The Xbox One S will start at $299 being released in August and that's all the practical information about it we get from this conference.
Moving on, film star and, apparently in his spare time, Gears Of War Co-Creator Clancy Brown steps on stage, also to inexplicably dark and menacing music. He announces "Xbox Play Anywhere" which allows a single purchase of a game to be accessible on both Xbox and Windows 10, with Gears 4 being one of the first compatible titles.
This cross-play functionality extends to the co-op as well and to demonstrate it Captain Hadley brings out Laura Bailey, one of the main voice actresses in the game. That said, we never actually see any split-screen or who's doing what so the co-op interactions are a little dubious.
This might however just be due to the terrible filmed set up that keeps cutting from the screen showing the gameplay to the motionless audience and stage. Bailey's character is supposed to finish off the demo with a powerful threat to a defeated boss but for some reason the audio cuts out at this point.
I guess maybe she said a naughty word and they had to censor it but in that case perhaps censor just the swearing and not almost all the rest of the dialogue as well. It might seem irrelevant to criticise these production values but because of them I didn't see or hear as much of Gears 4 as I should have and this bewildering stupidity in the video mixing plagues the entire conference.
What I did see admittedly looked decent. The short segment seemed to take and expand upon one of the most interesting features of the old games, that being the lethal alien weather that occurs on their planet. Gameplay seemed much the same but with increased environmental destruction and ways to use that against the enemy.
 |
| Toned down on the steroids too which is nice. |
But we're not done with Gears 4 because a special Gears-themed Elite Controller is in existence somewhere according to a not entirely helpful trailer. With claw marks, blood splatter and a mathematically incorrect tally mark you can finally help perpetuate the brainless violent grunt stereotype that Gears Of War often embodies.
 |
| This might explain how the Xbox One got its name... |
Following the increasing trend of guest characters from other franchises appearing in fighting games, Killer Instinct's latest memorable face will be none other than the iconic General Raam......You know? The final boss from the first Gears Of War? I think I remember fighting him on a train...You have to shoot him a lot until he dies...
The next trailer shows some beautiful environments of the Australian outback but rather than the long awaited sequel to Ty The Tasmanian Tiger it turns out to just be Forza again. It's just all that car stuff again except it's in Australia so there's also buggys.
Breaking the time honoured tradition of putting a car on the stage with something equally as baffling, a Scottish man walks on stage and says "Welcome to Australia." He sets up a multiplayer live demo with a woman playing on the Xbox One S and some poor bastard called Andy who has to sit in a Forza branded gaming chair isolated on his own stage with just his steering wheel and a computer running Windows 10.
 |
| Meanwhile player 3, Terrance clearly won whatever bet they had going and gets a proper chair with a desk. |
Still I can't deny, I don't recall seeing Australia as a location explored very much in games even if you're too busy dodging trees to really see it. Forza 3 Horizon is out September 27th this year and the crowd seems pretty keen on it for whatever that's worth.
Not much else to say other than the game looks really good with an almost Zelda-like charm. I think the release date was September 19th but again the camera decided to show the darkened room full of the backs of people's heads so I don't know. Thanks for that.
The director of Square Enix arrives on stage looking like the bags under his eyes spend all day bagging bags in a bag factory, whilst his plucky underling talks through and controls a Final Fantasy Fifteen demo. An initially impressive Shadow of The Colossus-esque scenario slowly loses its impact as the player is repeatedly swatted around by this giant monster and struggles to do any damage while his troupe of unfeasibly well-groomed allies make dumb little quips.
This goes on for an excruciating several minutes with a "Preorder now" banner having the audacity to pop up like all those shitty reminders on Windows 10. Eventually the player finally initiates the QTE correctly and our boy band of brothers destroy the monster's arm.
 |
| Colour me whatever colour unimpressed is. |
Time-Travelling "Patrick Bach" (as he is currently known) walks out to talk about Battlefield 1, which to be honest I'm still feeling fatigue from after all the hype it got in EA's conference. He announces its October 28th release date but Xbox One owners who are members of EA Access that perform the necessary animal sacrifices and were born under a full moon on the day of the Sabbath, can get it on October 13th...So hooray for that.
To brag about Xbox Live comes Mike Ybarra. A man whose voice is a mere stone's throw away from Kermit The Frog. He introduces some revolutionary new features like playing music in the background of your games, which I can do already on my 360. Language settings, so you no longer have to blindly navigate your console in Cantonese, and Cortana, the off-brand Siri that most people will still use from their phones rather than their consoles.
 |
| I know the Xbox One started without a bunch of basic features but this is ridiculous. |
With those background frivolities out of the way it's onto the serious business of-oh never mind it's Minecraft...
An unbearably chirpy young woman and a bald man so nervous he looks like he's going to melt introduce us to "the friendly update". A teeth-grindly twee name for what is ultimately again just cross-platform play. Chirpy girl and boiling egg are joined in their cringeful demo by John Carmack spinning in circles wearing an Oculus headset and looking more ridiculous than Andy on his desolate gaming chair.
Also revealed are "add ons" or mods as everyone else calls them, allowing you to reskin blocks, enemies and characters plus seemingly change their attributes to an extent, making usually docile NPC's into capable fighting allies.
Bubbly and crumbly finally leave only to have another controller trailer appear for a service that seems to let you customise the colours of your controller and likely buy them for an extortionate price directly from Microsoft.
A brief mysterious trailer for Inside plays, showing a strange building with people watching other people in dreary office environments with nonchalant employees and sinister undertones. From the creators of Limbo this very much seems to fit their M.O but there's really nothing else to go on. It's out June 29th.
Tobias Funke then appears on stage with grandiose claims about Inside like "it is a masterpiece" and "one of the best games I've ever played" But rather than show us any footage or tell us anything at all about it, he announces Limbo is now free and fucks off to let the obligatory "Indie games compilation trailer" play...
 |
| You can't just do that.. |
Everything else is given about three seconds screen time or less so out of a misguided sense of moral superiority, to try and counter the lack of respect these near-subliminal flashes of games get, I'll do my best to give the absolute maximum amount of description for each title from what little information the trailer delivers.
Outlast - A horror game that's very dark with a field of crops and at least one zombie. This zombie may or may not be able to use a torch.
Deliver Us The Moon - An Astronaut is on the moon, presumably he must deliver it somewhere but all he has is a space station corridor and a little moon car.
FlintHook - A possibly pirate themed pixellated 2D platformer where you play as a cutesy skeleton with a gun.
Far - A vehicle of some kind is travelling, probably quite a distance. You might have to maintain this vehicles' functionality.
Slime Rancher - You shoot muddy chickens and blobs with faces using a gun of ambiguous output and effect. The blob with a face explodes into stars. It is unclear if this is good or bad. A small carrot is also present.
Shadow Tactics - Japanese people in Japan sometimes attack each other with swords. Possibly a top-down hack and slash game.
Figment - Something vaguely humanoid wearing a black cat onesie slides down stripey pipes connected to platforms that either float without support structures or rest on huge red arses towering high above the clouds. The tops of the platforms grow trees that sprout tuning forks and the arses have windows. There are also bridges connecting the floating platforms and plants that spit purple blobs at you. Probably poison. A lute levitates ominously above a patch of three blades of grass.
The Culling - First person game where you try to kill other people by throwing things or blowing them up on bridges. Apart from some green gas in one of the backgrounds this free-for-all deathmatch appears to take place in a quaint forest or perhaps a national park.
For the King - A turn-based RPG with a cartooney art style. There is a lava level and possibly also The Kraken.
Beacon - An isometric shooter in a Sci-Fi fantasy land where glowing triangles open and the ground is quite red and dry. Possibly set on a future Mars with civilisation, jagged orange trees and towers perhaps for radio given the sticks interpretable as antenna on the top. The ground also gives way in places to large sinkholes where an odd turquoise light shines. Our character is too busy shooting at other very small and undetailed people to notice this or perhaps it is simply a normal geographical detail in this world.
Hand of Fate 2 - A fortune teller makes tarot cards fly and spin in front fo you. This causes you to lose your mind and attack the inhabitants of a city with Ancient Middle-Eastern Architecture.
Below - A game where you struggle to traverse a dark and misty land because the camera's zoomed out too far. (Perhaps they were inspired by the conference itself).
Raiders - (For some reason given a whopping 5-10 seconds) A shirtless man with red eyes, hair and shark teeth finds himself without ammo for his triple-barrelled shotgun when an armed guard is right around the corner. This disappoints him so and he sighs. He then decides to charge the guard completely unarmed perhaps having resigned himself to death.
Another man with blue LEDs in his head and a poorly stitched collar shoots a gun at something off-screen for which he feels no emotion towards. We see a guard's arm punch the shark teeth man and he falls to his knees looking displeased. (None of this was gameplay so this could be a point and click adventure game for all I know.)
Bloodstained - Anime girls do Castlevania on a pirate ship.
Everspace - A first person Sci-Fi flight game where you control a spaceship in space that shoots at other spaceships, also in space. Some of these spaceships are bigger than your spaceship.
The trailer finishes with the words "Risk Takers" "Rule Breakers" "Game Changers" appearing on screen. I can't help wishing Microsoft would take a bloody risk and show us more than a blink of each of these games if they're so wonderful, innovative and important to you.
Tobias returns to talk about Xbox Game Preview, which is just Steam Early Access for Xbox where you can play games before they're finished. No word yet if you can leave abusive threatening reviews or find identically worded ones praising the game suspiciously unreservedly.
The gameplay demo for We Happy Few hits a bit too close to home in a dystopian sixties world where everyone takes "Happy pills" and those who don't are violently hunted for being "downers". But that's probably why it seems such an interesting concept to me. (I live in the 60's you see).
 |
| They've already nailed the oppressive Orwellian atmosphere and creepy factor. |
Next on stage is the lead designer of CD Projekt Red who jumps around like an irritating hyperactive titwit before announcing the card game Gwent. A mini-game from The Witcher 3 that became so popular it apparently warranted its own stand-alone game.
A half CG, half gameplay trailer for Tekken 7 shows Akuma, a guest character from Street Fighter, fighting Tekken mainstay, Heihachi. The gameplay looks a bit loose if I'm perfectly honest with some sketchy innacurate hitboxes and too many power-ups involving characters striking the same pose repeatedly. The game is due Early 2017.
 |
| Granted it might just be the cameras insisting on showing us pointless background nothing every five seconds. |
Shannon Loftis Conversion arrives to wax poetic about Microsoft's dedication to original IPs whilst the crowd makes stupid noises whenever she pauses to breathe or silently ask for appreciation.
As for Scalebound's core gameplay, which I believe this is the first time we're seeing, the phrase that comes to mind is "Devil May Cry with Dragons." Even down to the chatty main protagonist who borders on insufferable with his constant cliched quips. Riding a dragon looks fun but all the character can seem to do besides that is hilariously flick bogey arrows at the giant oblivious enemy.
Unfortunately scaling the monster only happens at set intervals in this boss fight and frankly the whole thing feels very last-gen. Hopefully I'm wrong but that's my impressions, with a vague release date of 2017, there's still time for things to change.
XBOX ONE AND WINDOWS TEN EXCLUSIVE, DID YOU HEAR GUYS? IT'S FUCKING OURS, HAND'S OFF SONY! MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE.
The gameplay looks quite fun as a team-based pirate game where you can explore islands, drink rum, sail and mantain your ship together and attack others. Sadly it's online only multiplayer, as is everything nowadays. Some unnecessary face-cams of these "real players" justify people shouting and screaming and being irritating throughout the entire edited gameplay demo but ultimately a good enough segment to the conference.
 |
| Although this guy might literally be turning into a pirate... |
He eventually starts speaking some words with meaning and a trailer for a new Xbox One and a half plays. At one point several people say they gave the "SOC six terraflops of computing capability" in this deadly serious trailer full of developers talking against a pitch black background with a triumphant orchestral score. I'm sure that's actually impressive in computing terms but I'm a simple guy, you might as well have said it's got millions of Snap, Crackle and Boopy Bops.
 |
| It's got ninety five Gigawhoops and Faddy Sub Ploppers...Alright I'll stop now. |
"These are the highest quality pixels that anybody has seen." says some other guy. All the games and accessories will work on both this and the old Xbawks apparently and without actually getting to see the console "Project Scorpio" fades onto screen along with a holiday 2017 release date.
Phil then wraps up the conference talking about all three consoles, the Xbox One, Xbox One S and Project Scorpio all being compatible as though it's some great achievement not realising that no one will buy the Xbox One S, now we know there's a huge upgrade just around the corner...Great plan there chaps.
So overall a pretty weak conference from Microsoft. I think some good games were shown but I could only be certain had the fucking video camera mixers not decided to randomly deprive us of footage and information. As usual, way too much corporate drivel, non-gameplay trailers and that infuriating smug attitude of expecting praise and applause rather than earning it.
Combined with Project Scorpio being the gun that shoots its own Xbox One S foot and the unrelenting patronising exclusive and preorder pop ups, nagging and distracting from every single trailer, Microsoft's E3 conference was very much an okay film shown in a shit cinema.
 |
| Starring bad actors. |
No comments:
Post a Comment