With publishers increasingly opting out of full-scale press conferences in favor of more modest livestreams and Sony skipping out of the event entirely, Microsoft were left to dominate this year's E3 by default. With their recent acquisition of Obsidian and inXile, tonight's Microsoft press conference promised to be particularly relevant to Codex interests. In fact, The Outer Worlds was the very first game to appear, with a colorful but rather earnest anti-corporate trailer that also reveals that Dr. Phineas has been redesigned to look like less of a Rick and Morty ripoff. Wasteland 3 appeared later on with a light-hearted trailer featuring none other than Scotchmo from Wasteland 2, offering us an introduction to the wonders of post-apocalyptic Colorado and our first glimpse of real gameplay since the game was crowdfunded back in 2016.


Those of you who find the tone of these trailers objectionable will be happy to know that the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer played it completely straight. Well, and then there's the part where Keanu Reeves showed up, because of course he did. It's a direct sequel to the 48 minute gameplay reveal from last August but with the male protagonist, who appears to have gotten a visual redesign. Things don't turn out so well for him, but Keanu makes everything better.



Finally, there are release dates. The Outer Worlds is coming on October 25th and Cyberpunk 2077 is coming next year on April 16th, with the latter game now available for preorder as well. The Wasteland 3 trailer doesn't announce a release date, but it too has a new release window. More on that later.