QUESTION: What if MS has an E3 like last year?
Last year, they had lot’s of XB1X stuff, which I knew they’d have and that’s fine. That won’t be the case here, obviously. But for the most part, the games themselves seemed underwhelming.
Looking at the list of what they showed last year, the only exclusives, I believe, were:
Crackdown 3
Cuphead (for the 980th time)
Forza 7 (not interested)
Ori and the Will of the Wisps (my most hype moment of the show)
Sea of Theives (…again, still not interested)
State of Decay 2 (not interested)
Super Lucky’s Tale (wasn’t this a VR title first?)
That’s it. Everything on that list has come out already except for Ori 2 and Crackdown 3. That’s good actually, that they all came out. I’m glad it’s not like Sony where they announce stuff 5 years early. But none of those games that came out were of particular interest to me and I don’t think any of them scored remarkably well. Forza 7 reviews, if I recall correctly, said it was good, pretty, but kinda more or the same.
There were other games that were labeled “console launch exclusives” such as:
Tacoma
PUBG
Deep Rock Galactic
The Darwin Project
The Last Night
Black Desert
Ashen
The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti
I’ll be honest, the only ones that remotely interest me here are The Last Night, which has an awesome art style, and The Artful Escape and I could really take or leave that one. If MS had a packed lineup, Artful Escape probably wouldn’t even register for me. The rest of them don’t really do much for me.
Lastly, there were the world premiere multiplats:
Anthem
Assassins Creed Origins
Code Vein
Dragon Ball FighterZ
Life is Strange: Before the Storm
Metro Exodus
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Now, the trend here, as I see it, are that the biggest AAA titles seem to be the multiplats. Crackdown 3, Forza 7 and Sea of Thieves are the only real big budget exclusives here. Throw out Life is Strange, as that’s more of an indie title, and you still have a 2:1 ratio of big budget multiplats to big budget first party games, and the numbers aren’t very big.
To compound that for me personally, there just weren’t many compelling reasons here to own an Xbox One, and I’m not even talking about the same day PC release stuff. I came out of last year’s show glad that OG Xbox games were coming, thinking The Last Night looked cool and that I can’t wait for another Ori game, but otherwise it was lots of stuff we’d seen already ad nauseum, and few new, interesting reasons to be an owner of this platform.
Overall, I remember thinking it was the worst showing MS has had at E3 that I can remember. I know that sounds like an insult and I’m also fully aware that tons of people put tons of hours in to making the E3 briefing happen. I’m not trying to belittle anyone’s work here, I swear.
But simply put, as a fan of several MS franchises, there wasn’t much that I saw that got me excited. There wasn’t any next gen sequel to Fable, Lost Odyssey, Crimson Skies, MechAssault, Alan Wake, Kameo, Banjo, Conker, Blood Wake, Blue Dragon, Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Redshift, Perfect Dark, Phantom Dust, Rallisport Challenge, no legit baseball game, no Killer Instinct news, no kart racer or new fighter etc.
I mean, I get that new IPs are necessary, no question, but when you’ve owned an Xbox, an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One, you kind of hope to see some of those great games that come out continue as franchises and while they’ve done a phenomenal job with Halo, Gears and two Forza games, the fact that they’ve had such a limited amount of success cultivating franchises from other, similarly good games, is a bit frustrating as a system owner that likes having as many of those reliable franchises as humanly possible.
I’m a PS4 owner, so I hope to see a new Last of Us, a new God of war, a new Ratchet & Clank, a new Infamous, a new Twisted Metal, a new MLB: The show (each year), a new Syphon Filter, a new Disgaea, a new Dark Cloud, a new Gran Tourismo, a new Uncharted, a new Sly Cooper, a new Wipeout, a new Killzone, a new Little Big Planet, plus a bunch of other new IPs like Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, Final Fantasy Remake, The Last guardian, Until Dawn, etc.
Sure, some of these might not come out (I have few hopes for Twisted Metal), and they might not all be super fantastic (looking at Knack and The Order: 1866), but they’ve got both quantity and quality. During last year’s Xbox show, I didn’t see a lot that piqued my interest, and there didn’t seem to be much in the way of exclusives that I thought would be high tier system sellers.
TL/DR: I hope this year’s different and they have a lot of exciting new IPs, a bunch of great, AAA exclusive franchises returning in big, bold ways, maybe a big announcement or two, like the purchase of a publisher or something along those lines; some sort of substantial indication that they’ll be finishing out this generation strong.
Otherwise, and I don’t mean this as some sort of BS “customer’s always right” type of threat BY ANY MEANS, but given how disappointing this generation has been for MS in terms of reasons to own this system(for me), outside of Killer Instinct, Sunset Overdrive, the Horizon line of Forza games and Ori, I don’t know how much I’ll be considering the next generation of Xbox when MS, Sony and Nintendo (who’s also crushed it since the Switch came out) start gearing up for what’s next.
Am I overreacting here?