Microsoft Held a Press Conference at Gamescom

Gamescom, the world's largest gaming convention, doesn't officially start until tomorrow morning, but earlier today Microsoft took the stage to offer a preview of their upcoming releases. The press conference ran for about 90 minutes, and while Microsoft only brought a couple of big surprises, they did show new footage for a number of previously announced games. If you're interested, you can watch the West coast crew commentate along with the press conference, or you could check out the Gamescom trailers that Alex has been been posting up on the site all day.

But if you only have time to read an article quickly, well, I'm writing this for you. Here are some of the things that stood out to me.

Exclusive Games

I feel like we've been talking a lot about the nature and value of platform exclusivity, and Microsoft used this press conference as an opportunity to show that the company is still invested in first-party development and traditional console exclusives. While there were some third party, multi-platform titles at the event (like Dark Souls 3, Homefront: The Revolution, and Just Cause 3), Microsoft spent a lot of time showing off games only available on Xbox One. In fact, the show opened with the trio of Microsoft-published games that skipped E3: Quantum Break, Crackdown 3, and Scalebound.

Quantum Break comes from Remedy, the studio behind the first two Max Payne games and last generation's Alan Wake, and it shows. The game is a third person shooter that gives the player the ability to freeze areas of space and time in combat, and it will ship with a TV series on the disk. So yeah, very, very Remedy. It looks like both the game and the show will star Shawn Ashmore, Lance Reddick, Aidan Gillen, and Dominic Monaghan, which is definitely a bigger collection of known talent than the company has used in the past. I'm definitely curious about how all this will all turn out, but there was definitely something a little tiring about watching another trailer filled with third-person cover-shooter combat. The time control stuff might mix it up enough to keep it fresh, but I'm definitely ready for another paradigm shift in the shooter genre.

We've known that there would be a new Crackdown game for a while now, but we didn't really know who was making it or what would differentiate it from previous entries in the series. Well, now we know that the game is Crackdown 3, the developer is Reagent Games (a new studio founded by the director of the first Crackdown, Dave Jones), and the new twist on the franchise is destructibility. The trailer showed lots of explosions and a number of giant buildings falling to the ground dramatically, and the developers cite the Xbox One's cloud computing as a necessary component for this level of destruction. The trailer also gives a little bit of clarity for the game's structure: Crackdown 3 will allow players to tackle any of a big number of critical targets, and each of these targets is tied to some other objective or element of the game world. It actually sounds like an updated version of the system in the first Crackdown, where each criminal lieutenant provided a bonus for their gang's boss, and the boss would lose that bonus if you took said lieutenant out.

The Scalebound trailer had a dragon and a kid wearing headphones and this kid was like "hey, use your words dragon friend" and then there was some EDM and the kid did some action moves and he had a dragon arm???? Okay, okay. Okay. Lemme slow down. Scalebound is a Platinum-developed open-world RPG where you fight alongside your dragon against enemies small and large, collect and use loot, and team up with up to three other players to take on really big bosses. I got a lot of the same vibe that I felt during the Horizon: Zero Dawn trailer: This feels like some folks who really like the basic idea of taking down big, armored Monster Hunter-style creatures, but want to offer that experience in a game with a more traditional RPG structure and with faster-paced combat design. Time will tell how well that works. Also, I kept waiting for the player to get on the dragon and fly a little. Was anyone else waiting for that? That would've been cool.

Microsoft also announced a third season for free-to-play fighting game Killer Instinct, and the company debuted a new fighter who will immediately be made available: Rash from Battletoads. (Rash is the one who wears sunglasses. And yes, yes he does use one of those hoverbike things in an attack).

Oh, and Halo was there, too!

There was one first-party game presentation that fell flat on its face though, and that was the segment on Halo 5: Guardians. Two "shoutcasters" took to the stage, put on their eSports voices, and started to commentate a pre-recorded highlight reel of a match between two top Halo teams, and it just didn't work. I get wanting to highlight the competitive multiplayer, and I even understand the desire to chase after that hot eSports action, but this presentation didn't serve either of those purposes well. It didn't have the clarity that a simple features trailer would have had, it didn't actually explain how Halo 5 would support competitive play in new and important ways, and for all of the enthusiasm and volume of the commentators, it didn't even have the tension and drama of an actual live Halo match. And it just went on forever.

The worst thing is that the stuff that Brad, Dan, and Drew talked about in their E3 Halo 5 Unfinished video was cool. The new Warzone mode seems interesting, and I hear that the single player mode has all sorts of weird stuff, like issuing orders to your NPC squadmates. Show that stuff! And if you're going to highlight the competitive scene, do it in a way that actually communicates the value of that scene and explains how Halo 5 is being designed with those players in mind.

Oh, also, Microsoft closed the show with the announcement of a Creative Assembly helmed Halo Wars 2. Yeah, I just... I don't know, y'all. I've got nothing here, it's just... They were gonna end that conference, and then they did the whole "Oh, and one more thing," and then their one more thing was a Brute from Halo holding some sorta torch and mumbling something I couldn't make out and then "HALO WARS 2." That's a thing that happened in 2015. And who knows, maybe that game will be great! We'll see.

Quality of Life Improvements and Other Odds and Ends

Microsoft additionally announced a couple of features meant to make the overall Xbox One experience better for users.

The backwards compatibility that was announced at E3 will roll out for all Xbox One users in November. There will be over 100 games available at launch. Microsoft also announced that, going forward, their "Games with Gold" program will offer two backwards compatible Xbox 360 games every month. The 360 has a hell of a catalog, so there could be some great stuff given away in the future.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released an Over-the-Air tuner for the Xbox One, allowing users to attach a TV antenna to their console and stream local TV through their system. Now, those users will be able to use their Xbox One as a DVR for that TV content too. Never miss an episode of [fine CBS property] ever again! (The last CBS show I watched was The Mentalist. That was a good show. What. It WAS. Leave me alone.)

Independent and Early Access Games

There was also some time spent showing off some upcoming independent and "Game Preview" (read: Early Access) titles. Among those, these caught my eye:

• We Happy Few is coming to Game Preview this holiday, and then getting a regular release in 2016. We Happy Few is a first person survival game that successfully met its Kickstarter goal back in June, and it's being made by Compulsion Games, the studio behind the stylish PS4 launch game Contrast. Unlike other games in the "first person survival" genre, though, We Happy Few sets the player in a creepy, well-inhabited urban environment, and the primary threat are the city's citizens. The whole thing has a sort of 1960s British psychedelia style about it. It reminds me a lot of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, and that's always a good thing.
• Koji Igarashi stood on a stage with a whip and a cowboy hat and announced that Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will offer players cross-play Xbox One and Windows 10 versions of the game, presumably for the game's asynchronous multiplayer features. Which is a plus, definitely, but mostly I was excited to see Koji Igarashi stand on a stage with a cowboy hat and a whip.
• Mojang (Mojang?) showed off Cobalt, a 2D side-scrolling action game with single player, co-operative, and competitive modes. The bits of competitive gameplay shown was definitely reminiscent of some other games in the couch-competitive genre, like TowerFall and Samurai Gunn. But I'm always curious to see what Mojang does, and it's nice to know that Microsoft is letting the studio pursue projects that aren't just Minecraft.

Odds and Ends

There were a few other things worth mentioning, too:

• We now know that Rise of the Tomb Raider will be coming to PS4 in 2016, but that didn't stop Microsoft from showing some new gameplay footage of Lara shooting and knifing dudes. Which is fine, it's fine it. It is. Just... I would love to see a tomb or two? Ah well, maybe next time.
• I think I'm finally healed up from Bloodborne, because I definitely felt the desire to play Dark Souls 3. There was a big skeleton face. I'll bet I'll have to stand precariously close to that thing and hit the attack button a bunch while my camera totally breaks. Pretty excited.
• A new Just Cause 3 trailer was shown, and Microsoft announced that players who purchase the game on Xbox One will also receive a free copy of Just Cause 2. But other than that, there was no real "Xbox Exclusive" content attached to this. Which was sort of rad, because it kept the focus on that cool trailer. I guess the lesson to learn is: If at any point you think your press conference might be sagging a bit, just toss a Just Cause trailer in there. That'll do the trick.

I know that all seems pretty exhaustive, but believe it or not, this isn't everything that happened at Microsoft's event today. So again, if you're interested, you can watch the West coast crew talk over the press conference. And if you just want trailers, Alex has uploaded those to our trailer page!

Yeah, man, Microsoft has really picked it up with exclusive games I want to play.

I was all about recommending the PS4 early on, but the Xbox is gonna get a ton of playtime in the next year or so.

Can someone who's ever been to Gamescom describe the experience? Here in the UK our biggest gaming event in EGX which was originally just called the Eurogamer Expo and started in 2008. I first attended in 2012 which saw an attendance over 4 days of 50,000 people but has since grown to over 70,000 people in the last 2 years due to the releases of the Xbox One and the PS4. Now I ask about attending Gamescom because the last 2 years of EGX has just made it almost impossible to really enjoy the show as more games are being shown off but there hasn't been an increase in units. For example, at the 2013 show, over the course of 6 or so hours, I got to play Titanfall (the line was 2 hours), Hotline Miami 2 (the line was an hour long and it was being shown off on 2 screens while no one played Luftrausers next to it) and then a handful of PS4 games which was an hour line to get into the Sony booth and then you had to line up for the games once you were inside. I probably did spend an hour talking with Rebecca from Warframe though.

On topic of the article: I really had no idea that Dave Jones had moved on to founding a new game studio. I thought he was kind of done after Realtime Worlds and what happened with APB. That game had so much potential but was such a mess. I'm just glad he's still around. He founded DMA who made genre defining games at the time and would eventually become Rockstar North. But yea, looking at his LinkedIn, he's a busy guy.

I love how you didn't even bother writing up, the section where they showed how dedicated they are, to the PC platform.

Because nothing about the conference gave the impression they really cared, about the PC platform.

"This time we really do care about PC!! Heres a new GFWL and you want Halo? Then here's the wrong Halo!"

@austin_walker: In the part about Tomb Raider, should "it's fine it." just be "it's fine."?

I skipped the first Halo Wars, but a CA developed Halo RTS is right up my alley. I know, I know, Stormrise was a fucking disaster, but I'm sure those guys have a great science fiction strategy game in them.

Austin's generally a very good writer, but he definitely used the word "definitely" a lot in his paragraph on Quantum Break and I definitely noticed it.

Otherwise good write up.

I really like Halo, so I have to be "that guy"...

Jesus H! Does no one in the games press pay attention? They very clearly showed off the single player squad commands in the E3 campaign trailer.

And the GBWest guys mentioned how they were confused about the story going from H4 to H5G. 343i promoted the ever loving shit out of hashtagHuntTheTruth leading up to E3. It's a PHENOMINAL radio read type of story. Seriously, if you like Halo and haven't listened to season 1 yet, get on it! Especially you @austin_walker, because I'm pretty sure you'll appreciate it. And there will be a season 2 in September leading up to the release of H5G.

PS - And you couldn't hear what the Brute was saying in the Halo Wars 2 trailer? Really. It was fairly clear to me (if you weren't listening to GBWest talking over the ENTIRE thing).

I like how they showed off that small keyboard you can shove on the xbox controller and then announced it would be coming to PC too. I guess i can throw my keyboard away.

The three most exciting games on this for me (Dark Souls 3, Homefront, and Just Cause 3) were all cross-platform. Par for the course with both consoles lately. Exclusives are dead.

Scalebound looks great, but I'm very worried about that frame rate. Looked like it got real bad at times.

Thanks for this handy summary!

Austin, it is fun to read your articles. Thanks for the recap! I'm hoping some of those ID@XBOX games turn out to be great games. Some of the games that have come have not been great.

Just wanted to say I'm really glad for the short written recap, would love to have more written recaps of stuff in general, really helpful when life is too busy to watch all the video content. I'm really glad for your addition to the team, and I'm loving all of your articles, Austin!

Ever since E3 last year MS has been killing it. Really happy I got a Xbone last Christmas instead of a PS4 right now.

I'll bet I'll have to stand precariously close to that thing and hit the attack button a bunch while my camera totally breaks. Pretty excited.

Thank you @austin_walker. This is my new favorite description of the souls games.

I am excited for it too.

Crackdown 3 really might sell me a Xbox One.

Anything for PC?

Pretty much just Halo Wars 2

@armaan8014: well some other sites (I didnt meant to go there they made me THEY MADE ME) have reported that Halo Wars 2 is also coming for PC beyond that not really.

Never miss an episode of [fine CBS property] ever again!

I know this was intentional but I laughed too hard at it.

@austin_walker I really liked one of the GB chat comments during the Tomb Raider stream, "Lara Croft: Tomb Filler." Pretty much sums it up.

Hell I bet the game is very good but her propensity for murder is nearing Max Payne levels. Lara's always been a murdering sociopath, just now she focuses on that instead of the tomb stuff and she's not as jolly about the murder.

@incslayer: @turtlebird95: Daamn. I thought the days of regular PC ports (?) were upon us

There's something that rubs me wrong about the new Tomb Raider games. I just wished there were no human opponents in them at all I guess. In the first (reboot) I played until I had one segment where I was in some sort of Fallout like town where hordes of enemies kept spawning and I was mowing them down with a shotgun. I just stopped after that with a 'what the hell am I even doing' feeling.
It's not that I'm against killing digital bad humans, but it felt so wrong doing that while controlling that specific character I just couldn't go on (also the gameplay wasn't great, that might've had something to do with it as well).

Having said that, I must say that Microsoft's future line-up looks pretty damn nice. Quantum Break, Scalebound and the Rare game especially. I have no idea what kind of game Re-Core will be and Crackdown 3 looked like a Crackdown to me (which was awesome in a time where an open world city was still kind of a new thing). Gears 4 I just can't get excited for. Only played Gears 1 and that was ... fine, I guess.

All together it's not a bad line-up at all, though. Pretty diverse as well.

I wish they'd give some sort of word on Phantom Dust, beyond the one comment they made on a podcast saying the project was currently not being worked on by a studio. Tell me the damn game is dead so I can go back to being sad that another Phantom Dust will never be made or just stop teasing me. I bought their console for phantom dust and all i got out of this is a bunch of sequels to games I lost interest in years ago (except JC3) and some douchey looking kid with a dragon in a game that looks boring.

Microsoft needs to come out swinging, and this is a good start. They have a lot of momentum to make up for.

I feel like Austin would enjoy Person of Interest. It at least pretends to be more than a procedural

Talking of exclusives, Forza Motorsport 6 was there. Weird that it wasn't mentioned here, but yeah it's my most anticipated game of this year. Puddles!

Not sure if people were watching the same show but I didn't see much to get excited about here. We've got a terrible Halo presentation with forced commentary over a pre-recorded video, a Tomb Raider game where the tombs were shown in a slide slow second to Lara's soldier genocide and MS's continued talk of how they totally care about PC without ever actually saying how beyond some cloud saves.

I know this is a negative post, but I really didn't see much worth getting hyped over besides Scalebound and Halo Wars 2. I mean Just Cause 3 (and most of what was shown if we're being honest) is multiplatform and Crackdown, which I was genuinely interested in, was reduced to a grainy "over the designer's shoulder" promotional video at best.

Least we got Halo Wars 2 though: I really do want to play that.

Were there other conferences? Is there a writeup similar to this for those?

Yeah, that was perfect.

@kubqo: EA will have/has had a press conference, but from what I understand their show will mainly focus on showing off already announced titles like FIFA, Battlefront 3 and so on.

I'm astonished by the lukewarm reception to Scalebound, it looked like it had classic Platinum style seeping out of every pore. Have people really moved away from crazy Japanese games (or is it a case of exclusive so I must be down on it? I know I've caught myself subconsciously doing that for games on a platform I don't own.)

I got really excited when they showed a small clip of a car about to drive through what looked like a really big puddle. Unfortunately, they cut away before it did, the game looks incredible though coming out real soon too.

Hm, like a few others here have alluded to, the general sentiment seems bizarrely negative. I mean, to some extent AAA is the very embodiment of jading, but MS has maybe double as much stuff coming as Sony at this point -- they wouldn't be doing a second big conference otherwise.

Also, the competitive Halo segment did seem a bit forced, but the West crew seemed unjustifiably hostile towards it. I'm not into the Halo community at all, but undoubtedly there are a lot of players who work their arses off to get good at those games, and shitting on that community as soon as they get some exposure and financial support is just disrespectful -- and I say that as a KI fan whose community hasn't *really* made it yet.

@omgfather said:

We're a year out from its release, so it's probably a broken mess -- just like pretty much every game this far out.

Quantum Break looks so good. Tiring seeing everyone in the media blow it off because it's a third person shooter.

I'm not sure. To me it looks a lot like Dragon's Dogma which is a great thing. I'm excited for it.

There needs to be a Crackdown 3 beta with Halo 5. Come on. Close the loop. Regardless, Crackdown 3 is my most anticipated game of next year on any platform

Scalebound looked like a real game instead of a trailer, which I definitely appreciated. I'm sure at least some of the framerate stuff will be cleared up before release (although I wouldn't expect it to be perfect).

Quantum Break looks a little dull to me. Max Payne with a few more time-altering gimmicks.

I strongly believe Halo 5 is going to be fantastic, but fucccck that presentation was absolutely awful. Hopefully they don't do something like that again for ANY game.

Not into racing stuff but Forza 6 looks incredible.

@mrcraggle: I went a few years back and it was a mixed bag. Some booths were interesting because you could essentially reserve a spot to try the game later on. Others just had you wait in line for 2+ hours if you wanted to try them. Others still had 2 people looking at the booth from across the room and empty controllers. Overall, it was a bit too crowded for my taste. I only went with one friend, so maybe it's a better experience if you went with a bigger group.

While I still have no desire to buy an Xbox One just yet, I thought this was still a great show from Microsoft.