Microsoft E3 2017 conference: exclusive script leak

Yesterday, yer man Scullion exclusively revealed the full script for Sony’s E3 2017 press conference due to be held next week.

To show that my sources stretch far and wide across the games industry, I’ve also managed to snag a copy of Microsoft’s presentation script.

Avenge me, for I’m certain Microsoft’s assassins will have my balls for this.

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MICROSOFT CORPORATION: XBOX DIVISION

E3 PRESS EVENT AUTOCUE SCRIPT & STAGE DIRECTIONS

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

ONLY TO BE READ BY XBOX DIVISION STAFF NAMED ON THE ATTACHED CLEARANCE LIST

VENUE: The Galen Center, LA
DATE: June 11, 2017
TIME: 14:00 PDT

[PHIL SPENCER TO TAKE STAGE]

PHIL SPENCER
Good morning everyone! Welcome to E3 2017!

It’s my absolute pleasure to launch the first E3 conference of the week, even though it’ll give Sony a chance to make some last-minute changes to theirs if we end up nailing it.

A special welcome to everyone watching this conference live around the world on their Xbox One systems and Windows 10 PCs. There’ll be a repeat broadcast of this presentation later tonight for those of you Windows owners who inevitably get hit with a system update halfway through.

Let’s cut to the chase. You all know what our big news is this year, and even though we already gave the exclusive to Digital Foundry so they could gush over it, we’re going to pretend you don’t know anything about it.

We told you last year that Project Scorpio, our redesigned Xbox One, would be coming at the end of 2017. We’re now ready to show you it and reveal its real name.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Xbox One And A Half.

The Xbox One And A Half will be the most powerful games console ever created. Its CPU consists of eight custom x86 cores clocked at 2.3 GHz, and its GPU contains 40 customised compute units at 1172 MHz.

I don’t know what that means. Nobody does. But it’ll certainly be funny as fuck watching everyone on NeoGAF turning into amateur electronics experts and arguing about DDR5 and ESRAM like pros even though they couldn’t build so much as a Raspberry Pi in real life.

All I do know is that the Xbox One And A Half will be capable of running games at full 4K. Not half-arsed 4K like the PS4 Pro…

AUDIENCE MEMBER
Or the Xbox One S!

[PHIL SPENCER TO NOD TO A SECURITY GUARD DRESSED AS ONE OF THE BATTLETOADS, WHO WILL ESCORT THE AUDIENCE MEMBER OUT OF THE VENUE]

PHIL SPENCER
Anyone else want to be a hero? I thought not. Fuck up.

[ALLOW 15 SECONDS FOR AWKWARD SILENCE]

PHIL SPENCER
Anyway, as I was saying, Xbox One And A Half will run games in full 4K glory, and make use of the HDR colour palette.

Don’t worry: all our future games will still be compatible with the original Xbox One and Xbox One S. But they’ll look fucking GUFF, fam.

I know what you’re thinking, you rascals. I can already picture the Twitter trolls cracking their fingers in preparation to type the inevitable response: “What future games?”

Hahahahaha! My sides! They’re splitting right down the side! It’s a good job this stage is reinforced because my stomach acid is in real danger of spilling onto the floor and melting through it like in fucking Alien, such is my mirth!

No, of course we’ve got games. Obviously. It’s not like we’d announce a new system and then not have any games for it. We clearly just sat on a bunch of games until today so there was stuff to talk about.

I mean, seriously, do ANY of you FUCKING WANKS have ANY idea how to run a business? You complete CU…

[PHIL SPENCER’S MIC TO BE CUT OFF AT THIS POINT. LARRY ‘MAJOR NELSON’ HRYB TO TAKE THE STAGE. HE IS TO HAVE A QUIET CONVERSATION WITH A NOW SOBBING PHIL SPENCER. SPENCER TO SIGH AND WALK SLOWLY OFF-STAGE]

LARRY HRYB
Phil Spencer, everyone. Phil’s off for a little nap. Let’s give him a big hand.

PHIL SPENCER (WALKING OFF)
Don’t you dare clap for me. You’re all fucking SCUM.

LARRY HRYB
Um, let’s move on to the new games we definitely have in the pipeline for Xbox One and Xbox One And A Half.

As you know, we’re the market leaders when it comes to console racing games, and it’s all down to one series. Please welcome onto the stage Dan Greenawalt, creative director of Turn 10 Studios.

[A CONFUSED DAN GREENAWALT TO TAKE THE STAGE]

DAN GREENAWALT
Um… we don’t have anything, Larry.

LARRY HRYB
What’s that?

DAN GREENAWALT
We don’t have anything. To show today. We aren’t working on any new Forza games.

LARRY HRYB
Then why in the fuck… who wrote you into the presentation?

DAN GREENAWALT
Nobody. I’m here every year so I just figured I’d come along anyway for the free swag.

LARRY HRYB
Don’t we have any racing games?

DAN GREENAWALT
I mean, there’s something I’ve been working on during my lunch breaks but it’s just a joke, it’s not a real game.

LARRY HRYB
It’ll do. We’re fucking dying here and we haven’t even announced anything yet.

DAN GREENAWALT
Um, okay. So, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I’m apparently here today to show you the latest in a classic Xbox racing series.

Pending official sign-off and agreement, here’s your first look at our new game I guess, Project Gotham Racing 5.

Project Gotham 5 will continue the series’ trend of realistic recreations of real-world cities. The problem is, the previous Project Gotham games used up all the good ones.

So, you’ll be racing through the likes of:

• Hull (United Kingdom)
• Guayaquil (Ecuador)
• Bakersfield, CA (USA)
• Boucherville, Quebec (Canada)

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty pumped to race over that Humber Bridge.

Project Gotham Racing 5 will be available on Xbox One and Xbox One And A Half this holiday season. Even though I only just decided we’re doing it.

There will be two DLC packs, which you can buy for a reduced price with the Season Pass. The first will add new tracks from Yemen, while the other will just feature an Asda car park from somewhere in the Midlands or something, I dunno.

LARRY HRYB
Yeah. Thanks Dan.

[DAN GREENAWALT TO LEAVE THE STAGE. AS HE DOES HE IS TO PASS A REJUVENATED AND MUCH HAPPIER-LOOKING PHIL SPENCER, WHO IS RETURNING TO THE STAGE WITH A NEW SPRING IN HIS STEP]

PHIL SPENCER
Thanks for holding the fort, Larry. I’m feeling much better now.

LARRY HRYB
You sure? You got this?

PHIL SPENCER
Hey. HEY. Look at me. I’m cool.

[LARRY HRYB TO CAUTIOUSLY LEAVE THE STAGE]

PHIL SPENCER
Let’s move on, folks! There’s a special game coming to Xbox One next year, which you were all excited for but then immediately forgot all about.

Please join me in welcoming Capcom’s Yoshiaki Hirabayashi to the stage.

YOSHIAKI HIRABAYASHI [VIA A TRANSLATOR]
Hello everyone.

You may remember, almost two years ago, that I revealed a remake of Resident Evil 2 was in development.

Then again, you may not, because no fucker is talking about it online. The game everyone was asking for, and now nobody cares. Well we’re making it anyway and if you don’t buy it we’re going to make more of that first-person shit everybody loved for all of one week.

Resident Evil 2 HD will be a brand new version of the classic 1998 survival horror game, with a bunch of new additions created to spice things up a little.

After conducting a number of focus tests with gamers of various ages and backgrounds, it’s become clear that zombies are no longer interesting.

What was entertaining back then is not necessarily entertaining now, and today’s gamers consider zombies ‘boring’ enemies that highlight a lack of creativity on the part of the developer.

With that in mind, we have replaced all the zombies in the game with the star of cult Nintendo Wii shovelware game, Ninjabread Man.

We’re sure you’ll like this extra challenge, and we hope you won’t CRUMBLE under pressure.

Do you get it! Because he is a BISCUIT.

PHIL SPENCER
Thank you, Hirabayashi-san. Resident Evil 2 HD will be coming to Xbox One and Xbox One And A Half sometime next year.

Continuing the theme, let’s move onto another game you all completely forgot about because it was announced eight fucking decades ago. Roll it.

[TRAILER FOR CRACKDOWN 3 TO BE SHOWN. KEEP PHIL SPENCER’S MIC LIVE DURING THIS. THE TRAILER IS TO FEATURE THE THIN LIZZY SONG ‘THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN’ BUT EVERY TIME IT SAYS ‘BACK’ AND ‘TOWN’, SPENCER IS TO SAY ‘CRACK’ AND ‘DOWN’ OVER IT]

PHIL SPENCER
You’re going to think I’m pulling your pish-pipe here, but we actually first revealed Crackdown 3 at E3 2014. Three years ago.

You may remember that way back then I explained how the game would make use of cloud computing to add extra power that would allow for bigger explosions and fully destructible environments.

Well, frankly, I was on the arsehole sauce back then and I had no idea what the hell I was talking about. Imagine if your internet connection died halfway through a game: what then? Yup, I was completely fucking away with it.

BUT! Now we have the Xbox One And A Half, which gives us a whole lot more power to play with. And that means we don’t need to piss around with that cloud shit anymore, meaning it can retire along with Kinect, SmartGlass and Games For Windows Live.

Now you can relax and let the Xbox One And A Half’s immense processing power do all the work for you as you spend ten minutes blowing up skyscrapers before realising the fun thing about Crackdown was climbing large buildings, not knocking them down.

Crackdown 3 will launch in early 2018. The Xbox One And A Half version will be able to run offline, whereas the standard Xbox One version will require an always-online connection because I suppose it’ll need to use that cloud processing pish after all.

Now I’d like you to welcome Chris Charla to the stage.

[CHRIS CHARLA, DIRECTOR OF ID@XBOX, TO TAKE THE STAGE]

CHRIS CHARLA
Good evening everyone!

It’s been nearly four years since ID@Xbox was announced, and since then over 500 games have been created for the Xbox One and Windows 10 platforms by indie developers.

I’m here to show you a montage of the next batch of indie games you can expect to be playing on Xbox One and Windows 10 in the near future.

[ID@XBOX INDIE SHOWCASE MONTAGE TO PLAY. GAMES TO INCLUDE:

• SURVIVALCRAFT – UNORIGINAL STUDIOS
• TWINSTICK SHOOTFEST – BARE MINIMUM GAMES
• THE ADVENTURES OF QUIRKY MCQUIRK IN THE PROCEDURALLY GENERATED 8-BIT DUNGEON – THE ORIGINAL SQUAD
• WALKING ROUND A BIG HOUSE SIMULATOR – RIGHT IN THE FEELS GAMES
• THOMAS WAS ALONE – MIKE BITHELL
• DETECTIVE CHUCKLES AND THE CASE OF THE ROOMS FULL OF MISSING ITEMS HE HAS TO FIND WITHIN THREE MINUTES – TEMPLATE STUDIOS
• SOME TWEE PLATFORMER SHIT – LITERALLY ANYONE]

CHRIS CHARLA
I’m sure you’ll agree that this year’s line-up is the most original yet! Well, I’m relatively sure you’ll agree. Listen, the platformer’s quite good, even if it’s a bit twee.

PHIL SPENCER
Get off the stage Chris, nobody fucking cares.

[CHRIS CHARLA TO LEAVE THE STAGE]

PHIL SPENCER
Just a quick announcement before we move on to our final game of the evening.

You may have heard that our FIFA deal with EA has expired and it’s now moved to Sony. And, of course, Sony already has an existing DLC exclusivity arrangement with Activision.

Well, just in case you’re starting to get the impression that all the big publishers are siding with our rivals, we’re delighted to announce a new 10-year partnership with Dong Nguyen, the guy who made Flappy Bird.

I’m also proud to reveal that the long-awaited sequel, Flappy Bird 2: Because I’m Flappy, will be a timed exclusive on Xbox One, where it will be available on our platform and our platform ALONE for the first two hours before launching on other systems too.

[PAUSE FOR STANDING OVATION]

PHIL SPENCER
We’ve got one more game to show you tonight, and it’s a doozy. It’s something you absolutely won’t expect, and it’s a series that fans haven’t been able to play for a loooong time.

Ladies, gentlemen, everyone else that falls above the PEGI 18 bracket, I give to you…

Gears Of War 5.

[TRAILER FOR GEARS OF WAR 5 TO BE SHOWN. IT IS TO LOOK EXACTLY LIKE GEARS OF WAR 4, EXCEPT THERE’S A YOUNG BOY IN IT]

PHIL SPENCER
Gears Of War 5 is set 10 years after the events of Gears Of War 4. Once again you’ll be playing as Marcus Fenix’s son JD Fenix, but this time there’s a twist.

JD will also be accompanied by his own son, a 9-year-old lad who JD playfully and inventively calls Todd Of War. JD and Todd will have to work together to defeat the Locust, and maybe learn a thing or two about each other along the way.

Like the fact that they both fucking love hiding behind walls a lot.

Gears Of War 5 will hit the Xbox One And A Half… RIGHT AFTER THIS SHOW ENDS.

That’s right, even though the Xbox One And A Half won’t even be out for another five months. That’s how forward-thinking we are.

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we’ve showed you the future of Xbox. We’ve shown you the world’s most powerful games console ever made, and we’ve proved the wanks online wrong by showing that we do actually have games ready for it too. One of them’s even available now for no reason.

I hope you’ll agree with me that Xbox truly is the future of gaming, and if you don’t then I really don’t fucking know what more I can tell you ungrateful bastards.

You’re all dead to me. Thanks for watching.

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