overshadowing the games to a significant detriment.

Still, of the two I've watched so far, it was a damn sight more bearable than EA's AI BS.

Beep boop