I didn't enjoy Microsoft's conference last year as much as the majority of the community seemed to. They leaned into the hardware porn of the Xbox One X specs and spent too much time rallying consumer support based on brand names and recognisable characters. By attempting to hype up announcements to unreasonable levels, the publisher made their claims seem overblown, and they put too much emphasis on what they could potentially do with their characters and consoles instead of showing them using that potential. With the One X having been on shelves for months, they had the chance this year to spend less time on the hardware and more on the software, but there was still that overinflated sense of self-importance behind a lot of the games, and in the way they announced them.

Don't get me wrong; I do think many of these titles could have a bright future. For example: A lot of the well-received platform games that come out rely on igniting our nostalgia for the platformers of the 80s and 90s, and so it's a rare treat to see a title like Ori and the Will of the Wisps forging new ground in the genre. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit looks like another heart-melting effort by DONTNOD to capture the magic of childhood, with its protagonist no doubt needing some escape into a fantasy world when the harsh reality is that their father is an alcoholic. Gat Out of Hell and Agents of Mayhem felt like failed attempts to recreate the freeing bombasity of Saint's III and IV, but Crackdown 3 looks like it could be the worthy successor to Volition's work. We don't know how original Forza Horizon 4 is going to be, but now the series is expending so much effort on rendering new locales, a change of setting means more for it than it might for another racing game. I'm a sucker for seasonal cycles and seeing little bits of my home country pop up in virtual worlds, and the seasons make sense as a mechanic to switch up the environment when the biomes of Britain aren't as varied as those of Horizon 3's Australia.

I respect the decision of the We Happy Few devs to melt down and recast their game after fan reception. It is the anti-No Man's Sky in that they responded to accusations of misleading marketing by making a game more in line with the expectations that marketing created instead of ploughing ahead with what they'd made anyway. Session could fill the niche of skateboarding games which has been too long abandoned with there having been no Skate since 2010 and the last Tony Hawk being abysmally broken. With the way DmC's melee combat provided a degree of choice and forced players to change up how they attack, I'm expecting some smart, empowering design from Devil May Cry 5. Dying Light's fundamental concept of safe play during the day and dangerous gameplay at night is fascinating because it makes the day/night cycle not just an aesthetic alteration, but expresses the differences between these times through the systems of the game. Dying Light 2 learns from Mirror's Edge that having your character's hands sway in front of them as they move can add a greater sense of motion to your parkour segments. I'm glad Avalanche are getting another crack at Just Cause because the series deserves a return to form after 3 which was a bit of a letdown. Where Just Cause 2 was a sandbox of attack choppers and fuel tanks, Just Cause 3 used systems of progress, currency, and cooldown to gate off those explosive toys.

Then there's Cyberpunk 2077 which is so exciting it makes me want to combust. I know we have no information on the mechanics yet, but the sense of character in its art is enough to shake me up like a soda can. The idea of the characters being the vibrant splashes of colour against the concrete prison of the corporate city is an inspired way to represent the genre's theme of motivated, counter-cultural human beings pushing back against a cold, synthetic system. And I love that you can see the seams on that world's transhumanists; it tells you that these aren't just characters who are modified, they're hacked together from bins full of parts.

From games to services, I think that the Xbox Game Pass increasingly makes sense. Like EA's Origin Access Premier subscription, it's the closest we can get to a Netflix of video games. A complete on-demand hub for games is likely financially inviable right now and the concept of your game ownership expiring is much easier to come to terms with when you're playing short and linear games rather than long games with a lot of side content. However, that ease of access to lots of games at a comparatively low price point is the kind of move that gets more casual players trying out all sorts of games they otherwise wouldn't.

Then were a few announcements from Microsoft which didn't gel with me but not because of any big-picture problem with the conference. I'm not seeing From Software's expert character design in that trailer for Sekiro, and while Tunic has an enchanting aesthetic, there have not only been a lot of Zelda games already, but a lot of Zelda-like games such as Hyper Light Drifter, Half-Minute Hero, The Binding of Isaac, Ittle Dew, and Darksiders. I think that well has already been tapped. I've always kept Kingdom Hearts at arm's length and from the look of the trailer for Kingdom Hearts III, it would seem as though it remains oblivious to the all-important line between adorable and annoying. I don't think Sea of Thieves can be fixed with an expansion pack because the frustrations with the game were not over it not having enough content but that the content it did have couldn't build towards a substantial experience with the game's shallow systems. I'm also not sure that the raging aggression of the Gears series matches the slow thoughtfulness of a strategy game and Microsoft could easily over-saturate us with Gears by having three different games for the series simultaneously in development.

Taking all these games and services in isolation, it might be hard to see a macro-level problem with the Microsoft press conference. But compare these games to the commentary on them by executive Phil Spencer in his opening and closing speeches:

"As gamers, we are at a momentous time where creative vision and cutting-edge technology together are delivering the art form we love".

"Today we shared our most diverse gaming portfolio in every measure. From breadth in art style, genre, and cultures, range in subject and setting, scale in story and scope and creative vision".

"All [our games] demonstrate what true artisans can create".

I have a notepad full of quotes like this, and it's clear the impression we're meant to get: Games are about a lot of different things and come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. The medium is capital-A "Art", and these are not just entertainment products, they're an expression of the artists who made them. But most of these games are player empowerment fantasies coming from a white American perspective and are highly derivative of existing games. Unloading a machine gun into a zombie, having seven Narutos run down the side of a skyscraper, or fighting the dark forces of the world alongside Goofy are not challenging artistic experiences that tell us a lot about their creators. And there's nothing wrong with those games for that. The thing that made me smile about the Crackdown 3 trailer is that it could have fun with itself. But imagine if instead Terry Crews had tried to claim that him turning into a tank and blowing up soldiers was an affecting symbol of the monster that dwells inside every man. That's what Microsoft was doing with all these other games. David Cage was rightfully labelled as wildly missing the mark for thinking that improving the tech his games ran on innately generated better stories, but Spencer was doing the same thing on that stage and doesn't get called out for it.

The Microsoft press conference was pretentious, and that's a word that the gaming community has abused. Pretentiousness is about a person acting like someone or something is deeper than it is, and at one time people tried to apply that label to games that were anything more than empowerment fantasies, but as we know, games can touch us on a deeper level. What's actually pretentious is pointing to the games that have no aspirations towards doing so and pretending that they are soulful monuments to the human experience. You see it in how marketing materials for Battlefield V keep telling us that it's a respectful memorial to the victims of WWII even when all the footage of the actual game involves fiery explosions and tanks driving through houses. You see it in how The Division 2 is motioning towards this concept of corruption in Washington and monsters in the White House but then cowardly skirts around it and goes back to its players rummaging in urban scrap heaps for loot. It doesn't do these games justice to treat them this way either. Do we like Gears of War because it's the military soap opera it was presented as in the trailer or do we like it because it's a meaty, responsive cover shooter?

And if this show is about artisans and their expression then where are all the indies? Even the corporate juggernauts of EA had two long sections where they allowed indie creators to take the stage and talk about what they'd made. Their spot on Sea of Solitude was a dev talking about an emotional, introspective experience and it's not that long ago that Microsoft let their indies do the same thing, even if in shorter bursts. So why are we at a point where most indie games at Microsoft's conference got less screen time than the Gears of War Funko Pops mobile game? That sounds like a joke about the game industry; it shouldn't be the reality.

The most insulting thing was Spencer telling us "Gaming [...] reaches across age, ability, race, gender, and geography" and then Microsoft only representing people and games that address a tiny segment of each of those demographics. Without rewatching the entire conference, I only remember there being one woman on stage and she wasn't there to present a game, nor was the racial representation much better. We did see Japanese influence in Sekiro and a Japanese speaker in the form of Capcom's Hideaki Itsuno, but these were the exceptions in a press conference where white American men were the centre of attention on-screen and off. I know some people would scoff at the idea that gender or racial representation are things we should care about in a video game conference, but even Phil Spencer is implying these concepts are important, his company just isn't acting on that knowledge. It's unfair when games companies cater almost solely to the demographics which the status quo tells us are worth caring about, but it's downright gross to do that and then imply you should be treated like the people who are pushing for diversity in the gaming space.

So, I have neutral to positive things to say about most of the games that Microsoft dropped news for, but as a press conference, this was arrogant and representative of the AAA industry's trouble adapting to a critical environment in which games are no longer just for escapism. Certainly, trailers often tend to be more focused on characters than systems because it's easier to personify a game than it is to describe all the grisly mechanics of it. However, there's also a sense that Microsoft believes their games should be expressive and human even when they know their most widely marketed games can't be that because those are not the kind of games that make you a company valued in the hundreds of billions. Thanks for reading.