The Best Of E3 2019
Another year another massive set of announcements, with companies jostling to hawk their (soft)wares.
Although 2019’s E3 was a little slower than usual, with the notable absence of Sony and Activision, which even Xbox boss Phil Spencer felt was a shame. “E3 is not as good when they’re not here,” he said on a Giant Bomb livestream. This could come down to the fact we may be nearing the end of the current generation, and all the next big stuff isn’t ready to be shown off yet, bringing us a little bit of a draught. Despite this, there was still some big news, here’s our summary of events.
Halo Infinite
Landing in 2020, possibly as a launch title for Project Scarlett, Halo Infinite picks back up with Master Chief who has been floating in space for a while. He’s missed a pretty decisive war, but that won’t stop him from fighting anyway. The game is built on a brand new engine called Slipspace and will also be available on PC as part of Microsoft’s continuing push to marry Xbox and PC together.
Cyberpunk 2077
CD Projekt Red has been teasing me with this bloody game since 2013, but finally we have a release date of April 2020. The hype train for the RPG reached new heights when a new trailer revealed Keanu Reeves as a prominent character.
Streaming
Streaming your games from the cloud is finally hitting critical mass and becoming flavour of the week coupled with subscription-based game libraries. Why own a game when you can rent it forever? Why own a console when you can be at the mercy of your connectivity?
Google had already shown off their Stadia, and Microsoft is coming in with xCloud, which was running Xbox One games at 720p 60fps on smartphones with minimal lag. Bethesda is being a team player and creating complimentary software that will minimise the drain its games will have on resources with something it calls Orion.
Project Scarlett
Microsoft played its hand for next-gen console. No physical box to show off yet, but they had a spec sheet which boasted 120 FPS and 8K visuals with an SSD to speed up boot times, a Zen 2 processor from AMD, and GDDR6 ram. Because we live in weird times, it’s also important to note it will have a disc drive. Expect the console to ship in early 2020
