I’m ecstatic that this is the premiere of Nick Wild’s writing on this site! Check it out! – Vance
In a vacuum, Microsoft killed it. Plenty of games were shown, great pacing, and the topics were on point. But when the biggest question for Xbox has been “where are the exclusives?” I don’t know that I feel a whole lot better about where they are. Yes, there is a new round of Forza, Halo and Gears on their way. Those are all still solid games. But there has to be lingering concern over where the future of Xbox is headed.
It was announced that they have aquired some new studios, Ninja Theory being one of the most interesting ones. Excited to see what comes from that. That studio with money to spend is an exciting prospect. So again, some very positive news, some great games being shown. But I wanted to see a little more originality from them, show me the Xbox One has things to offer than no other console has, and I don’t think they completely delivered on that front.
One of the things talked about was GamePass, the Netlix-style subscription service for games. All first-party games will be available on that service day one, and they are improving the download speed through “machine learning” code. That’s a good move for them. They are certainly doing some interesting things.
Phil Spencer said they next Xbox is “deep” in development, which isn’t a shock considering this generation is 5 years old, and has been a loss for Microsoft. But add that to the fact all of their new exclusives will be available on PC as well, the future of the Xbox brand starts to become cloudy. At the end of the day, games are what matters. And fresh new IPs were still lacking.
