Take It Or Leave It – E3 2015 – Microsoft

Welcome to Take It Or Leave It, E3 2015 edition! It’s that time of the year again, when gamers come together and learn about the titles that will be leaving their wallets aching and hollow over the next year. Here, I will go over each of the major showcases with brief descriptions and reviews of what was announced, in typical Take It Or Leave It style.

Microsoft took the stage this year repeating the same strategy they used last year – games, games, and more games – hoping it would bring them the same success that it did before.

	Microsoft’s Briefing Bethesda presented a pretty tough act to follow, but Microsoft had more than a fair share of tricks up their sleeve to make this one worth watching. Plenty of new announcements, from the interesting to the mind blowing, kept their show entertaining from beginning to end. Verdict: Take It

Halo 5: Guardians The first game of the show is once again the next chapter in Master Chief’s story. Except this time around, we see that there will be missions where you play as the Spartan John Locke during his mission of hunting the “traitor” Chief down. It kind of reminds me of the Arbiter levels from Halo 2, but will it pull off that formula again? There was also news that you will always have a team of 3 aiding you through the story, whether they’re other players or AI if you’re in single player. The real interesting bit, however, was the new “Warzone” multiplayer mode, seemingly combining the classic “Firefight” with traditional competitive gameplay. AI Covenant and human enemies at the same time? Sounds like pure chaos to me. Verdict: Probably Take It

ReCore The first new title announcement from Microsoft here, this is the newest creation from Keiji Inafune (creator of Mega Man and Dead Rising) teaming up with the people behind Metroid Prime. The trailer doesn’t explain a whole lot, but it appears to be a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi storytelling, in which these “cores” can be moved from one machine to another in order to give them life and decide if they are friend or foe. Okay, it’s kind of odd to explain, so just go check out the trailer. It’s worth watching. Verdict: Take It

Backwards Compatibility What!? It’s happening!? That’s right, Xbox One will soon be able to play both disc-based and downloaded Xbox 360 titles. Even though the titles that this applies to will be from a list, that list will start off some time in the Fall with hundreds of titles, and increase by hundreds in the months after that. So chances are, it probably won’t be long until your favorite titles will work. Your old achievements will carry over, and keeping your save file is as simple as uploading it to the cloud storage. Verdict: Definitely Take It

Game Streaming With Windows 10 PCs with Windows 10, which is being given for free to everyone with legitimate installations of Windows 7 & 8, can have the Xbox One stream a game directly to that PC. Sounds like a neat feature, sure, but I still don’t see how practical it is. The problem with this sort of thing is that there’s usually a noticeable amount of lag with button input & response time, so unless this works from pretty much anywhere with an internet connection, I’m not quite sold on it yet. Verdict: Unsure

Xbox Elite Controller Because one improved controller wasn’t enough, here’s another one! This one features customized buttons, trigger locks, a flatter directional pad . . . it’s basically just an officially licensed modded controller (which I could’ve sworn was still considered cheating by just about every legitimate competition standard). Anyway, while the “official” part of it means it’s actually slightly cheaper than the third party options, it’s still got a pretty hefty price tag on it. Not worth the rather slight advantages, in my honest opinion. Verdict: Leave It

Fallout 4 Guess Bethesda didn’t quite fit everything they wanted to into their own part of the show. This was mostly more of the same stuff we had seen the night before, but this time they brought along the exciting news that the Xbox One version will be able to support the mods created by the game’s PC community, given that these mods fall under some fairly lenient guidelines anyway. As for the PS4 version of the game . . . well, we’ll have to wait and see if it can work with that too. Verdict: Still Definitely Take It

EA Access EA briefly came out to advertise their Access program, which is basically paying a small monthly fee to have instant access to a large number of their titles. The “interesting” news here is that the upcoming installments of Madden NFL, Need For Speed, and others will be playable about a week in advance of the normal release date if you’re an Access member. Pretty cool news for the hardcore fans of their stuff, I suppose. Verdict: Unsure

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 Finally, back to the games. The first Plants vs Zombies parody of the modern shooter games did surprisingly well, the charm and humor that this game is known for blended with the strategy and action perfectly. Promising to be the funniest and craziest in the franchise yet, this one claims more characters, more weapons, bigger levels, the usual stuff for a sequel. Oh, and the excellent trailer featured “Danger Zone,” because of course it did. Verdict: DANGER ZOOONE!! (Uh, I mean Take It)

Forza Motorsport 6 The king of Xbox racing simulation is here once again, offering the stunning visuals and true-to-life driving that the series is known for. This time, online races can feature up to 24 players, and the game will come with 450 different cars at default, before any downloaded content even comes into play. Everything from the gameplay to the weather features will be the most advanced in the series, so this probably isn’t one that any car fanatics want to miss out on. Verdict: Take It

Dark Souls III Well that was rather fast. Set to come out “Early 2016,” it’s safe to assume this one will offer the brutal, unforgiving, and rather vague kind of gameplay and storytelling that we’ve come to know from this game before. While the initial teaser really doesn’t show much aside from a giant (similar to the ones we saw in the last game) rising up and the typical imagery of despair & creepy stuff, most gamers already know if they’re going to be picking this up or avoiding it like the plague. Verdict: Probably Take It

The Division Despite having just been recently delayed into next year, Ubisoft was still determined to come out and tease us with more of this. We now know that a weaponized virus is what caused this world to fall apart (though it doesn’t seem to be the kind of virus that we’re used to in apocalyptic games). A part of the trailer also stated that this Division was “activated as a last resort.” I’m intrigued. Oh, and Xbox One will be getting first dibs at playing the game in an exclusive beta this December. Verdict: Take It

	Rainbow Six: Siege The return of the classic tactical shooter seems to be coming along rather nicely. This time, we get a look at the returning Terrorist Hunt mode, and we’re told that the game will include the two previous titles in the series, Rainbow Six: Vegas 1 and 2. So even if Siege somehow manages to disappoint, you’re still getting a couple of great games with it. Verdict: Take It

Gigantic A new free to play game exclusive to Xbox & Windows, this seems to be a cooperative (maybe also competitive?) game in which you fight to take control of the battlefield, then unleash your character’s “guardian,” a giant beast that it’s safe to assume helps you out rather significantly. Still, there was very little of the actual game shown here, so it’s tough to say what kind of game it even is right now. Verdict: Unsure

Indie Games Showcase The ID@Xbox program has been getting pretty strong lately, bringing in more and more of the smash indie hits. This year’s barrage of teases for what’s to come included the next titles from Adult Swim games, Behemoth, the makers of Gone Home, and more. The surprise here is the announcement that the recent PC favorite ARK: Survival Evolved and Goat Simulator: MMOre GoatZ Edition are among that list Verdict: Take It

Xbox Game Preview Microsoft is borrowing a bit from Steam’s Early Access program and bringing something very similar to Xbox One. The Xbox Game Preview will also allow people to play unfinished games as they’re being developed, in order to offer feedback and help fund the completion and eventual full release of the game. What makes this better, though, is that there will be an option to try these games before spending money on buying them, which should solve the issue that plagues PC players being burned by games that are never finished and / or just flat out broken. The Long Dark, the survival hit, is already available under this program, and DayZ will be coming to it later on this year. Verdict: Probably Take It

Rise of the Tomb Raider The origin story of Lara Croft continues, and it now looks to feel much more like a proper Tomb Raider title. The gameplay revealed that Lara has started to do some real raiding, cave exploring, and platforming, climbing an icy mountain to locate a lost city. Still no sign of her adventures getting as weird and mythical as the original titles were, but a lost city in the mountains has my hopes pretty high for it. This one’s set to release November 10th of this year. Verdict: Take It

	Rare Replay Hey, Microsoft finally let Rare do something other than making Xbox avatars! In all seriousness, this is one hell of a deal. 30 of Rare’s greatest games bundled into one package, from the Nintendo 64 classics like Banjo Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, to Xbox 360 launch title Kameo, and a whole bunch of smash hits & obscure hidden gems in between. Verdict: Definitely Take It

Sea of Thieves When huge online survival games take up most of the top popular PC titles, with everything from zombies to dinosaurs being the themes of those games, how do you mix it up? Pirates! Treasure hunting, ship combat, living skeletons, everything you think of when you imagine pirate folklore looks to be in this game. This “shared world” fantasy game will be heading to Xbox . . .  at some point. Verdict: Unsure

Fable: Legends Fable’s take on the dungeon crawler style of games will be free to play and allow PC and Xbox to play together. One team works together to take on the challenges that a villain player creates for them. I feel like this could be a pretty fun experience, but it might not have much in terms of lasting power . . . probably why it’s free to play, honestly. Verdict: Still Waiting for a Proper Fable IV

Virtual / Augmented Reality Here’s where more of that mind blowing stuff I mentioned earlier comes in. Xbox and Valve announce a partnership to bring virtual reality gaming to PC. The Occulus VR sets will come with an Xbox One controller (and also believe that motion controls will work well with it . . . we’ll see about that), and Xbox games will be streamable to that VR set using Windows 10 (okay now that makes sense, pretty cool). The craziest part of all of this though, was seeing how Minecraft will be played on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality set. You’re able to see and play with your Minecraft world in whole new ways, right before your eyes. You have to see this to really understand what makes it so good. Verdict: Definitely Take It

	Gears of War: Ultimate Edition The first Gears game is back, remastered for Xbox One. Featuring all of the additional content along with some brand new stuff never featured in the original game before, this one’s definitely for the long time fans as well as the ones who have still never played. Maybe this time the dedicated servers will actually exist? One can dream . . . Verdict: Take It

Gears of War 4 Offering up a double serving of Gears to close their show out, we now get some solid information on the next title in the franchise. Revolving around a whole new team of characters, the gameplay shown here seemed to bring back a little of the horror themes that the previous games had less and less of with each installment. Dark environments and brand new threats were shown here, along with the classic weapons, huge armor, all of the signatures of the title. Could this be the proper return to form that the series needed? Verdict: Unsure

Jeremy Harrison has been into gaming and just about everything nerdy or out of the norm for as long as he can remember. He likes to keep an open mind about things, but also has a strangely high amount of fun getting into a rant or good debate. . . which is probably why he was recruited to this site in the first place. You can Email Jeremy or follow Jeremy on Twitter @NightmareAsylum or Facebook