The Annual E3 Microsoft press conference thread, 2014 edition

[iroboto]

MS pressconf was... little over average. Tons of expected [leaked] titles, a lot of CGIs, not a single megaton. They played it very safe.

It was safe, but there was very little fat. It was trimmed down and they churned out titles. It was not boring from beginning to end if you were into those titles.

Overall I thought it was pretty good and if you had no knowledge of the leaks, it would be pretty great conference overall.

 

[Cyan]

Can you believe this?

 

[orangpelupa]

I really liked the humble Microsoft at the beginning of the conference.

yeah, i also like how MS and Sony praised each other last year when they release ps4 and x1.
when i tweeted that microsoft E3 2014 intro, it also become the most retweeted tweet that i have tweeted about E3 2014 live tweets

seems that a humble person in video game industry is really needed. No wonder Cerny got so much attention too

 

[blakjedi]

Can you believe this?

yep. Tretton sat on the "review board" for Spike TV during the show. Its only fanboys that "hate" or demean other people over pieces of silicon. To these men its a professional livelihood

 

[Cyan]

yeah, i also like how MS and Sony praised each other last year when they release ps4 and x1.
when i tweeted that microsoft E3 2014 intro, it also become the most retweeted tweet that i have tweeted about E3 2014 live tweets

seems that a humble person in video game industry is really needed. No wonder Cerny got so much attention too

This article gives another perspective to this, similar to your thoughts. It's called... "The War is Over" -referring to the war against the Xbox One-

http://www.computerandvideogames.co...war-is-over/?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-General-RSS

 

[Jwm]

Overall pretty boring, next year we need to push for "Gameplay, Gameplay, Gameplay"...instead of games.games.games. ;p

Too many leaks, plus last night Cloudgine updated their website so that gave me a feeling they would be there with the destructible worlds game (now Crackdown).

Fable?? What is it, surely I am missing something more to this game.

Halo MC and FH2 did excite me, everything else was all CGI. Plenty of ID games that I would like to pickup.

 

[mosen]

MS pressconf was... little over average. Tons of expected [leaked] titles, a lot of CGIs, not a single megaton. They played it very safe.

What they were supposed to do? Talking about games like GeoW that were in production only for few month, because some stupid insiders leaks their plan for 2014 and 2015 earlier this year? Or they should make CGIs like believeable gameplay (what sony did for E3 2005) to make fans happy?

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Sunset looks to be funny forever or boring after five minutes

I agree, it actually went from a game I wanted to play to a game that I'm pretty sure I'd get bored of after five minutes watching that demo.

I can't believe that many people care about a remastered Halo2 and that they can essentially center their entire E3 around some exclusive content in a fifteen hour long Call of Duty advertisement to start the show and then a re-release of four old games and a new beta to end the show.

But, after listening to crowd reaction, the Halo Collection certainly got the biggest "pop" and some of their other announcements of exclusives and whatnot were met with crickets.

The Dead Rising arcade game might be fun to play, but not something to make a $399 investment to play. If it was in the arcade as I walked by on my way through the mall to pick up a new pair of pants, I might stop and pop a few quarters in it.

Which is more than I can say for the rest of the games they showed. Fable? I guess the big deal is that this one is co-op? I never actually heard the word "co-op", so I can't be sure if you control all the characters or they are AI or what.

Crackdown is always welcomed, I'd like to see if they can actually expand the city - it always felt too cramped for some reason. And showing game play might be nice as well.

All in all, it was a lot of "nothing to see here", IMO. It was more like offering the status quo - Geez, if they didn't have those games, what would they have? Nothing?

And the two Kinect games for twenty seconds or so was very LOL. Although I thought Project Spark was supposed to really take advantage of the Kinect2 - and I don't think they showed they were using Kinect2 at all during this Spark update. Did they? Actually, did they show anybody using the Kinect on the other two either, or just gameplay? I'll have to go back and look.

 

[Brad Grenz]

I'm concerned about how small the environments seemed in the Fable demo. The limited scope has always been one of the failings of the series, but it feels like just offering a series of multiplayer maps built around that Villain mode stuff is definitely moving in the wrong direction. I want a game like that to get bigger and more open, not shunted into narrow, if pretty, corridors. Hopefully there is some kind of open world single player component.

I also downloaded the high quality footage of The Division. I think that game is super promising, but there was a lot of aliasing. I have to assume it was rendering well below 1080p.

 

[AzBat]

Kinect is still being supported. Ubisoft announced a new Shape Up fitness game as well the latest Just Dance 2015.

For reasons behind the lack of Kinect mention look at this interview...

Q: You didn’t talk about Kinect at all.

A: I didn’t say controller, either. I think what we highlighted were the games and what was special about our art form and the space are the games that people love. A lot of the games that we showed use Kinect in one way or another … but I wanted it to be about creativity on screen, not the different system components that people use – ‘OK, this one uses the A button’ or something. I’m not trying to be flippant. If you go to our booth, you will see Kinect games playable on the floor.

From a show standpoint, just to be very honest with you, Kinect games don’t show always as well on stage because you end up watching this person move around and see something on screen. My creative take on it is putting the game play on stage of Kinect doesn’t always work from an entertainment standpoint the way I’d like it to work.

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/brier...-sony-virtual-reality-and-the-missing-kinect/

Tommy McClain

 

[Jwm]

Ok, so the early build demo with the building destruction that I thought might be related to Crackdown is now linked to early Crackdown work.

Phil tweeting on it

 

[Rangers]

So it occurred to me the announcement of the 399 Xbox would have been a nice topper to MS conference and made the thing feel a whole lot better. The closest to a megaton really.

Dont know why they handled it like they did. Doesn't make sense to me but whatever.

 

[eastmen]

I dunno Rangers , it would have been a great show ender to drop price on the xbox 360 .

I was hoping for a 360 with no dvd drive , 32 gigs of storage space and a 28nm soc for $150 . that would have been a megaton

 

[temesgen]

So it occurred to me the announcement of the 399 Xbox would have been a nice topper to MS conference and made the thing feel a whole lot better. The closest to a megaton really.

Dont know why they handled it like they did. Doesn't make sense to me but whatever.

The console at 399 has moved down on Amazon's list though, over all they did OK today.

edit:

Halo collection coming in at number 1 too...

 

[AzBat]

Yeah lack of love for 360 games, pricing or otherwise was kind of a slap. Seems like they have given up on the system. Maybe they're making additional announcements tomorrow after seeing the competition?

Tommy McClain

 

[eastmen]

Yeah lack of love for 360 games, pricing or otherwise was kind of a slap. Seems like they have given up on the system. Maybe they're making additional announcements tomorrow after seeing the competition?

Tommy McClain

the only hope I have for the 360 getting a price drop (need to replace one of my old ones since its starting to give up the ghost) is this fall. They have traditionaly announced a price drop in sept.

I think the 360 still sells well on its own without them needing to do much tho

 

[HTupolev]

Halo collection coming in at number 1 too...

It's the "sell customers what they actually wanted" effect in action.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Ok, so the early build demo with the building destruction that I thought might be related to Crackdown is now linked to early Crackdown work.

Phil tweeting on it

Nice, so Crackdown may be the first major use of cloud computing with destruction physics being done in the cloud. One of the things I mentioned a year ago that would be perfectly suited for cloud computation as it doesn't need to react within milliseconds of a player's input.

Regards,
SB

 

[temesgen]

It's the "sell customers what they actually wanted" effect in action.

MS has had a good E3, my hunch is they didn't mention the price cut bc they want to move as far away from last summer as possible i.e. pretend it didn't happen.

Get the price right, get the focus back on games and with the table cleared of all the clutter prior to E3 and today essentially was the release of the XB1. All the mistakes get tied to a machine they canceled - the one with the built in camera,all the media questions were already answered so again today was about games.

For those not paying close attention the new XBox has awesome games, a cool new online service with you guessed it free games and mom and dad can even watch Netflix if they want to on my old machine in their room.

 

[mosen]

So it occurred to me the announcement of the 399 Xbox would have been a nice topper to MS conference and made the thing feel a whole lot better. The closest to a megaton really.

Dont know why they handled it like they did. Doesn't make sense to me but whatever.

I think the reason is Sony. They have/like to jabbing on Microsoft. They did it even after a month (Andrew House did this) and they mentioned different things like Kinect and Games,Games and Games speak from Microsoft, and even F2P . If he kept 399$ and removing of pay-wall announcements for E3 Sony became the easy winner just like last year (Microsoft conference was about Games,Games and Games and Sony's was about jabbing on Microsoft). Even Amazon did this with Microsoft at their conference.

So it was a wise move to reduce the impact of Sony responses.