Vague expectations are understandable though.
What wins E3 aren't the announcements and game reveals we know about and expect. What wins E3 are those "straight outta the left-field" announcements that crash forums, blow up twitter and generate successive weeks worth of youtube reaction videos.
By definition, you can't expect nor predict these things beforehand.
It's on the gaming companies to blow us away with their new stuff. It's not on us to tell them how.
I mean...they could try. We do it here everyday with those kind of wild speculations. Chances of a lot of them happening are almost zero but it's worth the try.
MS is finding themselves back to the same situation they found themselves last year. One of my beliefs for why the Infinite demo fell flat is that, among other things, people were already coming off The Last of us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima and seeing what studios can do late gen. We don’t exist in a vacuum and the unspoken word was that the demo wasn’t as inspired as it could be as it didn’t even hold a candle to PS4 games. Again, there were other problems with the demo but i believe this just didn’t help their cause.
Fast forward to today and we’re back at it again with Ratchet and Clank clearly another grand slam by a sony studio. So yah. MS is going to have to come out with a banger with their titles at E3. And actually show something that wows everyone. This is a tough act to follow.
They can’t fall flat again they ran out of mulligans.
Dunno how planned Rift Apart's release was to E3 to counteract Microsoft's presentation, but I think it's probably being considered a nice convenience by folks at Sony, at the very least. My
hope is that they might've pushed for this date out of having some knowledge of what Microsoft and their partners will be showing at E3 and it being
so impressive in some way they want Rift Apart to take some of the shine away.
That's an optimistic view, and I'm an optimist, so this might be a sign they'll have a great E3 with something gameplay-wise that's just flat out visually arresting. It may not be Halo Infinite, it may not even be Starfield, but it may be something.
Once Xbox starts pumping out first party hits you are right. I'm sceptical still though. MS has a bad track record with studios they bought so far.
Can't say it's a "bad" track record tho when those studios haven't released anything new that wasn't already in development pre-acquisition...
...though that is indicative of a potential upper management issue, to be fair. Especially when you compare that output to, say, Insomniac's, who were also acquired in 2018 and have put out two new games plus a remaster (all of them fantastic games at that) in the span of only roughly three years.