After the Briefing: First Impressions
Published July 11, 2007
The sun set on Santa Monica and with it a new dawn broke for Xbox 360™ fans as Microsoft unleashed its vision for the immediate future. From the Halo® 3-themed opening to the live demo versions of Project Gotham Racing® 4, Call of Duty® 4: Modern Warfare™, Assassin's Creed™ and the Games for Windows version of Gears of War (presented by Cliffy B of course), as well as the rapid-fire montages of gameplay and so much more, the Microsoft Press Briefing shone a bright light on our immediate gaming future.
Watch the trailer here. Then, watch it again.
For full details on all the major announcements, check out our E3 coverage. You can watch highlights of the Microsoft press briefing here, or watch the entire archived briefing, courtesy of the good folks at G4.
An Unprecedented Approach
Microsoft took a rather radical approach to this year's briefing by announcing that everything shown (with one notable exception—more on that later) would come out this year. This is even more startling when you realize that they could have highlighted titles like Fable 2, but chose instead to focus purely on what's at hand in just the next five months.
When you consider that the lineup consists of Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, BioShock, Madden NFL 08, and Assassin's Creed to name just a very few, this made all the sense in the world.
If you can see it, you can climb it.
Best Halo Moment
No, it wasn't the unleashing of the new trailer (though that will make any Halo fan swoon), but the quintet of young musicians called Corporeal from Libertyville, Illinois. They opened the event with a thunderous rendition of the Halo theme song. For a pack of unassuming but talented kids to be asked to usher in this year's E3, and then kick ass while doing so was simply sweet to behold.
LIVE to Unreal
Though its effects may not be immediately seen, the announcement that the Xbox LIVE® developer tools are now included in the Unreal 3 engine has important and long-reaching ramifications.
Put bluntly, developers are simply far more likely to include Xbox LIVE support in their Games for Windows titles when the engine they're already using has the platform built right in. The cross-platform experiment may have begun with Shadowrun™, but now the initiative can gain some serious momentum. For gamers, this simply means a larger and more diverse community of people to play with, and that's precisely what we need.
The Resident Exception
Everything else showcased at the briefing is set to release in 2007, but the trailer for Resident Evil 5 was just too damn good to keep locked up. For fans of the series, you'll be happy to know that RE5 looks to pick up right where its predecessor left off.
The action moves very quickly in the trailer and focuses on possessed or infected villagers, though they appear even more frightfully fast and bloodthirsty than in RE4. And unless my eyes deceive me, Chris Redfield of RE1 fame appears to play a prominent role, perhaps even as the main character.
Fight big daddies next month in BioShock.
Playable Impressions
Beyond trailers and montages, Microsoft also let loose a series of demos played live by developers before the audience. A few quick impressions:
- Can you spot the ghillie-suited soldier at the beginning of the Call of Duty 4 trailer? The visual itself is startlingly authentic, but its gameplay effect raises all sorts of outstanding options (here's hoping it makes it to multiplayer).
- The weather effects on Project Gotham Racing 4 are no joke, and that slick a look at that rate of speed is an astounding technical achievement.
- Assassin's Creed is amazing. Every element of every environment in the game can be navigated and explored. There has never been a virtual playground quite like this one.
- Gears of War for Games for Windows is no mere port with several new chapters of the single-player campaign to play (including new bosses) and revamped achievements. If ever there was a reason to double-dip a game on PC and console, this may be the one.
That the preceding accounts for only a very small percentage of the exciting announcements at the press briefing speaks volumes to what gamers can look forward to in just the next few months. What's more, this is just the beginning. E3 starts in earnest Wednesday, and I can only imagine what treasures await.
Article by Ryan Treit
