The Annual E3 Microsoft press conference thread, 2017 edition

Sea of Thieves lacks charm for its art direction.

How about a giant Shark with a peg leg-fin or eyepatch or a monocle/magnifying glass that fires a giant laser beam when focusing the sun. Or just comes up out of nowhere and eats an entire ship. And then jump-escapes off into the distance early in the game.

or even...

...a big stupid jellyfish.

Just to change things up a little from just a cartoony pirate looting game. meh

 

Of all my issues with SoT, the art direction isn't one of them. I think the art direction is incredibly charming as a matter of fact. I think the sharks have a very "Shark Tale"-esque quality to them.

 

I prefer when companies announce their games shortly before release, but Microsoft didn't really have any of those either. All they can really do is hope some of the indie games launching on Xbox first have a significant window before they're on PlayStation.

 

Art direction is fine, but I'm saying they don't take advantage of the cartooniness to take it to the N-th degree of ludicrosity that would have been fitting along the likes of Conker. As it is, it feels like a rather rote cartoon with nothing special that says, "this is why it's a cartoon" apart from being kid-friendly. Even the ocean isn't thematically consistent (as awesome as the water shading looks). Or... take Monkey Island for example as well. It's got all sorts of absurdity that makes this pirate game feel lacking. The only thing that seemed out-of-the-blue (in a good way) was the cannonball shot of the pirate from the boat onto the island.

Feels boring.

 

Changing it after seeing what Sony has shown.

C-

Cons:
- Lost opportunity

 

After seeing Sonys show... my grade for Microsoft went up. Sony showed nothing relative to Xbox. It was a long demo reel of 2018 games - maybe. Xbox showed actual games running on the Xbox and X1X system today that will be available this year, in greater fidelity than Sony's offerings.

 

watching anthem again this time at home on my 1080p plasma.
wow looks like complete shit, wow need to buy me a 4K HDR OLED screen now. Seriously, night and day, no wonder no one was impressed with MS. You didn't see!!!

 

Regards Anthem, I watched a YT vid after reading lots of raves but it didn't look particularly different to HZD to my eyes. Based on what people were saying I was expecting it to look head-and-shoulders above anything. What are the differences/features that others are seeing as making Anthem appear so much ahead of the rest to their eyes? Coz lighting, models, scenery, all looked that same-ish, and considering it's cross-platform it's an unlikely contender to max out XB1X.

 

Shifty the same as as with a.c. origins or ark survival. The game is maxed out on all settings on the xb1x. The devs say that xb1x games have the ability to do "epic" or "ultra" settings which include 4k textures, max draw distance, volumetric lighting and fog etc on par or near the highest settings for pc.

If the developer bothers to (which a lot of devs who aren't Bungie are doing) they are maxing out xb1x games visually in a way that is only possible on high end specced pcs.

If the pc version of a game on highest settings doesn't impress you then the console version wont either.

 

Seems to be a common response. 4k (hdr) stream was amazing, "you didn't see what I saw"

My question then becomes was it a limitation of 1080p streams and, then YouTube compression for the vods, or is there little difference for 1080p owners?
Guess need to wait for decent comparisons and high quality captures at 4k and 1080p to know.

Any reason to suspect bungie isn't?
Only thing I've heard is that it's not 60fps on 1X, but I don't take that as not making most of the X1 at all.

 

If people are expecting PC ultra settings on Xbox One X at native 4K they will definitely be left disappointed imo. My expectation for the system is either checkerboard 4k with close to ultra settings (only leaving out cpu intensive settings and the nvidia specific effects) or native 4k with Xbox One settings or slightly higher.

 

I'll give two responses, the first is addressing technically what was different, the second response more about it as a package.
1080p stream could not resolve all the detail on the screen. By not all, I mean it feels like a fraction of what 4K stream was resolving.
HDR enables developers to truly separate different materials from each other. Mist and fog looks like mist and fog, it doesn't look like some blur over textures, it felt like proper interaction between materials.

These two features combined made it feel like a next gen game, something I've not seen before. As soon as i downgraded to 1080 without HDR, it looked like something I've seen before.

If you compare 4K to 1080p you will see the difference in detail. But without HDR you won't be able to truly see the difference between how light interacts with the scene. And that is really hard for someone to describe without seeing it in person

 

Careful there. "Like Epic settings" isn't Epic settings as Clukos and I discussed. Take what they say with a grain of salt. Ark: Survival Evolved can be a beautiful game, but it's also not a particularly well optimized game.

Regards,
SB

 

AC: Origins runs checkerboard 4k according to DF

 

Or you know, the Xbox One/Ps4?

 

Nah it's those really low end (min spec) PC's that are at fault

 

Question is, could it have run it at 4k30 native XO settings? Which was the initial sales pitch (forgetting the fact that it's 900p on XO). This seems to be a lot higher quality settings than what is going to be expected from XO.

Which I think is right option, and in line with their updated message, on their FAQ at least. lol
Going to read the article, only watched vid, but seems impressive for an alpha,be nice when they can do some comparisons though.