Well my oh my. Microsoft certainly brought their A-game today with their press conference. On the back of some pretty weak exclusives recently, we had been asking what Microsoft have coming up to keep them competitive and I think we can safely say they delivered.
A display of 50 games including 18 exclusives and 15 world premieres kicked off with Halo Infinite in what would go on to be Microsoft’s most impressive press conference in a long, long time. Rather than go through everything that was shown I’m just going to share some of my key highlights here, but if you scroll down you can see a full list of games and their trailers.
Obviously the holy trinity for Xbox fans is Halo, Forza, and Gears. Those three franchises all had a showing with Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 4, and Gears 5. A world premiere reveal of Fallout 76 told us that this new game is a prequel to the previous Fallout games and has a world FOUR TIMES THE SIZE of Fallout 4. That is pretty damned impressive, but the hits didn’t stop there.
Microsoft have opened a new studio called The Initiative, but have also acquired four studios including Ninja Theory which came as a bit of a shock. They have also picked up Compulsion Games who are the developers of We Happy Few which was recently refused classification in Australia.
The Division 2 was on show with that classic Ubisoft fake multiplayer banter that we know and love from their gameplay trailers. It’s set in Washington DC this time around and looks to build on the success of the first game. In other world premiere reveals we saw Just Cause 4, Devil May Cry 5, and a new title from From Software which looks a lot like the PlayStation exclusive Nioh.
The reveals kept coming hard and fast throughout the 90 minute press conference and it ended with one of the best reveals I’ve ever seen for a game: Cyberpunk 2077. It is so great to see more of the new game coming from The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, and I’m looking forward to seeing more soon.
Of course we will be discussing our highlights from this show on our next episode of the DBG podcast but in the meantime check out the trailers below for a bunch of the stuff that was shown.
Halo Infinite
Forza Horizon 4 (October 22nd 2018)
ID@Xbox Indie Game Montage
Gears 5 (2019)
Crackdown 3 (February 2019)
Check out more trailers from the Microsoft E3 2018 press conference on the next page.
