Starfield and Halo Infinite are the stars of Microsoft's Xbox 2021 event

Microsoft's e 320 21 press event add something for everybody. So I'm going to tell you why I think it's really probably the highlight of this year's eatery. [MUSIC] We just saw Microsoft's annual e three press conference. The Xbox Bethesda press conference, although now maybe you should call it the Bethesda Xbox press conference because they started with the game. I think everybody really wanted to hear about more than anything else. And that is Starfield, which I think we first heard about maybe in E3 2018. Where Bethesda which is known for making these epic open world RPGs like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series decided, hey, we're making a science fiction version of this. It's called Starfield and that's all we're going to tell you. Some copies of that trailer started leaking online early. So we all saw what was going on and we saw that their trailer was really Just a pre-rendered cut scene that doesn't really tell you a lot. There's like an astronaut in a ship about to take off and someone is talking to her about how this is humanity's final journey, and they are now part of some sort of organization called constellation. Which is probably whatever group that you as a player belong to in this game. It certainly seems to take itself more seriously than something like the outer worlds. Which is a funnier almost Douglas Adams he take on the big expansive you know starfield action adventure through probably the biggest star fuel news is the news you didn't really wanna hear and that it is not going to be out until November 11, 2022. So, more than a year from now, and it's going to support cloud gaming and it's going to be on Xbox game paths. If your game has subscriber you just get the game on day one. And you don't have to go out and buy it separately. That's I think part of a big advantage that Microsoft is pitching around being an Xbox game pass member or a game pass ultimate member, especially now that they own In a big studio like Bethesda, and some of these Xbox exclusive games are gonna come to that service. So they're saying you might as well subscribe anyway. And again, Amazon makes a similar point bundling in the free shipping with the Amazon Prime Video and And other benefits. So that would probably be the single biggest newsy thing at the Microsoft X-Box Bethesda press event. But then they went on and showed a whole lot of other games. Some we've heard of before some we haven't somebody new details, some just kind of regurgitating what we've already heard. We saw stalker two right after that, and I've always been a fan of these games. They're fairly complex, open world ish role playing games that take place in a irradiated area of Russia, and they're actually based on a 1970s Russian novel. And a Russian film. The film is also called stalker. It's a Tarkovsky film. He also did Solaris. So I love seeing this very weird ethereal, not very action packed, Soviet movie from the 1970s to be translated into a very modern looking, Action RPG game. It's one of those great little cultural notes that helps this game series and everything that come before all sort of feel like they're part of almost a stalker cinematic universe. There's There's an update coming to see of thieves, which I've tried to get into several times. And I like really open world games that don't really hold your hand. I could do a tiny bit more hand holding in that, but maybe I'm going to go back and try it again. Now that there's going to be a pirates life expansion that has Captain jack Sparrow and other characters in the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean films, not Johnny Depp doing the voice very clearly a sound alike but sounded pretty good and I thought the visuals really Captured that the more Disney ask, you know theme park ride Pirates of the Caribbean feel but you know in the Sea of Thieves universe am looking like Johnny Depp we saw a little bit of the very first. There's multiplayer footage, of course multiplayer very important to Halo. And we already knew that there was part of the multiplayer component that was gonna be free to play. And we also learn that the game is gonna come out holiday 2021 not really a specific date, but it'll be an Xbox game pass. So again, another great reason Microsoft is giving you to subscribe. I also love that Haiti is coming to Xbox and it's also going to be on game pass. It's interesting that I like Haiti so much because I generally don't like that rogue style game. But, there's something about the gameplay loop, and the graphics and the voice acting, and the sense of progression that really makes me. Take it as a winner. I don't know if I'll restart on Xbox if I can't transfer my you know PC save over. But you know if you have not played it you definitely should. Something else I wasn't necessarily expecting to hear was that Microsoft Flight Simulator is coming to Xbox. On the PC where I originally played it and wrote about it, I believe last year, it took up something like 127 gigabytes of space on my hard drive that's big for a PC. It's even bigger for an Xbox. I'm very curious to see what they're going to be able to do to shrink down The game size so that it doesn't eat up your entire hard drive and they closed or almost close with Forza horizons five takes place in Mexico. It looks great. What am I gonna tell you it looks like every other Forza game, one of the best looking games that you could play at that time than the game. Comes out watching the live feed of comments on the Microsoft Xbox feed. A lot of people were saying, the sports section is just too long. Okay, we get it, it's a car game move on. I'm not gonna lie, I can kind of feel that maybe it's because I'm a native New Yorker and not really a driver. Maybe if it was for to assembly edition, I'd be more interested. It looks really nice. There was one other bit I mentioned very briefly earlier, but I want to circle back to real fast and that is, we saw that Outer Worlds 2 is coming. The original wasn't in Xbox exclusive, I don't think this one probably is going to be either. But it's a game that I played a bit when it came out but then it got really back into during the coronavirus lockdown and I got it all the way up to the end game and I said you know what, there's a DLC coming, I'm gonna wait to get into the end game until the DLC Gets here and I started going down that path and I could use a lot more hours of outer worlds in my life. So I'm excited to see that is actually happening. If there are two big ideas I want to draw out of this Microsoft press conference one is about something we saw a lot of and one is about something we didn't see at all. To take that one first. Microsoft did not even really mention anything hardware related. They hardly referred to the Xbox series X or S consoles at all really. So there's nothing about any new deluxe controllers, any new external, or internal storage options. Nothing about supply chain issues with many people still can't buy these consoles, no new accessories. So, this was all software, no hardware and this Xbox Microsoft event. Number But two is how often we heard about Xbox game pass. And again, that's the subscription service where you can get access to a big library of games that frankly grows pretty quickly and play them all for that monthly fee. Kind of like Netflix. An incomplete list of the games that are coming to game pass that they talked about just today include starfield back for blood Doom eternal Yakuza, like a dragon, Which do you think is launching right now on game pass Hades. So many of the games that we saw Other packaging that in and that leads me to believe that Microsoft understands the long term gaming industry picture is not selling hard report to speakers, eventually everything is going to move over to cloud streaming just like all video has, you don't buy movies and download them anymore, really. To say less of DVD and Blu-ray discs, so Microsoft understands this and that's why they have done things like acquire Bethesda, to really make sure they're on top of that content side of the business and also pushing that recurring subscription revenue. Whether you are buying a $500 console every seven or eight years or not, if you're giving Microsoft $15 a month, every month forever, that's a pretty good deal for them and that's why so many companies. Have transitioned into that subscription model. And Xbox is no different. They even have one where you can as part of the subscription, get game pass and an Xbox and you're just making larger monthly payments based on that. So far this Microsoft Xbox president is the best thing I've seen it he 322 to 21, now that bar has been set pretty low up until now don't get me wrong. That said I saw a lot of the games I wanted to see and I saw that a lot of them were coming to game paths, which I think is pretty cool. We are gonna be covering E3 all week long. So stay tuned for more reactions from press conferences, more trailers, and hopefully a surprise or two. [MUSIC]