Xbox E3 2016 Revisited

Xbox E3 2016 was an interesting display of what was next for the platform as they kicked off working towards their Xbox Play Anywhere program. Coming from the insane Xbox Backwards Compatible announcement the year before, 2016 was all about what's next. It was where they first announced buying a game on Xbox One and owning it on Windows 10 as well or also the other way around. This was a display of change in what the goals were for Microsoft's console as they were working towards a service of where your games last forever. It's been great since, as you simply just take your saves between places and can even enjoy cross-play.

This was also where Xbox took a bold move by announcing their next console, Project Scorpio well in advance with a follow-up release planned the year after. This was shown clearly with just specs and they have delivered on that so far. The Xbox One S was also announced as a cute and small version of the Xbox One to bridge the gap with HDR support. To build on the hardware aspects of it, they also kicked off Design Lab for custom controllers and began the start of a new community side to the platform. This was with clubs, arena competitions and group searching which are now all in practice across basically every device.


Another important aspect of what Xbox brought to E3 was the games, it had a collection of first and third party titles. Battlefield 1; Gwent, Final Fantasy XV and Tekken 7 were part of the latter. For the first party/exclusives they gave the full reveals for Gears of War 4; Forza Horizon 3, Inside (timed exclusive), ReCore, Sea of Thieves, State of Decay 2, Halo Wars 2, Dead Rising 4 (timed exclusive) and some smaller titles. Scalebound was also part of this, but later cancelled in early 2017. It certainly wasn't a bad display of games having a mix of titles releasing for fall 2016 and some that were part of the future. The conference was once again exciting to watch, yet not quite at the magical level the 2015 one had hit.

On the showfloor, the Xbox booth featured a different design being more open. They had the Forza title car right there taking up a lot of space and the Xbox One S's in cases. The back area around the open spot were for various meetings and in the middle was a collection of games to play. I was lucky to attend the international party so I got to get my hands on everything. Lines were particularly wild during the show for Sea of Thieves, Forza Horizon 3 and ReCore. Dead Rising 4 was also getting some love and I was very hyped for that one, I mean it had the original location of Willamette and Frank West! It was an interesting event for Xbox bringing a fine selection of games and officially starting their push of Xbox Play Anywhere.

Update:
Added timed exclusive to Dead Rising 4, Inside. People are really touchy about that sort of thing, if you play games you should know what I meant.

Our Game Hubs
View More Revisited Games
Read our Xbox E3 2017: What to Expect