By Jeff Bond on June 9, 2014 at 8:30am
The stage is set, Major Nelson is on the green carpet talking to folks, and we are ready for the Microsoft Press Conference at E3 2014!
Phil Spencer is out welcoming everyone. People in the crowd were given wristbands and they have all started lighting up and glowing. Starting to talk about the game industry as a whole.
dedicating our entire briefing to games
Alright, no hardware announcements, fair enough.
Activision is up first with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Showing a trailer now. Plenty of explosions, yelling, and helicopters just like you would expect. In a futuristic city with a lot of rubble. Walking around with a squad, exploring, even more explosions and fire. Pretty sure we just saw a mech suit followed by a giant mechanical walking spider thing. Looks like a swarm of flying robots terrorizing our squad buzzing overhead. More shooting, but wait, we have a laser turret, that's pretty neat. Enemies have a sort of red line overlay to highlight them. Generic soldier had his arm caught in a door of a helicopter, kept us from helping him saying we were out of time, pushed us out of it, and it exploded. And now a montage trailer to wrap everything up.
Those wristband things changed color as the lights on the stage did, that was pretty sweet.
Forza 5 time with Dan Greenwalt, director of Turn 10 Studios. New track, Nurburgring, available starting today, free.
Ralph Fulton (Playground Games) is out now to talk about Forza Horizon 2 built on the Forza 5 engine with dynamic weather and day/night cycles in 1080p. September 30th release date. Trailer of many very shiny cars going around tracks.
Trailer for Evolve has started playing, from the creators of Left 4 Dead. Crazy Cthulu looking monster. Assault, trapper, medic, and support classes, or, you can be the monster! Lots of shooting and explosions in a cave, looks very bad ass. Open beta starts this fall.
Ubisoft senior producer Vincent Pontbriand is out to talk about Assassin's Creed Unity. Join with up to 3 friends for co-op goodness. Trailer now playing. In a blue trenchcoat this time. Crowd of people in this village is very well done. Sneaking around, some nice stabbing. Co-op looks like it works pretty well. Engine looks very powerful, tons of detail.
Looks like a Dragon Age: Inquisition trailer now. Once again, super detailed, all of these have been really. Huge purple dragon, some green magic goodness, some fire breathing, lots of combat, plenty of sword on face to go around. October 7th.
Another trailer now, looks like more military shooting, not too surprised, then out of nowhere a teenager comes bursting through a wall and is parkouring all over this warehouse. Sunset Overdrive. We dun been duped.
Can you save Sunset City? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CAN YOU?! Of course you can, it's a #*)&%$) video game!
Insomniac Games Ted Price is now out to talk about it with a live gameplay demo. Lots of color, a nice change of pace from all of the dark and grungy trailers we've seen so far today. Sort of Jet Set Radio feel to it. Running around the city shooting a monster, nice bit of fire to top things off.
Capcom trailer time. Super Ultra Dead Rising 3 Arcade Remix Hyper Edition EX Plus OL. Wut? Available now. I.. I don't even have anything for this.
Harmonix is once again bringing out Dance Central, Dance Central Spotlight. A few references to Fantasia? Arrives this September.
And another quick segway over to Fable Legends. Headed into ruins to find an ancient artifact. Very nice art style so far, however no UI of any sort. Where's my health bar?! You can be the villan, controlling the world from above, sort of like a game master with a Dungeon Keeper / Black and White feel to it. Beta this Fall.
Project Spark trailer time, same cool stylized art approach as before. Still looks beautiful. Showing off the range of possibilities you can create. Once again, very pretty, but a kind of bland trailer. Wait, out of nowhere, Conker makes an appearance and the trailer ends.
Pretty sure we're moving into indie territory now, looking like a 2d game with watercolor-ish graphics. From Moon Studios, Ori and the Blind Forest. Looks pretty good actually.
Oh man, Halo time. Starting off with a trailer which I get the strangest feeling will involve plenty of ships, guns, and explosions. Wait, that's from Halo 2 opening level with the bomb dropping. I thought I recognized that. Looking very nice. Bonnie Ross, Studio Head from 343 is out now. Talking about Master Chief's journey, past and future, and the game's history and traditions. Halo: Master Chief Collection, November 11th release date. Includes Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, 3, and 4. Dan Ayoub is out now to talk about the collection. All 4 games, everything unlocked, all on one disc. Halo 2 is hitting 10 a year anniversary and has gotten a huge graphics overhaul, looks very nice, can toggle between original and anniversary versions of graphics. Original Halo 2 multiplayer is in the box. Some gameplay footage showing off the pretties. Holy crap, here we go, every map ever released from, all four games are running in 60 FPS at 1080p. Includes Halo Nightfall video series and December access to Halo 5 multiplayer beta.
Phil Spencer back out. Everything we've seen so far is available this year, now on to 2015 stuff.
Trailer for Playdead, a new game from the Limbo folks. Sort of has a 2.5D feel to it. Puzzle Platformer, not too surprising. Nice looking though. Dystopian.
Switching over to indie developer preview montage. Going to be a ton of stuff here and I'm not going to be able to cover but I'm going to do my best, here we go! Nevermind, I lied, it's too fast, we'll try to get a list up in a bit. Below, Cuphead, and The Mighty Nine were in there. That was a lot. Looks like the indie scene is getting some love.
Laura Croft time. Rise of the Tomb Raider, holiday 2015.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is on stage now with some live demo going on. Tracking a creature via some sort of trail left behind, blood or scent perhaps. Shot a winged creature with an arrow and it looks like that is indeed blood we're tracking. Slight framerate hiccup during some action bits but we're running around the scenery and everything is looking nice.
Moving right along, Ken Lobb is out now, teasing us about an old franchise. Got some wizardy looking folks in a destroyed city with all sorts of spells slinging around. It's Phantom Dust.
This is a pretty quick pace they've got going on, not a slow moment.
The Division is up next and we've got a brief introduction and a trailer. Loos like an abandoned subway with all sorts of trash laying about. Pretty spiffy holographic map projected on the floor to help you find your way. Running around with your teammate exploring the area. There we go! We're above ground now, it's the NYC / Times Square area. Crouching around and flanking some folks, shots being exchanged among everyone.
Hideki Kamiya is out now from Platinum Games. Presenting their next new game, no title yet, trailer! Gotta make you work for it. Running through a forest and then oh crap a dragon breathing fire at us, followed by some horned monster thing, reminds me of Godzilla enemies fighting each other. Scalebound. Now a crazy multi-headed dragon Medusa thing going on, very very large monster.
Cloud Jam is out now, and they've brought Crackdown. Neon, cell shading, machine guns, a sniper, and some explosives to top it all off. So many explosions.
Phil Spencer back out, I'm presuming for the last time as we're starting to run out of time. Telling us how he just showed us a ton of games, and in all fairness, that's what they've done. I don't think I've even heard a mention of Kinect. Looks like a recap trailer now of all the games they showed.
That's it! We're done!
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