Microsoft E3 Conference Impressions

Bring on the casual market seemed to be the rallying cry for the big M in today's conference presentation. The opening moments of Microsoft's event focused on some of the "hardcore" fare headed to the retail chain this holiday showing titles such as "Fallout 3," "Fable 2," and "Gears of War 2." Along with the updates and hands-on demos of these titles Xbox head honcho Dan Matrick also teased that they were going to revolutionize the console race with a new innovation.

This new innovation is apparently a redesigned from the ground up Xbox Live interface. The main bullet-point in this redesign appear to be "avatars." These avatars are 3-D rendered embodiments of your online persona, much like Miis on the Wii. Rare studios came up with the avatar editor system and promise thousands of pieces of content to customize your unique avatar with. Other than the addition of avatars the new Live interface will sport a streamlined design that consists of floating windows representing the different areas of the Xbox 360. From there the conference began to focus on party games and yet more casual fare espousing a more online, connected, and social atmosphere being their goal moving forward for the Live service.

As a gamer, I found myself ultimately left wanting by this conference. The big announcement was obviously the re-imagining of Live and I was left scratching my head mostly as to how this was going to "revolutionize" the way I play and experience games. It seemed to me that Microsoft is very content with their position in the marketplace (as they should be) and they are playing things related to their core users very safe by not making any new announcements or revealing any future franchises. It seems that their #1 priority is attracting a more casual market to their system by syphoning off the target audience of the Wii.

Microsoft has a maddening tendency to want to try and be all things to all people and this conference personified this trait in my eyes. Looking at the conference as a whole, Microsoft essentially lead off with demos of hardcore titles, then spent the rest of the conference hammering their new casual approach while ending with a hardcore appeasing announcment from Square. I was hoping for more excitment from the 360 camp out of this conference and in my eyes they did not deliver. I am excited for Gears 2, Fable 2, and Rock Band 2 at the end of this year but Microsoft failed to stimulate much interest or excitement from me on what lies ahead in 2009. What is your reaction to the conference?