Watched the Xbox briefing this afternoon with my laptop propped on the kitchen table and the volume down low because my kid was napping upstairs, which is not how I imagined watching a big Microsoft press conference back when I started this blog in 2011, but here we are.
The big formal news is Project Scarlett, the next Xbox, which Microsoft says is coming holiday 2020 and which they're pitching on specs (four times the processing power of the current Xbox One X, SSD storage, up to 8K, variable refresh rate) without actually showing hardware or giving a price. I've seen enough of these reveals to know that "four times the power" numbers mean almost nothing until you see it running something next to the competition. Also "Scarlett" is obviously a codename and not the real name, and I'd put money on them changing it before launch, because Microsoft cannot leave a product name alone if its life depended on it.
The thing everyone's actually going to be talking about tonight, though, has nothing to do with teraflops. It's Keanu Reeves.
They brought him out during the Cyberpunk 2077 segment, revealed he's playing a character named Johnny Silverhand in the game, and someone in the crowd yelled "You're breathtaking!" at him mid-presentation. Keanu, without missing a beat, said "You're breathtaking too" back to the guy. The room lost it. I rewound the stream three times to catch it clean because I was laughing too hard the first time through. That's the kind of unscripted moment that no marketing team can plan for and it did more for that trailer than the trailer itself, honestly, and the trailer was already pretty striking.
They also dropped a release date for Cyberpunk 2077, April 16, 2020, and look, I want to believe that. I really do. But I've been covering this industry long enough to remember every big open-world RPG announcing a date a year out and then quietly not hitting it. CD Projekt Red has a good track record with The Witcher 3, so maybe they pull it off, but I'm mentally filing that date under "optimistic" until I see it closer to launch.
Halo Infinite got its first teaser too, showing off their new Slipspace engine with a shot of what's presumably Master Chief looking out over a Halo ring at sunset. Pretty, moody, tells you basically nothing about how the game plays, which is fine, that's what teasers are for. I'm more curious what they do with the "Infinite" part of the name than I am about the engine tech demo they showed off with it.
Honestly the announcement I think matters most for actual people who buy games, versus people like me who write about them, is the Xbox Game Pass stuff. Microsoft said all of their first-party games are going into Game Pass on day one going forward, no waiting period. If you're already paying the $9.99 a month, that's a real change to how you'd think about buying a new Halo or Forza at launch versus just letting the subscription cover it. That's the kind of decision that actually changes a budget line for a household, not a console spec sheet nobody outside forums reads closely.
I'll say this too, because nobody else seems to be pointing it out: watching a two-hour press conference on a laptop with headphones while trying not to wake a toddler is a genuinely bad way to experience E3, and I don't know why I keep doing it to myself every June instead of just reading a recap the next morning like a sane person. Old habits.
Bethesda's got their own showcase tonight too, later, and I might try to catch some of it, but I make no promises about staying awake for the whole thing. My coffee cup's empty and it's already past eight here.