A new console will make-or-break its debut based on what games will launch with it and especially which games will be exclusive to that console. Looking at the market of the Microsoft press event it’s not too shabby. Between the expected Halo and Battlefield 4, we can add Romans on the beach, big-stompy robots, and lots of zombie games.

For those who don’t know, Xbox One will be $499 and shall appear November 2013.

On to the games!

Ryse: Son of Rome got a glorious demo on the stage:

Romans storming a beach generates a very much Saving Private Ryan intro as another trailer is displayed showing off another game in the Xbox One lineup—with quicktime event combat hacking and slashing blood across the screen. Romans really know how to mix it up on the beach. Squad controls make for a game that gives the player a sense they’re not just in the thick of things; but that they’re commanding a troop of Roman soldiers and part of a large scale attack.

Next: Killer Instinct. An oldie, but goodie got a trailer. This game I’m most used to not from consoles, but from stand-up arcades. Certainly on the Xbox One it’s going to be better and more amazing looking than ever, but it was greeted only with a tiny, almost 10 second trailer.

Insomniac Games introduced Sunset Overdrive—an open-world shooter that leverages the Xbox cloud in order to generate a living world of player driven experience. From the trailer, we saw a lot of parkour. Players seem to have found themselves in a city overrun by bloated mutant monstrosities in a stylized urban landscape with odd weapons (including a soda-can that powers up a shotgun into a small nuke.)

FORZA Motorsport 5 showed off an extremely rare car on stage—a McLaren P—to introduce Turn 10’s new game for Xbox One that will take advantage of the power within the console, but also mentioned the Xbox cloud. The representative mentioned the “end of AI” (truly a marketing misstatement) talking about something called a “driveatar” which is a learning algorithm that learns from how you drive. The system will log and collect data from how you in particular drive your car, it will process and consume how you drive in order to produce better AI—run in the Xbox cloud—and drive them against other players. This would allow the game to produce computer-driven AI drivers that act a lot more like natural people by copying the style and skills of other players and marshaling that to make a better game.

Commitment to indie game developers. Consoles are an important place for indie game developres (and developers in general) so when this got mentioned, my ears perked up. Minecraft will come to Xbox One.

Remedy Entertainment spoke further about the expectation of the video-cinema-to-video-game Quantum Break. “Blurring the lines between gaming and television.” The game provides an odd mixture of TV show and video game in that there’s a lot of cinema built into an apparent choose-your-own adventure. It’s hard to say where the game will go, or even if it will work as planned, but it’s something new.

Dave McCarthy spoke about Project Spark about the process of making a video game. Not only does this game use Kinect to listen to the user to allow them to build up landscapes (choosing biome, and time) but it adds the ability to use Xbox SmartGlass to interact directly with the game. After the demonstrators on the stage made terrain and a village, they dropped in a villager. In the short time given they showed off how this could be used to construct worlds, add AI to in-game assets. It’s obvious that Project Spark’s idea is to bring story creation and game design to the hands of the everyday person.

Dead Rising 3—if the zombie apocalypse wasn’t enough, new hero Nick Ramos must escape from a city filled with the dead. The game includes a lot of the same-old-zombie-tropes of the walking dead, but adds environmental weapons and the capability to construct new ones from what’s laying around (from strapping flashlights to guns to sledge-hammer-circular-saws.) You can still mow down zombies in cars as with previous games, but now they can smash in your windows and try to drag you out. Using SmartGlass, players can call in specials: such as artillery support from their smartphone or tablet.

An open world and wizardry comes to the Xbox One with The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Actual game footage in a trailer came to the E3 audience. Switching between melee and spell-based combat, players will face wolves, giant opponents, soldiers, and between sword stroke and fireball fight their way through an open world.

Not to be left out, Battlefield 4 showed off some stunning in-game footage showing soldiers march across the landscape with guns, guns, and more guns. For people who have played CoD and Battlefield games, the trailer is just an example of what-is-to-come rather than something to latch onto.

Next up, Microsoft showed off gripping, dynamic visions from another Xbox exclusive, a dune-filled desert erupts around a robed figure to reveal a technological monstrosity exploding from the sand. Even as the sand reveals a winged-entity, the robed figure’s hood falls back to show Master Chief. Can we say Halo for Xbox One? 343 Industries representatives spoke about Halo Assault and the television series with Stephen Spielberg—but it’s the new Halo FPS that will take advantage of Xbox One and the cloud.

Respawn Entertainment revealed the last exclusive game for the Xbox One: Titanfall. A big-stompy-mech warfare-in-the-streets full on mayhem game that pits human vs. machine in the frontier of a dystopian science fiction universe. Another game that intends to take advantage of the Xbox “cloud compute” in order to offload some of the calculations from the console and put them into the cloud, enabling the game to think about what’s coming into the player’s view without taxing the console. The gameplay for this game is stunning and gives players a chance to both play on the ground as a grunt with a gun or inside of giant-stompy-walking-armored machines called a “titan.” The game appears to combine the gritty element of CoD-like urban warfare (with guns and men) with the science fiction element of exoframe mechs and interesting futuristic weaponry.