Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Microsoft - E3

Microsoft - Xbox One - E3

Here's a summation of all the games Microsoft showcased and lots of pictures. If you want to read ALL the conferences on Day One head over here.

Halo 5: Guardians - Microsoft came out swinging and in major need of a thesaurus as they used epic three times to describe Halo: that franchise they nearly killed through litigation. But it's back with Halo 5. Master Chief is on the run, and Nathan Fillion's been sent by Admiral Anderson to hunt him down and stop him from harassing female spartans and doxxing Cortana.

There's also a Halo Warzone multiplayer pvp option as well.

Halo 5 is scheduled for an October 27th 2015 release, exclusive to the Xbox (if you just got in from Mars).
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Recore - Microsoft wanted to talk about the importance of having new games and not just continuing franchises, then played a teaser that told nothing about the game.
My best guess, you're a robot dog that can explode into fairy gazing balls, and your companion girl has to insert your memory core into bigger and badder robots every time you level up. By the end you wind up as the dog from Ghostbusters and she becomes Gozar.

2015 is the year of the dog in video games. It makes some sense, you want to give instant pathos give a character a pet. Cats will take over for 2016 and by 2020 games will be nothing but gerbils locked in a war with pygmy goats.
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Backward Compatibility - In doing everything they can to get you to go out and buy an Xbox One, this Christmas (everything is coming this Holiday season) these games will be backwards compatible off the 360. They showed it off by firing up Mass Effect one and talked about how it's great because now you can take screen shots and lord it over your friends trapped back in 2009. That was their biggest selling point for compatibility, the ability to use Xbox Live to share.

Xbox Elite Wireless Controller - We also got a peak at a super fancy controller coming with hair trigger locks, a trigger min/max, swappable components to break easier. It'll even julienne fries!
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Fallout 4 -  Bethsda wandered back to talk some more about Fallout 4 and their pipboy with computer technology from the '70s, and the laser musket from the 1770s.

But the real surprise was that mods done on the PC are no transferable across Xbox live to the Xbox One. No idea if Playstation is at all involved in that. Probably not. Expect hundreds of Lone Wanderer's dressed like Santa and fishing for irradiated tuna in Fallout 4 on the Xbox.
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EA -  EA wandered out to talk about Madden NFL 16. "I know you're all excited to play it," causing one or two people to clap in the audience. Yep, they're real excited. He was mostly there to talk about EA access which is another one of those great EA screw yous they're known for. If you pay for that then you can rent games like Titanfall or Dragon Age: Inquisition. An entire 12 titles. Wooo! I'm beginning to see why there was one clap guy. He was probably the EA presenter's cousin.
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Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 - Coming next spring. Welcome to zomberbia where plants and zombies fight. What more need be said? 
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Forza Motorsport 6 - Somehow a ford commercial slipped into the middle of the presentation. Yeah yeah, Henry Ford - right bloody asshole, and now you're lowering a car from the ceiling. 
 Okay. Guys, maybe you wanted the convention hall down the road and...No, this is a video game. Are you sure? I'm still pretty certain you want me to buy a car. I will say, the way the camera oggled chrome and curves of cut scene cars I started to feel bad for the vehicles.

If you like driving around in circles, there are 26 new circles with this game that drops on September 15th.
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Dark Souls 3 - In keeping with the "teasers don't tell you jack shit or even what game this is until the very end" we have a bunch of scenes cut from Game of Thrones mixed with a bit of Lord of the Rings, and a bit of the desert. (not dessert, a pie scene would have really livened it up)
And this guy. No one told him "Don't put the chain mail on when it's still red hot." Undead wraiths never listen.

Early 2016.
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Tom Clancy’s: The Division - Ubisoft dropped out to talk early about this game that will have an exclusive beta trial on Xbox. Amazingly, their trailer actually explained what the hell was happening. It doesn't make it anything new, but I could follow along.
A weaponized virus was released by secret agent pandas (okay, I made that last bit up). Of course, rather than people bonding together, coming up with evacuation and rescue plans, society crumbles. The obligatory scavengers are all wearing bright orange jumpsuits because nothing screams inconspicuous/city camo like bright orange. 

Apparently this team your on is so elite you don't even know how many of them there are. Sounds like an easy way for people to infiltrate and take you down, but what do I know?

Tom Clancy's: The Division drops in December.
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Rainbow Six | Siege:  - coming in October 13th. The biggest selling point was destructible environments. That was pretty much all the presenter had to share. It looks like you get to tactically take people out by shooting them through walls, doors, stuffed animals, air craft carriers, space stations. All that great destructible environments.
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 Indie Game-a-plooza! - Microsoft shared its indie game division by throwing a bunch of 10 second trailers at us and smiling like: The Molasses Flood, Phantasmal, The Solus Project, Sword Coast Legend, Outward, Goat simulator (whatever number they're at now), Game 4, Below, Ark, Recruits. And then it focused on four specific ones.

Tacoma - Is in that horror genre game of drop your character off somewhere and have them piece together what the hell happened. In this case it's set on the moon. For being indie the graphics looked really pretty and who doesn't want to run around on the moon? I call first ride on the tilt-a-whirl!

Ashen - You have to discover who amongst you is friend or foe, which is going to be really difficult as no one has any faces. Maybe they have Rorschach like features and the phrase "friend" will appear on a good guy's face?

The game play shown looked more like an average adventure/explore game -- solving puzzles, collapsing bridges, getting stab in the gut with a skeleton one -- ending with the surprise visit of this guy.
I AM GROOT!

Beyond Eyes - A game about a little girl who first leaves her home to explore and the twist is she's blind. It uses a watercolor like palette to visualize the world through other senses. At one point a scary barking dog flashes various body parts as the little girl tries to back away from it.

Cuphead - The creators wanted an old 8 bit game with a 1930's aesthetic and they nailed it. It's like the demented love child of Mario Brothers and Betty Boop. If that's your thing, it's coming in 2016.
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Ion -  This guy. When you're standing on a stage saying the words “We are the architects of this new universe, but you will governs its destiny" you need someone to pull you back and say "Uh, you know it's just a video game right?" He uses all the spin in a salesman's bag to convince the world that Ion isn't just your run of the mill space MMO but a game that's a universe. And yet, all we see are some pretty space station pictures and then a human in a plastic bag. With no gameplay shown it's hard to see how this is a whole universe in a game.

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Rise of the Tomb Raider -  Lara's back and you have a hundred more fresh ways to cause her gruesome and graphic death! The gameplay looks much the same as the reboot with the preview being the first ten minutes as she tries to climb a mountain and fails spectacularly. This younger Lara Croft tends to fail upwards.
They said that this Tomb Raider would be an Xbox exclusive (because cutting themselves off at the hamstrings early is a great plan), but are also claiming it's timed and maybe they'll offer it on PS4. I have no idea. But you guys struggled with the last one, I don't see how cutting off your console numbers will help. You do you, I guess.
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Sea of Thieves -  An exclusive game from Rare, you can pirate ships and pirate gold, and pirate skeletons, and pirate sharks! Pirates! 
Are pirates still a thing? I thought Johnny Depp simultaneously revived and killed that genre.
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Fable Legends - A free to play game (we all know what that means). The trailer was missing Kate Upton squeezed into a breast plate, but was very pretty nonetheless. Told from the point of view of the bad guys who are sick and tired of your hero character trouncing in and ruining all the good things they've got going.
Fable Legends is coming this Holiday.
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Microsoft HoloLens - Okay, let's get to what everyone's talking about. Minecraft rolled out to show off the HoloLens an untethered holographic computer, so you can get killed by evil Lincoln in real time. While one woman played a Minecraft game on a tablet, a man slotted on the hololens and stared at a wall. Pretty interesting, we could see what he saw through a special camera.

What caused everyone to sit up and pay attention is when he transferred over to the table.
His Minecraft world expanded in three dimensions. He could zoom in on characters, peer through windows, and even raise the whole thing up to peer underground. The HoloLens responded to his voice. For the end he threw lightning at some pigs because if you're going to go out, go out on undead bacon.

Now to wait and see how great this amazing piece of technology actually works in the real world. At least make sure to leave the damn safety settings on so you don't have creepers attacking you at night in your bed.
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Gears of War - They're remastering the first game for the Xbox One (which shouldn't matter anymore if they're backwards compatibility-ing everything) and including a multiplayer.

It ended with a trailer for the coming Gears of War 4. Two soldiers wandering around at night looking for a thing, but not The Thing, because dogs are our friends now. Embrace the dogs of 2015!
Gears of War coming Holiday 2016.

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