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Microsoft has dated its E3 2017 press conference for Sunday June 11th at 2pm PT (that’s 10pm in the UK) and it will be taking place at the Galen Center in LA. That’s a day earlier than Microsoft’s usual E3 slot, as the company traditionally holds its E3 presser on the show’s opening Monday.
The Sunday press conference spot has, in previous years, been occupied by Bethesda. Last year, EA also held its own EA Play event on Sunday afternoon last year just outside the LA Convention Centre. This year, EA has yet to announce exact details of its EA Play 2017 event, but we do know the public hands-on event will be taking place between June 10th and June 12th, suggesting we’ll see EA’s press conference the day before Microsoft’s on the Saturday.
As we can see from Microsoft’s full teaser image below, its upcoming Project Scorpio looks like it will be the main topic of conversation. Last year, Microsoft said its super-powered, 4K VR console was due to hit shop shelves in Holiday 2017, so this year’s conference should finally give us a proper look at what Microsoft has in store for its next machine.
As Microsoft stated last year, all Xbox One games will be playable on Scorpio, and there won’t be any Scorpio exclusive titles, either – at least for the time being. In this sense, the machine is being positioned in a very similar way to Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro – a more powerful version of its existing counterpart, but not quite the ‘next-gen’ replacement console that would typically mark the age of a new console generation.
With Scorpio likely drawing most of the attention this year, we wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft chose the still-unreleased Crackdown 3 to show off its true capabilities. The open world action game looked highly ambitious when it was officially unveiled at Gamescom 2015, as it was revealed it would be using Microsoft’s cloud-computing technology to help power its real-time city destruction. Since then, we’ve heard very little about the game, and it missed last year’s E3 press conference entirely. With a current vague release date of 2017, Crackdown 3 might finally come out of hibernation this year to show what’s possible on Project Scorpio.
