Microsoft on Monday announced that its next generation video game console, the Xbox One, which it officially unveiled in May, will arrive in retail on November 21. It will be available for $499. As the company previously announced, the unit will come equipped with the Kinect motion controller and 802.11n Wi-Fi, as well as offering 8 GB of system memory and a 500-GB hard drive. It will also offer something the Xbox 360 never delivered -- a Blu-ray Disc drive.
At Monday's press conference at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press conference on Monday, Microsoft's emphasis was not on the hardware, but the software. After all, for gamers, the games define the console.
This was notable as Microsoft started off the show with a quiet loud "bang" beginning with the photorealistic Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain, the latest in the popular third-person action game. This series has always blended pre-rendered cut scenes and lengthy cinematic elements with actual gameplay, and it was hard to tell where the line blurred this time
"This is an exciting day for our teams," announced Don Mattrick, president of Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. "We've been promising it is all about the games."
In total at its Monday E3 event Microsoft demonstrated some 13 games for the Xbox One, including Dark Souls II, World of Tanks - Xbox 360 Edition, the fighting game Killer Instinct, the third person historically-based Ryse: Son of Rome, and the open world zombie survival game Dead Rising 3. Perhaps the biggest offering from an outside publisher was the demo of Electronic Arts' Battlefield 4 - which suggests yet another shooter-showdown as rival Activision has already announced Call of Duty: Ghosts, the latter of which wasn't shown during Microsoft's presentation.
This commitment to games suggested that Microsoft is going to the core fans again and didn't address the set-top box functionality of the system. However, Microsoft noted the role that Xbox Live, Smart Glass and Upload Studios - the latter of which can record gameplay - will play in the system. This includes functionality that will allow players to save videos and upload these via Twitch, which transforms the game console into a social media device.
The overall focus was also very much on action games, with the notable exception of the kid-friendly Max: The Curse of Brotherhood.
While the star of the show was very much the Xbox One, Microsoft did confirm that it will continue to support the aging Xbox 360, which was introduced eight years ago. On Monday Microsoft announced it will offer an updated version of the legacy system, which is now available at retail.
"We have updated the system with a modern look and feel that is based on the Xbox One design," said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience Business Group at Microsoft.
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