E3 2014 - Microsoft

With an introduction that basically says "you're in charge of Microsoft now, we dunno what the fuck we're doing so we'll just listen to you." Phil Spencer also claims this will be an "entire conference dedicated to games" That's a pretty good start i have to admit, it's almost like they're capable of learning. He goes on to talk about "new ip's" and the "next generation" before showing us a demo of the next Call Of Duty...

So Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare appears to have Metal Gears, Michael Bay levels of explosions, somewhat futuristic weapons, jetpacks and what i initially mistook to be the Kryll from Gears Of War. They are in fact swarms of robot drones and you can tear car doors off to shield yourself from them. Of course there has to be a noble team-mate sacrifice at the end of the demo and whilst they resisted having you black out, you don't leave unscathed.

An explosion knocks you back and the expected shrapnel flies past but for once in a rare element of realism for COD, your arm has been severed off and your shellshocked character doesn't seem to realise until he's being dragged to safety. Now a friend thought this was just hilarious but to me it seemed like hinting at a greater exploration of the real horrors of war and that would be interesting. Unfortunately i then realised this would never happen in any other iteration and is probably just so you can have a Bionic Commando replacement.

Forza 5 gets a fair amount of stage time just like last year, detailing DLC that is available immediately which as release dates go can't be faulted. Aaron Paul shows off his new voicebox and introduces the sequel; Forza Horizon, with a trailer, the likes of which i have absolutely seen a hundred times before.

Assassin's Creed Unity has its world premiere demo, although describing it as having the biggest game world of any AC game is not necessarily a good thing. Online four player co-op however could be, and it seems to work quite well within confrontations at least. I'm going to assume at this point it won't also be available through splitscreen...

With Unity, the series appears to be returning to its roots of infiltration, crowd-based stealth and actual assassinations. All enhanced from the original with the advancements in speed, combat and fluidity we've seen since. It's possible all the bells and whistles are still present outside of this demo, but initial footage is promising and the setting feels more alive than in some of the previous games.

People have long hoped for AC during the French Revolution.

The Sunset Overdrive trailer mocks modern military shooters then quickly becomes mockable itself with cringeworthy comedy and badly breaking the fourth wall. Irritating presentation aside, "Tony Hawk with guns" does at least then show gameplay footage that looks colourful, comic book inspired and fast. Dead Rising 3 is up next, awkwardly still describing itself as an exclusive despite a PC version already being announced. More cringey comedy as the game tries to get its goofy back with online multiplayer modes through DLC, of which the quality is questionable but again it's available immediately so that's commendable.

Oh and Dance Central is back i guess...

The new Fable Legends brings more co-op gaming along with an interesting RTS Overlord style feature playing as the villain. Initial criticisms would be that the constant quipping from characters will get repetitive and annoying fast but besides that the gameplay looks fine and functional at this stage. All throughout the conference the trailers and demos have been interspersed with odd little Vox Pop interview segments starring different game developers. They add little to the proceedings but help break up the otherwise constant stream of game footage in a 90 minute conference i suppose.

Another inane quipping, cartoon, self-referential title called Project Spark appears, that apparently allows over one million different types of game level creation. As a fan of mapmakers i'm certainly intrigued and there does seem a genuine wide variety of possible creations in the trailer. This ends with a seeming segue into a new Conker game! Now that would be news but in fact it's just Conker as a random feature in the aforementioned game. The wording and introduction of this feature feels more than a little deceptive and cheap, not to mention probably rising, puncturing and sinking the hearts of many starved fans watching.

I believe this is known in the industry as "a dick move"

Visually stylised 2D indie platformer with a sombre story? That's ORI...at least i think that's what it was called, the typography was a bit flamboyant. Halo 5  is then introduced with its iconic accompanying theme, now a little awkward considering the attempted lawsuits by composer Martin O' Donnell. A purely cinematic trailer it unfortunately turns out but some Keith David narration is always nice.

Bonnie Ross enters the stage to wax vague lyrical about Halo before announcing a boxset of all the previous titles. I wonder what kind of insanity that will cost? The "Master Chief Collection" apparently all fits on one disc and transitions so seamlessly between games one can create playlists of their favourite moments. We then see some brief gameplay of an (optionally) graphically improved Halo 2 multiplayer. As well as announcing some other extras to the huge Halo collection the release date of the 11th November is surprisingly soon. I can't really criticise this package at all until i know the cost.

Phil Spencer introduces another visually stylised 2D indie platformer with a sombre story titled "Inside". It certainly doesn't look bad but this style of game is not automatically "innovative" and is quickly becoming tired. Continuing on the indie train we get a montage trailer of indie games with a decent variety, though some still fall into the aforementioned overused category. A few that stood out to me personally were Plague.Inc Evolved, Cuphead, Fru and Woolfe.

Following this, a purely cinematic announcement trailer for Tomb Raider 2 (The Rise Of The Tomb Raider) which suggests a darker more psychological focus that could just be all in the trailer because we don't see any gameplay. Next up a demo for The Witcher 3 which not knowing much about the series appears to be Dark Souls crossed with Monster Hunter and not too shabby in either regard. Ken Lobb talks briefly about Killer Instinct before showing a completely cinematic trailer for a rebooted Phantom Dust, a title i'd frankly never heard of and that this new glimpse does little to intrigue me.

As the show winds down there's a brief demo of Tom Clancy's post apocalyptic third person shooter The Division, a dragon riding mythical thing, sans gameplay, called Scalebound and Crackdown 3 in another purely cinematic trailer. At this point you might have guessed my main criticism of this conference. Too many cinematic trailers without actual gameplay and while i'm not strongly against cutscenes and some of my favourite games are cutscene heavy, it's a different story in regards to trailers. Even in a purely gameplay trailer, it is still a trailer and can be manipulated and edited to look far superior or vastly different to what the game actually is. This is significantly more the case if the trailer contains little or no gameplay and has cinematics made solely for it.

There is also not a great deal of groundbreaking innovation  and whilst that's a problem with the entire industry, it is still prevalent here. That said, Microsoft took about the best strategy they could this year by focusing solely on the games and this actually felt like the kind of conferences we used to get before Nintendo broke the mould with the original Wii and all successors were overrun with hardware gimmicks.

So overall, certainly not a bad effort from Microsoft. A fair few of the titles were exclusive and whilst nothing groundbreaking or mindblowing surfaced i am interested in some of these games shown.

And thanks for not mentioning television...