{"id":39107,"date":"2017-06-11T16:23:11","date_gmt":"2017-06-11T20:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=39107"},"modified":"2018-06-29T03:04:46","modified_gmt":"2018-06-29T07:04:46","slug":"e3-2017-day-2-microsoft-bethesda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=39107","title":{"rendered":"E3 2017 Day 2: Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s day 2, which means it’s time for Microsoft to shuffle out on stage and play another round of “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids<\/a>?”<\/p>\n

They’re expected to show off the new Xbox hardware. I’m looking forward to getting angry over the part where they once again fail to apologize for Games for Windows LIVE<\/a>. I’m anticipating that they will follow that up with a bit where they pretend like there’s nothing wrong<\/a> with the Windows Store<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’d embed the Twitch stream, but for some idiotic reason the Twitch player always auto-plays. That’s obnoxious. So instead you’ll have to settle for this link right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

XBOX One X<\/h3>\n

“The most powerful console ever made!”<\/p>\n

You mean more powerful than the OTHER one? Because when it comes to power this is really a two-horse race.<\/p>\n

“Power, compatibility, and craftsmanship.”<\/p>\n

I really like these three design principles. They’re really bragging on the “full backward compatibility”, but really, they NEEDED that. Otherwise they would balkanize the audience, because not everyone is going to want to upgrade so soon after the last one.<\/p>\n

“Smallest Xbox ever.”<\/p>\n

It’s also rectangular, which means you can put things on it, or put it on other things. I’m glad Microsoft has swallowed their pride and is ready to start acting like their device is part of the living room, not the center of it. <\/p>\n

“We’re going to show you 20 platform exclusives!”<\/p>\n

(Audience cheers.)<\/p>\n

Why are you dingbats cheering for exclusives? Those aren’t good for you. They’re good for Microsoft. <\/p>\n

So now they’re going to show off a bunch of games back-to-back. My comments on each:<\/p>\n

Forza 7:<\/strong> I want to believe this gameplay footage is real, but after a decade of bullshots I can’t help but think of the disappointments of the past. I mean, No Man’s Sky looked pretty amazing before release. So did WATCH_DOGS. You don’t have to cheat very often before everyone assumes you’re cheating all the time. (And yes, I’m aware that both of those examples were by other companies and not by Microsoft, but this is an industry-wide problem.)<\/p>\n

Metro Exodus: <\/strong>Looks like staged gameplay filled with canned cinematic moments. That makes for good cinema, but doesn’t really tell us much about the game. <\/p>\n

Assassins Creed Origins:<\/strong> I know this series has a lot of fans, but to me it disappeared up its own asshole about five sequels ago, and now it’s just a bunch of sound and fury.<\/p>\n

PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS<\/strong>: I don’t have anything to say about this, except that apparently “exclusive” now means, “Not on the other major console”. I mean, this game STARTED on the PC. <\/p>\n

Deep Rock Galactic:<\/strong> I’m so glad we have these fancy 4K next-gen consoles so we have this game that looks like Team Fortres 2. I kid. It looks charming. <\/p>\n

State of Decay 2:<\/strong> The zombie genre is long played-out. What can we do to freshen it up? How about base building and crafting? That’s played out too? Well shit.<\/p>\n

The Darwin Project:<\/strong> Whatev.<\/p>\n

Minecraft:<\/strong> They’re unifying mobiles, Windows 10, and Xbox players into one multiplayer system. That’s a good idea. I’d be more excited if the Windows 10 store wasn’t a land of sadness and malfunction.<\/p>\n

Dragonball FightersZ:<\/strong> There’s no point in me snarking at this game. It’s not for me and I don’t even know enough about DBZ to know if this will resonate with fans or not.<\/p>\n

Black Desert:<\/strong> I liked Black Desert when it came out on PC last year. My problem was that after 30 hours I felt like I was still in the same forest. I just got bored with the same color palette and soundscape and wanted to see something new. <\/p>\n

The Last Night:<\/strong> Oh my goodness. I NEED to play this based on the art style alone. That is magnificent.<\/p>\n

The Artful Escape:<\/strong> Remember ten years ago when computers had a fraction of the power they do today, and everyone was aiming for photorealism? Now we’ve got all this power and suddenly everyone is going for highly stylized visuals. This is probably doing more for the look of the games than processor advances. <\/p>\n

Codevein:<\/strong> Some sort of JRPG?<\/p>\n

Sea of Thieves:<\/strong> Some sort of pirate-based MMO? Not really my thing, but I like how the demo was fun to watch.<\/p>\n

Tacoma:<\/strong> Another “exclusive” lifted from the PC. You can buy this right now on Steam.<\/del> Nope! My bad. I was confusing Tacoma with Event[0]<\/a>. Different games.<\/p>\n

Super Lucky’s Tale:<\/strong> So Xbox is having a go at Mario? It will be interesting to watch Lucky die on this hill. Pretty visuals, though.<\/p>\n

Cuphead:<\/strong> Wow. A game animated in the style of early American cartoons. Huh. <\/p>\n

Crackdown 3:<\/strong> I remember the original Crackdown as being a little dull, but this looks like all the best parts of Saints Row, given life in a different franchise. Cool.<\/p>\n

Shadow of War:<\/strong> Yeah, I know everyone loves this stupid thing because the nemesis system is cool, but I hate<\/strong> this series. It’s a gross bastardization of Tolkien mixed with a clumsy bastardization of Batman. The idea of using THE RING OF POWER to raise an army is just… no. There are so many ways that’s wrong. The One Ring can’t be used like that. And even if it could, it couldn’t be used like that by a human. And even if it could, the entire history of The Ring is accounted for and there’s no room in the timeline for Talion’s possession of it. And even if you patch over that with some retcons, you’ve still got the problem that Talion and his story is completely wrong for this world in a thematic sense. And even if you ignore that, there’s still that problem that he’s a stupid boring asshole. Talion is an obnoxious lore-shattering Mary Sue and I hate everything about him. A pox on this game.<\/em><\/p>\n

Deep breath.<\/p>\n

Moving on, they cap off this rapid-fire list of new titles with an announcement of Xbox 360 compatibility. “You probably already have a library of titles on your Xbox X.” That’s a really strong move. The $499 price tag sounds reasonable, given the opening lineup and processing capabilities.<\/p>\n

Anthem gameplay demo: So EA didn’t show off Anthem at their OWN show, but they showed it off for Microsoft? Interesting, particularly since this would have been the crown of their show.<\/p>\n

In any case, I’m genuinely interested in Anthem. It doesn’t look anything like a BioWare game, but it looks good anyway? It looks fresh and new. I could nitpick the extremely staged gameplay demo, but my heart just isn’t in it. I’m eager to see what happens with this one.<\/p>\n

So that’s the Microsoft \/ Xbox show. Overall, I was impressed more often than I was annoyed, so I guess it was a success. <\/p>\n

I didn’t expect to have this much to say about their show, but then they went and surprised me. The Bethesda show is later today. Rather than stick it on the end of this post, I’m going to give it a post of its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s day 2, which means it’s time for Microsoft to shuffle out on stage and play another round of “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” They’re expected to show off the new Xbox hardware. I’m looking forward to getting angry over the part where they once again fail to apologize for Games for Windows LIVE. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[613],"tags":[181],"class_list":["post-39107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-events","tag-e3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43132,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39107\/revisions\/43132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}