It’s day 0 of E3 2016, with Microsoft, Ubisoft, AMD, and Sony holding their big press conferences the day before the convention officially opens. We’re here with the AOTF Podcast #35 to go over everything that we saw at the conferences, and what we saw afterward. Will, Dylan, and myself discuss the shows and what we thought, with some disagreement on the finer points.
Microsoft kicked off the day with a very lackluster press conference, showing a lot of stuff that we’d either seen before, or was unfortunately leaked beforehand. The big announcements were there, but they were mainly hardware related.
The Xbox One S was announced, offering a much smaller form factor, with some extra bells and whistles thrown in. This made sense, and was actually a pretty nice little addition to the Xbox One family. However, it was quickly overshadowed with the reveal of Project Scorpio.
Project Scorpio is the totally upgraded Xbox One that we have been talking about for the last few podcasts. The announcement made some almost ridiculously bold claims, like that it would be able to deliver 4K gaming, and high fidelity VR experiences. While it probably will end up being the “most powerful console of all time”, a lot of the claims from Microsoft were pretty suspicious, especially considering what the price of this console will end up being.
Furthermore, this new era of “beyond generations” calls into question a lot of the tenants of console gaming. Ease of use, standardized hardware and graphics, and a low price point could be gone very soon, at least for the Xbox One.
Ubisoft and the PC Gaming Show filled in the middle of the day, and while we didn’t check out Ubisoft we did visit the PC Gaming Show. It wasn’t amazing stuff, but they actually did pull off a good presentation, with rapid fire announcements and reveals.
Ending the night was Sony, and what a show they had. Opening with a God of War reboot/sequel that stars an older version of Kratos, no matter what Will says, Sony went big and just kept getting bigger. The Last Guardian got a release date, Crash Bandicoot is coming back, Resident Evil 7 is in VR and actually looks really scary, and freaking Hideo Kojima was on stage and showed off his amazing looking new game.
Those who are wowed by the promises of the “most powerful console of all time” might have enjoyed Microsoft’s presentation, but for pure gaming, Sony won this E3 pretty easily in my opinion. But, check out the entire AOTF Podcast #35 to hear more, and some discussion around these topics.
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