I found Microsoft's conference very disappointing. With Playstation gone this year, I thought Microsoft would pick up the slack with some surprising third party game announcements, but instead we got a bunch of indie stuff. Nothing really interested me aside from the stuff I was already looking forward to.
Battletoads was very much what I expected, and while I'm looking forward to it, it's not exactly a big E3 reveal.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps still looks amazing but we've known about that for years.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order had a much better showing here than EA's rather tame but promising gameplay presentation. But it was still just more of what we already seen elsewhere.
Borderlands 3 still looks awesome but once again, nothing new.
Gears of War 5 is by far the most disappointing thing to me during this conference. We got a tease of the story and gameplay that left us with so many questions at last year's E3. So rather than show us a gameplay demonstration of one of the more exciting moments in the campaign that shows off some new mechanics, enemies, weapons, and executions like the last 2 Gears games, we get a CGI trailer of faces and a CGI trailer for a game mode. That's it. The game releases in September and that's what they showcased at one of if not the most hyped up Microsoft Conferences ever.
The rest of the conference was nothing but lame indie games, CG trailers, expansions of old games, and mildly interesting but not exciting things. That's actually the running theme of most of the conferences this year.
The highlights were the Scarlett talk and Halo: Infinite, which left me very disappointed on my initial viewing due to such high expectations, but that aside, it's still one of the weaker Halo trailers, which is a shame because they usually have epic trailers. But very impressive nonetheless after revealing it to be the actual opening of the game.
I think hopes were too high this year, which was unrealistic because Microsoft has clearly given up on this gen and are saving their big stuff for next gen. Ninja Theory's reassurance that they're working on more games is very telling of that. They also announced their last batch of backward compatible games for the generation so they could focus on making everything backward compatible on the Scarlett and Halo is being pushed back so it could be a launch title. Microsoft is definitely ready to abandon ship.
I still have faith in Microsoft because they've definitely been making all the right moves, but the fact of the matter is, their E3 blew this year.