Caught up on the Xbox presentation. It looked... pretty good actually. Now people here may not be all that enthusiastic about several games, but here's very late notes:
- STALKER getting a sequel is really interesting, especially since the original is a pretty damn good - if buggy - game in its own right.
- Sea of Thieves is still alive, and if anything the Jack Sparrow thing shows confidence from both dev and publisher. Good to see that Rare has it as the backbone to help fund further games like Everwild.
- Yakuza release is another plus, since it shows increased interest from Sega.
- Battlefield 2042 looked... pretty damn interesting too. While it's not revolutionary the genre could really use some more interconnected maps that actually use all kinds of space, especially for multiplayer games. Still, I find it worrying that the publisher / devs want to have the cake and eat it too in regards to the in-game climate apocalypse.
- Psychonauts 2? My older brother really liked the first game, so I'm happy for him.
- Skyrim 10th and TES Online... yeah expected while we wait for TES VI, and Bethesda's really trying to salvage FallOut 76 from total disaster territory.
- Party Animals looked solid on its Steam Beta, good to see it on Xbox consoles too.
- Hades getting more looks promising for that game.
- The Halo multiplayer. The big showstopper since Microsoft relies on that a lot. It makes a lot of sense why that's Free to play while the campaign is its own, especially now with really big filesizes. It does put a ton of pressure on the campaign - not only since it's the one people will pay for, but also since Halo 4 / 5's campaigns have not been considered as good as the first 3 (IIRC).
- Diablo II's remake... pressure is really on Blizzard (and Activision by proxy), especially since WarCraft 3 ReForged flopped.
- Far Cry 6, now with Morgan Freeman (?). Kinda expected, but interested to see where this goes.
- Slime Rancher 2 - agreeing with Max that if Nintendo had made that people here would go nuts over it.
- Atomic Heart is the most bizarre game I've seen a trailer of. Half Life but with crash dummies it looked like and more random ****? I'm intrigued.
- Eiyuden Chronicles looked... pretty damn unique, even if its visuals looked wonky when trying to blend in.
- Age of Empires I and II were two of my childhood games, so please Microsoft make AoE IV actually good, I beg you. Its visuals don't look amazing, but it might be an intentional callback to II. Please Microsoft. Please don't bungle it.
- The Outer Worlds 2: So fourth-wally that I'm pretty sure that Deadpool could blend in. I'm interested.
- Not sure what Redfall's trying to do... yeah. I'm cautious on this.
- Some games that didn't show off much more than we already knew like Grounded, or some that were "Eh" like Shredders the snowboarding one.
I hardcore get the impression that a lot of the "E3 is dying" comments partly come from
them not being in the target audience for those games. This is not meant to put down on people who feel that this year's E3's been a let down: I mean, Square's presentation was overshadowed by
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Oh where was I? Yeah, killing Chaos Zero and all that. But Ubisoft Forward E3 2021 had
a million average views and an hours watched total that comes kinda close to
Summer Game Fest's. Not really that close to Nintendo's February Direct
which averaged 1,5 million, but still. E3's not going to die in the immiediate future.
So all in all, while I say that Nintendo only has Microsoft as competition, it's pretty damn decent competition.