The Annual E3 Microsoft press conference thread, 2017 edition

[Nisaaru]

This depression feast here is hilarious. For what? 50-100 bucks more than you guessed? As if that makes a real difference. If you can't afford that you can't afford the 4K TV nor the games anyway. Seriously, what do you actually expect here? It's as if you people buy a price and not a product.

I didn't expect any big exclusive titles anyway as Phil Spencer gave the impression to me a few months ago that they weren't ready to show any new franchise this year. That they didn't show much other big multi platform games we can blame on the ridiculous practice of paying for game *sales* marketing now. Probably also the reason they had to blow up this show with all these indie games I can live without.

P.S. Personally I can wait for another Halo until they get their shit together and actually manage a Halo game which delivers the Sense Of Wonder the original delivered in spade. I expect the latest major MS titles to get a 4K uplift anyway.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This depression feast here is hilarious. For what? 50-100 bucks more than you guessed?

If 10-20% doesn't make a difference, sales wouldn't increase when consoles get price drops. And it's not so much the personal situation as the wider market that people are talking about. So you can afford an extra $50 for Scorpio? Great. If everyone else decides not to bother because its too expensive, where's the incentive for devs to maximise your box? Your investment decreases in value the less people buy the same machine. It also shows something of MS's attitude to the console space and people's preferred gaming platform. Coming out fighting with aggressive prices shows they are serious about competing and trying to win market- and mind-share back from Sony.

It's far more than just an extra 50+ bucks.

 

[Johnglen]

This depression feast here is hilarious. For what? 50-100 bucks more than you guessed? As if that makes a real difference. If you can't afford that you can't afford the 4K TV nor the games anyway. Seriously, what do you actually expect here? It's as if you people buy a price and not a product.

I didn't expect any big exclusive titles anyway as Phil Spencer gave the impression to me a few months ago that they weren't ready to show any new franchise this year. That they didn't show much other big multi platform games we can blame on the ridiculous practice of paying for game *sales* marketing now. Probably also the reason they had to blow up this show with all these indie games I can live without.

P.S. Personally I can wait for another Halo until they get their shit together and actually manage a Halo game which delivers the Sense Of Wonder the original delivered in spade. I expect the latest major MS titles to get a 4K uplift anyway.

There was NOTHING even remotely impressive in what they showed for x1x. The downward spiral for ms is without end, they went from having partnerships with crytek, remedy, insomniac e.t.c to promoting that ridiculous ancient oculus platform game. The price becomes an even bigger joke in light of what they showed for the console. Look at it like this, I was hell bent on buying a Scorpio on launch day, I even imported an Xbox one from the u.k on launch day since my country was tier 2 . Now I will never buy it, simple as that, never. I actually regret buying a semi decent laptop a month ago, had I waited I would have gone all in for a monster desktop.

Seriously these guys introduced a 500$ console like this...indie game, indie game, indie game, multiplatfom game, indie ,indie ,indie ....It was sad. In retrospective everything about Scorpio was sad, from the insane hype to the t-shirts they were giving at their conference .

Not paying the premium for....liquid cooling and a cool looking console box .

 

[xexuxjy]

Conference was ok, and despite having a bad headache I stayed up and watched from 10 till 11:30 and it went surprisingly quickly. Nice to see the whole range of back to back games with very little waffle in-between. Think there was a good variety , but will definitely agree they were missing out on some complete showstoppers. Some big 3rd party exclusives (BloodBorne type scope), but most importantly a complete lack of 1st Party big/new titles. Sea of Thieves looked great as ever , and I'm enjoying the alpha when I get chance to play it, but I would have loved to see a few more things from Rare - even if much smaller games. But there was really nothing from MS as a studio.... I;m expecting Sony to have far less games to show but for what they have to be jaw-dropping. Price of the Scorpio, seems a bit high but who knows.... certainly a nice looking box and very surprised to see it smaller than the S. Did enjoy Bruce the Troll.......

 

[ultragpu]

This depression feast here is hilarious. For what? 50-100 bucks more than you guessed? As if that makes a real difference. If you can't afford that you can't afford the 4K TV nor the games anyway. Seriously, what do you actually expect here? It's as if you people buy a price and not a product.

I think it's more to do with people's expectation of MS's competitiveness in its pricing compared to the Pro, yes X1X offers more power and an UHD player but is it really worth it paying $499 for a mid gen upgrade at this point? I'm sure some of us are still willing but many would feel like money could be spent better else where.

 

[RobertR1]

The mid gen upgrade part is what I have trouble with when relating to the price point.

While the console is powerful in comparison to the competition, it's just as true that it's a few generations behind what's available in consumer land. The CPU is a few generations behind and by the time it comes out, both nvidia and AMD will be a couple of gens ahead on the GPU department also.

If this was a ZEN/Vega part, it'd be more powerful and then you're able to understand the $499 price tag. Expecting a mid gen upgrade to take off at this price point a couple of generations old technology is optimistic at best.

 

[Cyan]

LOL. I guess a lot people had different expectations than me.

I am not sure why people expected a $400 tag.

In 2013 if you bought a xbo you were spending about $380 per Tflop. If you bought a launch PS4 that number works out to about $216 per. In 2016 a PS4 Pro cost you about $95 per Tflop with a 24% increase in bandwidth over the base PS4.

The XBOX offers a rate of $80 dollars per Tflop with a 50% increase in bandwidth and amount of RAM over a PS4 Pro. And on top of it all, MS is giving it to you in a package that's basically a Xbox One X Slim.

The $500 dollar price tag doesn't bother me at all. Primarily, because if this was a new gen even a $400 box would warrant additional spending on accessories like an extra controller, charging station and because this is an Xbox, a couple of charge and play kits. That $500 is mostly going towards the hardware itself.

the 400€ tag hype is normal if you take into account consumer friendly prices, which is typical on consoles. The X360 was sold at a loss, I think. As for the conference, it was good, for console agnostic users and people who wanted to see games, they showed game after game.

It was a great opportunity for Phil to bang his fist on the table though. With a 450-400€ price tag and a few more exclusives like a new Perfect Dark or Age of Empires, it would be excellent. That's the issue I have with it.

 

[Jay]

3 years in development, and the only 1P game have for it at launch is FM7? (Or of note anyway)
I was expecting at least a single player DLC for gears or halo 5.
Halo 5 sounds crazy, but the multiplayer community is still pretty strong, and a single player dlc would've given it another shot in the arm until halo 6.
Game that you can only get on XO, marquee franchise, looking stunning in 4k. Use the assets that are being developed as part of halo 6.
I think it would've gone down well even as just a dlc.

 

[Nisaaru]

There was NOTHING even remotely impressive in what they showed for x1x. The downward spiral for ms is without end, they went from having partnerships with crytek, remedy, insomniac e.t.c to promoting that ridiculous ancient oculus platform game. The price becomes an even bigger joke in light of what they showed for the console. Look at it like this, I was hell bent on buying a Scorpio on launch day, I even imported an Xbox one from the u.k on launch day since my country was tier 2 . Now I will never buy it, simple as that, never. I actually regret buying a semi decent laptop a month ago, had I waited I would have gone all in for a monster desktop.

Seriously these guys introduced a 500$ console like this...indie game, indie game, indie game, multiplatfom game, indie ,indie ,indie ....It was sad. In retrospective everything about Scorpio was sad, from the insane hype to the t-shirts they were giving at their conference .

Not paying the premium for....liquid cooling and a cool looking console box .

Only because they weren't allowed to show CoD/Destiny2/Battelfront/.... doesn't mean these titles won't be available for it. If you don't want to play these titles on a console with higher graphics quality and potentially better FPS and faster load times(so they say) then why were you interested before?

 

[Nisaaru]

I think it's more to do with people's expectation of MS's competitiveness in its pricing compared to the Pro, yes X1X offers more power and an UHD player but is it really worth it paying $499 for a mid gen upgrade at this point? I'm sure some of us are still willing but many would feel like money could be spent better else where.

I'm sure we all would have wanted a more powerful console, at least on the CPU side. But it's up to everybody if he wants to wait another 3-4 years for 7nm consoles with even better specs again or if he wants a better experience in 5 months.

 

[iroboto]

Gnarly. Sounds like I'm the only one sold on this. This is either a good thing or bad thing lol not sure which. That being said within our viewing party a lot of folks were ready to jump in. Price tag scared them off. But now that we know the CDN price, they may jump back in. We were under the assumption it would be closer to 700 CAD. But 599 is more Reasonable.

I think they are "in", but not Day 1. But I was trying to explain that consoles drop in price like $50 a year and TVS drop in prices by nearly 30% a year; at least from my perspective makes more sense to buy XBOX now and recapture savings on the TV then the other way around. Shrug. But of a predictament with my 1070 now with the price points being similar.

This all being said and done, 4K HDR was the seller for me. I wanted to know what games would look like, and even the most hardcore of PC gamers were swayed by the visuals.

 

[Cyan]

Just now catching up before bed. Once conference was over I had to work on removing kitchen cabinets for our kitchen remodel.

Rating? Bleh? Is that allowed? OK, a C+ then.

Kinda anti-climatic. We pretty much new the look, the name & price before the show. Like others said they didn't do enough to sell me on the price. It might be worth it but I won't pay for it. Missed opportunity on a new Elite controller with Bluetooth support. XB1X color sucked & although it the ”smallest" the Twitter pics say it's the same as the 1S.

Games? Ori!!! Pre-ordering that. Crackdown 3 looked good & Terry Crews he was perfect spokesman lol. Could've talked about cloud destruction though. Anthem & Metro looked neat. Other titles that have me excited are State of Decay 2, Life is Strange & Super Lucky's Tale. Can't wait for Cuphead & Sea of Thieves.

True lack of more first party games was a head scratcher.

That's about it. C+ rating, what a waste. :/

Liked last year's E3 better.

Tommy McClain

no Elite controller, but thankfully the Duke is back.

 

[Johnglen]

Only because they weren't allowed to show CoD/Destiny2/Battelfront/.... doesn't mean these titles won't be available for it. If you don't want to play these titles on a console with higher graphics quality and potentially better FPS and faster load times(so they say) then why were you interested before?

Nope showing some of these games wouldn't change a thing about how sad the whole thing was just like it was depressing watching that bioware ,multiplatform game blowing away everything ms had to offer for Scorpio. Sony will, and has been, showing games like that for a long time , ms had nothing.....nothing !! Even things like crackdown looked downright embarrassing . Ms doesn't want to invest in the console market, that's their right, the just lost another customer.

Oh well at least ms sent me a copy of rare replay for watching this debacle on mixer, and that's the only positive thing from this briefing .

 

[Nisaaru]

If 10-20% doesn't make a difference, sales wouldn't increase when consoles get price drops. And it's not so much the personal situation as the wider market that people are talking about. So you can afford an extra $50 for Scorpio? Great. If everyone else decides not to bother because its too expensive, where's the incentive for devs to maximise your box? Your investment decreases in value the less people buy the same machine. It also shows something of MS's attitude to the console space and people's preferred gaming platform. Coming out fighting with aggressive prices shows they are serious about competing and trying to win market- and mind-share back from Sony.

It's far more than just an extra 50+ bucks.

Well, if you need a personal potential market size analyzation for everything in your head before you buy into something you're on the last leg on your sales curve anyway. Then you're not really the target audience. XBox users will be able to play their library with better graphics, faster load times and enjoy significantly better graphics for future titles. If that's not good enough people can wait until "next generation gaming" comes a long...sometime..while enjoying another IPhone/Ipad refresh with minor improvements.

Until somebody explains to me how 10-20% more based on bogus personal price expectations make a real difference with prices for 4K displays, extra HD and common prices of 100 bucks for AAA games these days if you don't wanna feel left out with a cut version, I can only see it as some irrational noise which means jack shit when the release is close. Then the same kind of people will make hair trigger orders because they need a new thrill to fill their bored consumer lifes.

 

[Nisaaru]

Nope showing some of these games wouldn't change a thing about how sad the whole thing was just like it was depressing watching that bioware ,multiplatform game blowing away everything ms had to offer for Scorpio. Sony will, and has been, showing games like that for a long time , ms had nothing.....nothing !! Even things like crackdown looked downright embarrassing . Ms doesn't want to invest in the console market, that's their right, the just lost another customer.

Oh well at least ms sent me a copy of rare replay for watching this debacle on mixer, and that's the only positive thing from this briefing .

You want them to invest in *marketing* rights so you can feel better about their shows? I prefer them to invest that money where it actually matters.

 

[Johnglen]

You want them to invest in *marketing* rights so you can feel better about their shows? I prefer them to invest that money where it actually matters.

No I meant to invest in big budget exclusivs like Sony does, not in marketing rights, I consider the whole marketing partner thing useless. Sorry i didn't really worded it right in my previous post.

 

[Cyan]

No I meant to invest in big budget exclusivs like Sony does, not in marketing rights, I consider the whole marketing partner thing useless. Sorry i didn't really worded it right in my previous post.

MS might not be interested in true Xbox exclusives, I am ok with that, but more 1st party games is what I expected. Sony and Nintendo are a good example of this. Gotta say though that Sony sell a lot of smoke when it comes to games.

Wonder if Phil is going to show something interesting in the PC Show 2017.

 

[Nisaaru]

Exclusives AAA titles take time. My understanding is that they have new projects under works but they are simply not ready this year. Showing some artworks and silly prop trailers for year(s) away content isn't something I would call smart these days.

 

[Johnglen]

I mean console exclusives so I agree with you . Sorry to all for my extreme reactions but I was legitimately shocked with the ms conference.

 

[one]

The lack of Mixed Reality was a curious move, MR games/demos could have been true Xbox One X-exclusive titles. They might have been afraid of being seen as not devoting itself into gaming enough if they had shown tech demos playing with expensive toys like HoloLens.