Microsoft Press Briefing: E3 2011 Recap
Call me crazy, but I think Microsoft really wants you to buy a Kinect. It was obvious during their 90 minute press briefing, that Kinect is clearly their focus at this time, as we had the opportunity to see both Kinect only and “Better with Kinect” games. There were a few surprises and they are actually delivering on a few promises that seemed like pie in the sky just 2 years ago.
Modern Warfare 3 opened the show, with a live game play demonstration. In true E3 form, just moments into the demo, the infamous “please re connect the controller” notification popped up. The game play itself was just about what you would expect from a Modern Warfare game, heavily scripted scenes, random button prompts and a vehicle escape scene. Modern Warfare 3 will ship on November 8th, 2011. The lights then came up and Mr. Microsoft himself, Don Matrick took the stage to welcome everyone and bring out the next set of guests.
Crystal Dynamics came out to show off their reboot of Tomb Raider, the redesigned Lara Croft looked amazing and I was especially impressed with the voice actress. Not many games have the character convey that amount of tension and stress in their voice work with the appropriate amount of grunts, screams and heavy breathing. It was a very convincing performance and the game is slated for a fall 2012 release.
Peter Moore from EA Sports was next up and he revealed that 4 EA Sports titles would utilize Kinect. Tiger Woods Golf, FIFA Soccer and Madden Football, he said there was a 4th game that they would not reveal just yet. No real details were given, except some vague comments about using Kinect to call your own audibles in Madden. Dr. Ray Mazurka followed Mr. Moore to show off a glimpse of Mass Effect 3, and verified that yes, it will be Kinect enabled. They demonstrated using the voice ability of the sensor to speak the dialogue choices and to directly command your squad mates in battle, it was an interesting use of the Kinect to be sure.
Ubisoft brought out a demo of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier, showing off their new Gunsmith feature that will allow you to customize every piece of every weapon in the game, using voice and hand gestures via you guessed it, Kinect. The cgi trailer was OK, but the Gunsmith stuff was really impressive and they also announces all future Tom Clancy games would be Kinect enabled as well.
The show then moved on to the Xbox Live service segment, talking about the next, next Xbox experience. The future for live is about bringing you more music, movies and television, and the first new partnership announced is with Youtube. You will be able to watch videos directly from your console as soon as the update is released. The Microsoft search engine Bing is being integrated into the dashboard, and with Kinect all you have to do is say it, and Xbox will find it. Catchy line, but Microsoft wrote it, not me. The last new feature announced is that they are partnering with television content providers to bring live television and sports to your console. Dana White from UFC came out to announce that you will be able to watch fights live on Xbox 360 and they seemed to show some kind of interactive betting system, for play money or points I’m sure.
The event then switched back to games, as Phil Spencer introduced the “Only on Xbox” segment. Gears of War 3 was up first, as Cliffy B showed off a co-op game play demo with the one and only Ice-T. At the end of the demo, Ice-T flubbed his lines a bit as he announced his rock group Body Count, would be reuniting to record a song about Gears Horde mode, wtf? We saw a non game play trailer for Crytek’s new Roman soldier Kinect game called Ryse, and Microsoft announced the long rumoured remake of the original Halo, called Halo: CE Anniversary. The game will feature co-op, xbox live multi player on classic Halo maps, and a redesigned campaign and will hit store shelves on November 15th.
Turn 10 took the stage to show a trailer for Forza Motorsport 4 , which will have Kinect support via voice commands and head tracking, and they talked a little about new community features they are adding as well as a rival mode and the world tour. Peter Molyneaux presented a demo of the next game in the Fable series, titled Fable: The Journey. The game play showed appeared to be completely on rails, but the use of your hands to cast spells seemed quite neat.
Phil Spencer took the stage once again to present the portion of the show dedicated to new games for Kinect. Did I just say that right? At this point the whole show seemed to be about Kinect. Disney has a new game called Kinect Disney Adventures, that seems to be a cheaper way of taking your family to Disneyland. Kinect Star Wars was shown, and again another on rails experience. Tim Schaeffer had the best joke of the show when he said que the fake family, who demonstrated their Sesame Street Kinect game called Once Upon a Monster. Kudo Tsunoda showed off a new suite of applications for Kinect bundled together and called Kinect Fun Labs. Your able to scan your face and body into the application and make a unique avatar, draw in 3d, and scan objects into Kinect to play with. The shock of the announcement is that it is available today and i gave the avatar thing a try. Kinect Sports Season 2 and Dance Central 2 were also announced and demos were shown.
To close the show, Don Matrick emerged to give the big announcement that had already leaked earlier in the day. A new trilogy for the 360, starring Master Chief with the first game being called Halo 4, I’m really surprised they didn’t go with H4lo, but I’m not in marketing. The first Halo game not made by Bungie will release sometime during holiday 2012. There were no real big surprises this year for Microsoft, unless you include how Kinect focused the show was. See you at next year at a hopefully less Kinect focused Microsoft media briefing.
