E3 2018 – the most important points you need to know from Microsoft’s E3 press conference

The Microsoft conference was an absolute unit. Too much unit for one person to break down alone, surely? That’s why we’ve put together a neat, organised list of the main reveals and announcements. But seriously, it was a lot of games.

• The giant crowd at the Microsoft presser was in an absolute state, like every audience member was about to ascend to a higher level of existence from all the f***ing games. One lad at the front started to do the ‘we’re not worthy’ worshipping at Phil Spencer before he’d even said anything because there’s a new Halo game with Master Chief in it and everything, you slags.

• Microsoft has bought approximately every independent game studio in the world — or, if you want to be accurate, Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, and Ninja Theory. Microsoft has also set up The Initiative, a brand new studio (corporate monopolies rock seriously hard y’all).

• Microsoft revealed almost every interesting game Square Enix had (Nier: Automata on Xbox, Just Cause 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Kingdom Hearts III Frozen trailer, and Life is Strange 2 related free game The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit), thus leaving Square Enix to just repeat trailers the following evening.

• New FromSoftware game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in ‘looks weird and is obsessed with death’ shocker.

• Xbox Game Pass now has a thing called Fast Start to make your games start fast, but nobody yet seems sure what it is and that includes us and, we suspect, Xbox.

• SO MANY ID@XBOX GAMES.

• Not Skate 4

• Not DmC 2

• The Division 2

• Forza Horizon 4 is set in the UK after we explicitly joked on a livestream about how terrible that would be.

• Too many games

• Oh god, they just keep coming

• Cuphead DLC. Dying Light 2. Battletoads???

• Please Phil.

• Phil, just let us rest.

• Sea of Thieves DLC. Crackdown 3 gameplay. Ori and the Will of the Wisps. We Happy Few release date, finally.

• She cannae take any more, captain!

• At the end Microsoft pulled a fake-out by showing the Gears of War logo and then it turned out to be the reveal of a Gears of War Funko Pop mobile game, because the time has never been more right for a Funko Pop tie-in.

• Microsoft then announced Gears 5 with a big dollop of actual gameplay right after that Funko Pop thing, thus successfully pulling off the extremely rare double fake-out, the absolute laaaaaads.

• Phil dropped in that they’re already working on a new Xbox, all casual like. It’s potentially codenamed Scarlet, so you know it’s gotta be pretty sexy.

• The Cyberpunk trailer was then revealed at the very end like a pretend haxors thing that killed the lights in the conference centre, and Phil Spencer did an ‘Oh wow, this is unexpected!’ face like a trooper even though he said they’d revealed 50 games and there’d only been 49 and he bloody knew it was coming, the scallywag.