PC Gamer’s “The PC Gaming Show” is back again for 2019. This time it’s sponsored by Epic. Sean Plott and Frankie Ward hosted. Here’s everything they announced:
Rebellion’s Evil Genius 2: World Domination is the sequel to a well-regarded base-building game in line with your Theme Hospital or maybe a little closer to Dungeon Keeper. It’s a little goofy that this trailer shows no actual gameplay, but that is a common theme today, and then kind of shitty that Rebellion decided to frame beta access as something to win. Otherwise, they’re planning a 2020 release on Steam for Windows. Presumably Epic passed on giving buckets of money for this exclusive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dz0c0UsmnQ
Coming to Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 in 2020 it’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. The game that lets you stalk Seattle as a complete weirdo, out for blood. I’m not really into the vampire thing, but games that contain cities I love like Seattle are always on my radar.
Ward compared Starmancer to Dwarf Fortress in space and that sounds pretty compelling. The trailer reminds me of Spacebase DF-9 which is good. There’s no release date, but I can be hopeful that Starmancer won’t suffer the same fate. Steam for Windows, macOS, and Linux. No release date given, but the website says they’re hoping for 2019.
Tripwire’s John Gibson & Torn Banner’s Steve Piggott appeared on stage to talk about their collaboration on Chivalry II, the sequel to the medieval slasher. Piggot said the new game would have twice as many players on a server at 64, increased the scale of the levels, and added more objectives. 2020, timed exclusive for the Epic Game Store.
Mosaic by Krillbite is coming later this year for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows. Ward called it a “dark and atmospheric adventure game.”Mosaic reminds me of Inside. I really enjoy their parody of clicker games, Blip Blop. I’m playing Blip Blop right now.(
Midnight Ghost Hunt is a competitive 4v4 multiplayer game that looks like it takes the Prey (2017) aliens hiding as objects mechanic and replaces the aliens with ghosts. The Call of Duty prop hunt mode is maybe a more exact comparison with one team hunting the ghosts or props and the other team trying their best to survive to the time limit. Plott interviewed the game’s developer Samuel Malone on-stage, where Malone said the teams change places if the ghost team can make it through until the time limit, which revives their entire team. Steam for Windows. No release date yet, although they’re working on an early alpha for the public.
Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer’s Legacy is a roguelite that has a very nice look to it, unfortunately it’s in the process of raising money through the faux-investment service called Fig. Windows for Steam only, for now.
After Unexplored, the show was interrupted to tell us about a 240hz curved Samsung G-Sync gaming monitor. I hope it works better than mine, because it routinely gets an odd vertical tear until I power cycle the monitor and the manufacturer blames Nvidia for the issue.
Natascha Röösli from Funcom appeared to talk about Funcom’s 2019 lineup. Mutant Year Zero: Seed of Evil is a $15 MYZ expansion for the Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows, and PlayStation 4. July 30th. It was already announced.
Conan Unconquered is Funcom’s Conan RTS that looks very traditional, and it’s been out for Windows on Steam since the end of May.
Moons of Madness is a cosmic horror game set on Mars due for the Xbox One, Steam for Windows, and PlayStation 4 on Halloween, it was announced a year ago.
Röösli introduced Philip Mayes from Mighty Kingdom, a game studio in Australia that is making Conan Chop Chop. A rogluelike with top-down Zelda-y graphics. There are a ton of those, but why not more? Chop Chop was introduced as an April Fools joke, but apparently they’re actually putting it out on September 3rd. Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch.
Last Oasis is a “nomadic survival MMO” that is going to early access for Steam for Windows on July 15th. The trailer reminds me of Air Buccaneers and Chivalry, with maybe not so hot MMO combat. The full game is out on September 3rd.
Age of Wonders Planetfall has 4X strategy, laser dinos, tech trees, and I think I saw some aggressive penguins in there. August 6th. Steam for Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4. Lennart Sas and Tom Bird showed up to talk about Planetfall and its brain-eating parasites.
Zombie Army 4: Dead War is another sequel to Rebellion’s co-op Zombie Army first-person shooters. It must be impossible to run out of undead Nazi soldiers. Rebellion already has a separate gameplay trailer up:
Gunfire Games’ Remnant: From The Ashes is only the second Cthulhu-y game full of nightmare creatures I’ve seen today. It looks an awful lot like a third-person Left 4 Dead. August 20th, Steam for Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One. David Adams confirmed that it is a co-op action game. He also emphasized that the game is highly replayable, but then said all the loot is “legendary” which is an odd decision.
Griftlands is a Klei’s $15 deck building roguelike that has an early version out on July 11th for Windows via the Epic Game Store. Next year it’ll get to Steam, as well, and then in Fall 2020 it’ll be out for real.
Planet Zoo is Frontier’s next management sim. This video has a pooping hippo, so that’s good. November 5th for Steam on Windows.
Shenmue 3’s Yu Suzuki was on-stage to talk about Shenmue 3 and introduce the above trailer, and the news is that the game is now a timed exclusive to the Epic Games Store. Shenmue I and II were re-released in a package for Steam and other platforms last year. I didn’t see any mention of which store the WIndows version was to be sold on Shenmue 3’s Kickstarter page, but it does seem kind of odd to not give the game’s backers the option to choose Steam if that was what they picked in a survey.
Songs of Conquest is an updated, pixelated, Heroes of Might & Magic-esque turn-based fantasy strategy game. Carl Toftfelt spoke about the game in-person and it’s due for late 2020 on Windows and macOS.
The co-op fantasy combat game, Vermintide 2, is getting a player versus player versus mode. There’s a beta going on.
Tion Industries’ Per Aspera is about the challenge of terraforming Mars with human consciousnesses transferred to machines. 2020 on Windows.
Patrice Desilets from Panache Digital Games spoke about Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, a third-person open-world survival game about our ancestors set in ancient Africa that gets to Windows on August 27th.
The split between the different versions of Auto Chess, a game created by Dota 2 fans, is growing. Loring Lee appeared on stage to talk about the official Drodo standalone version of Auto Chess and announce that is headed for the Epic Game Store.
Cris Tales is a JRPG-style game from Dreams Uncorporated and SYCK that is due for next year. Until the 24th of June there is a free demo available on Steam for Windows. The art style for this game is pretty cool, I didn’t think I would like the flat look at first, but it is pretty compelling.
Valfaris looks like it could be a completely ridiculous and awesome metalvania. It’s due this year on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam for Windows. There is a free demo available now on Steam for Windows. I am psyched, though I wonder how long you can keep up the metal adrenaline surge through what are often languid explorations of new environments and backtracking through old ones.
Oh, thank goodness, Gearbox got someone else to talk about Borderlands 3. It’s Paul Sage, the creative director. He spoke about the character Moze the Gunner, and her mech called Iron Bear that Moze pilots, different grenade types including one that launches other weapons when it explodes, and more. Game is out September 13th for PlayStation 4, Windows via the Epic Game Store, and Xbox One.
Maneater is apparently an open-world action SharkPG from Tripwire. I appreciate their use of Mississippi Queen in their trailer. Tripwire’s John Gibson said the game is like GTA but if you were a shark. There is no certain release date, but it’ll be exclusive to the Epic Games Store for a year.
At this point the show turned over into a bizarre sponsored ad made of B-Roll without narration for an “E-Win” gaming chair. I don’t know why anyone needs a special chair for gaming, but O.K.
Terraria’s final updates are coming in a final patch called Journey’s End. It’s due this year, no specific release date was given.
I loved Sam Barlow’s last game, Her Story, Telling Lies looks like it could be just as good and features a similar mechanic of searching the transcriptions of video clips for clues that lead to other clips. It’s a unique way of exploring a game I haven’t seen anywhere else. Telling Lies is to be out soon, but there isn’t a specific release date yet.
Warframe: Empyrean is the next expansion for Warframe, but this trailer was more of a teaser to watch an upcoming Twitch stream on the 6th of July.
Genesis Noir is an adventure game set during, after, and before the big bang, about stopping the big bang to save your love. Genesis Noir looks amazing, and different, and there’s a prologue available for free on this site. Feral Cat Den’s out-there adventure is expected to be for Windows and macOS, but there is no release date.
Honig’s El Hijo is a different kind stealth game, where you’re a boy searching for your mom. I can’t think of a better game for a rainy day. The planned platforms are Steam for Windows, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. There is no release date, yet.
Larian Studios is making Baldur’s Gate 3. Sven Vincke from Larian and Wizards of the Coast’s Mike Mearls spoke on-stage about the game and what their goals are. There will be a Baldur’s Gate prequel for table top players on September 17th. There is no release date for Baldur’s Gate 3.
Overall
I’m pretty pleased with this year’s show, obviously a huge undercurrent is the competition between Epic and Valve, and some folks on-stage couldn’t help but get a dig in about it. Valve’s dominance is a problem, but I’m not looking forward to having a more scattered library of games across platforms that will all shutter some day. It’s a particularly big problem for people playing games with Linux who are finding the limits of Valve’s support for their platform and the complete lack of support from Epic who seem to have no plans to bring their game store and launcher to the platform. Otherwise, I don’t think that anyone outside of Valve should be upset with temporary exclusivity deals in general. The specifics of crowd-funded games promising one thing and doing another when Epic shows up with that cash might be the only legitimate cause for alarm.
The long and short of it is that we don’t need another in versus out crowd like we had with early Nintendo and Sega platforms. There are bigger issues, and anyone talking about how Epic has Chinese money is a racist sack of shit. Investors everywhere are shitbags who would prefer that people fight over what launcher we use to play games instead of organizing to take their money through taxes and use it to pay for things we all need.
One of the problems with putting backwards compatibility in the hands of publishers and developers to pick and choose which games get brought forward is that they go out of business and can’t make a decision, make bad choices based on financial decisions, or in this case Microsoft has decided that they’ve done enough and will stop updating the Xbox 360 and original Xbox compatibility lists for the Xbox One.
We’ve listened closely to community feedback and respect the game libraries you’ve built throughout the last 18 years. That’s why we’re taking our work a step further and announced this week that thousands of games from all four generations will be playable on Project Scarlett. As such, we have now shifted our focus to help make the games you love playing on Xbox One compatible with future Xbox hardware. After this week, we have no plans to add additional Original Xbox or Xbox 360 titles to the catalog on Xbox One, but we’re excited to continue our work on Xbox compatibility across platforms and devices, which remains a top priority.
Microsoft have released a final update with eight more games from the original Xbox and sixteen Xbox 360 games brought forward (Too Human is free for some reason?), and it’s good that it can be assumed that these backwards compatible games were actually tested, but the backward compatibility story isn’t great unless a generic method is released to support every older game. Not just the ones that Microsoft receives approval to support.
Unique games like Steel Battalion, licensed games like Spider-Man 2, some of the best Burnout games, sorta-interesting war games like Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, classic stompy stompy games like Mechassault, Chronicles of Riddick, Project Gotham Racing. There aren’t as many as we lost when the PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility died off on the PlayStation 3, but Microsoft had the chance to make every Xbox and Xbox 360 game playable on hardware they still sell and support, and blew it.
Bethesda held their E3 event last night, here’s everything they announced.
Pete Hines’ Soapbox
Pete Hines opened the event after a short video about the people making their games.
Todd Howard
Todd Howard followed Hines by talking about the “well-deserved criticism” Bethesda received for the not-so-great Fallout 76. He went on to praise the players that stuck with 76 for a good attitude. Next, he moved on to The Elder Scrolls: Blades, the free-to-play game that I’ve loaded up exactly once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wev_raLJ6PM
The Elder Scrolls: Blades Minute with Craig Lafferty & Matt Carofano
Lafferty & Carofano introduced an update to their mobile game that is available now before talking about how Blades will come to the Nintendo Switch this Fall. Accounts and progress are promised to be portable between the platforms, it’s still the same free-to-play game.
Fallout 76 Updates with Tom Mustaine & Jeff Gardiner
With an innovation in press briefings Apple could learn from, Lafferty and Carofano handed off to Mustaine and Gardiner without bouncing back up the stack to Todd Howard or Pete Hines. Amazing. They introduced the above trailer for the Wastelanders update which actually has human characters to interact with. The feature list at the end of the trailer:
Human NPCs Return
New Main Quest
Choices & Consequences
New Weapons & Gear
Those things sound a lot more like a Fallout game that I might be interested in playing, and a complete shift from the original pitch of the game which promised that all the human characters would be real people.
The Wastelanders update is due for the Fall.
Of course, no modern first-person game is complete in 2019 without a battle royale mode, and that’s what Fallout 76 is getting in the form of the 52-player Nuclear Winter mode. The winner gets to become vault overseer.
There’s a free trial for 76 from June 10th to the 17th, with an early version of the Nuclear Winter mode. There’s no release date or window for the Nuclear Winter mode. There is a trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4NbPbkNUbc
Todd Howard’s Thanks for the Critcism, Unless You’re a Criminal Journalist here to Lambast our Games
Howard reappeared to reiterate that every update so far is free, and to say that they’re still working on Starfield and the 6th Elder Scrolls game before thanking the audience for their appreciation and criticism. To the best of my knowledge, Bethesda still refuses to ship review copies of games to press.
Ghostwire Tokyo
Shinji Mikami appeared onstage to announce Ghostwire Tokyo, an action-adventure game and Mikami also introduced Ikumi Nakamura to talk about the game. Nakamura said that while Ghostwire Tokyo is spooky, it won’t be a survival horror game like the ones that Mikami is known for (Resident Evil, Evil Within). Instead, this game is about people vanishing in Tokyo, as depicted in the trailer. This was the most interesting game I’ve seen so far at Bethesda’s show, even though I suppose we haven’t really seen the game. No information about a release was given.
The Elder Scrolls Online…
…continues to be a thing. Matt Firor came out to boast about their growing userbase and the latest expansion that apparently is already out, Elsweyr. I’m not sure which is worse, start-up naming schemes or fantasy naming schemes. No, I’m sure, it’s start-ups. Anyway, Firor introduced the above trailer which is the follow-up to an earlier trailer. MMO’s always have interesting looking trailers to compensate for the lack of interactivty in their worlds. This trailer also ended with what Firor called a cliffhanger, but was more of a “to be continued” because nobody was really imperiled at the end. Firor said there would be a “fourth quarter story DLC” called Dragonhold, more information at QuakeCon, and “dungeon DLC” called Scalebreaker which would appear in August. QuakeCon is usually in August, but I think Firor got tripped up by the audience yelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtQjGPfkEe8
Commander Keen
Firor finished up by introducing Kira Schlitt to talk about the mobile game Bethesda is making based on Commander Keen. Schlitt explained what the Keen game’s history is, before showing some gameplay that looks like it has all the worst free-to-play trappings. This summer, iOS and Android, for a “soft launch.” You know what’d be great? Remastering the orginal Keen games.
Pete Hines Returns
Hines said that Fallout shelter game is more popular than ever, and Hines also introduced a trailer for Elder Scrolls Legends, the mobile collectible card game that has been out for some time. Hines talked about an expansion for Legends called Moons of Elsweyr. That is coming on the 27th of June.
Rage 2 Updates
Avalanche and id’s Rage 2 is an odd game, the first game wasn’t a critical success, this one has little to do with it, and the marketing never really matched the gameplay from what I’ve heard. Still, Hines introduced the above trailer for some upcoming updates, including the first story DLC with a release window of “later this year.”
Wolfenstein Updates
With the third id software universe that’s been plundered by Bethesda, this one mostly for the better, Machine Games’ Jerk Gustafsson appeared after the Rage 2 trailer to talk about the previously announced Wolfenstein Cyberpilot VR game. Gustafsson said it’d be out this July. Also in July, on the 26th is the release of co-op FPS Wolfenstein Youngblood, as depicted in the trailer above. I am all for how much Gustafsson is about killing Nazis, he spoke about how fun it is to kill them in VR and in Youngblood, but there’s some cut to that excitement when Zenimax’s board of directors includes Robert Trump who supports his brother’s fascism 100%. We literally have people who came here seeking refuge from the hell their homes have turned into after US intervention, dying in concentration camps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXv5IDp8y74
Deathloop
Arkane’s Dinga Bakaba and Sèbastien Mitton spoke about a new Arkane first-person action game called Deathloop that looks very interesting. Two characters killing each other and then immediately waking up to do it again each time they die could be a Black Mirror episode, but I think that Arkane’s stories are more interesting than TV.
Robert Duffy & James Altman’s Patent Showcase
Duffy and Altman spoke about middleware technologies they had developed for streaming games to have lower latency and require less bandwidth called Orion. They took the time to get a dig in at Oculus with a photo of Tim Willits wearing an early, slapped-together, VR HMD. Finally, they encouraged people to sign up for the “Slayers Club” a corporate-owned alternative to Doomworld that gives you brownie points for doing what they’d want you to do, including signing up to be unpaid QA for Orion streaming solutions. I think I’m good with Doomworld.
This trailer for Doom Eternal put a nice cap on the patent showcase. Hugo Martin and Marty Stratton appeared after the trailer to talk about Doom Eternal and introduce two segments of gameplay that looked fun. Stratton gave a release date of November 22nd. They also talked about a collector’s edition helmet that they had pre-arranged to be worn by an employee in the audience. Bethesda hasn’t had the best track record with collector’s edition merchandise. Stratton and Martin also introduced a trailer for a 2 demons versus 1 doom slayer multiplayer mode seen below.
I’m glad they’re using Doom as a place for interesting multiplayer ideas, but they keep talking about QuakeCon without talking about Quake. Pete Hines even returned to call some portion of QuakeCon, DoomCon. If Quake Champions isn’t working out, it wasn’t mentioned at all, then I have some ideas for updating Quake 1, 2, and 3.
Microsoft’s annual E3-adjacent event for their Xbox sub-brand was today. Here’s what they announced:
Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds was annonced for October 25th, 2019, it’ll be an exclusive to Microsoft platforms since Obsidian was bought out by Microsoft. This is a sci-fi, Borderlands-aesthetic, faux anti-corporate, first-person, single-player, RPG. It’s about a new person shaking up corporate control of colonized worlds. I didn’t really care for the art style, but Obsidian makes good games.
Ninja Theory’s Rahni Tucker and Dom Matthews appeared to talk about how stoked they are to be owned by Microsoft and announce Bleeding Edge. It’s a four versus four team-based multiplayer action game that looks like it’ll have a bit of Ninja Theory’s unique action gameplay. There is a “Technical Alpha” starting on the 27th of June.
Moon Studios’ Ori and the Will of the Wisps had another gameplay trailer, it’s out on February 11th, 2020.
Mojang’s Minecraft Dungeons got announced, it’s an isometric game that looks like it borrows a lot from Diablo in gameplay and of course it’s got that blocky Minecraft aesthetic. 4-player co-op, local and online. Spring 2020 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Windows. Looks like fun.
Phil Spencer’s Soapbox 2019
Spencer showed up about 15 minutes into the show. It’s kind of good that the Xbox division of Microsoft lets developers speak first. The attitude from the audience during this entire thing is completely ridiculous. Press shouldn’t applaud or cheer, so I hope it’s just whatever group of fans that Microsoft lets in making all the noise.
Spencer had nothing of value to say. It was entirely pandering to gamers.
Respawn’s EA’s Jedi: Fallen Order had another trailer. It looks good, I’ll be interested to read reviews when it comes out on November 15th. Don’t pre-order games. It’ll be out on the Xbox One, Windows via Origin, and the PlayStation 4. Where is Titanfall 3?
Blair Witch is a first-person horror game based on the movie, I guess, I’ve never seen the movie. Lots of running in the forest with a camcorder. August 30th. No developer named. Xbox One & Windows.
CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 first-person RPG finally has popped-up thermal collars, a release date of April 16th 2020, every corpo-cop in the sector, a protagonist named V, and Keanu Reeves telling us to “Wake the fuck up, Samurai.”
Reeves also appeared on-stage to talk about the game. It’ll be out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows.
Thunder Lotus’ Spiritfarer is about managing a ferry for the dead. The developers call it “cozy” and I couldn’t disagree. I love the look of this. Xbox One, Windows, PlayStation 4, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, 2020.
Battletoads was a game on the NES so bad that it became notorious. With notoriety it became a meme. As a meme, Microsoft decided that was worth resuscitating. This looks like a pretty standard brawler, with the addition of minecart levels. No release date. Xbox One.
Deskworks’ RPG Time: The Legend of Wright has a colorful hand-made aesthetic of 2D art on 3D pages and pieces of cardboard that looks like it was created from the perspective of a child. Very promising. Xbox One, Windows, iOS, Android. 2020.
id@Xbox had this montage of various indie games. Sarah Bond followed up to talk about the games in the trailer and guarantee they would be on the Xbox Game Pass the first day they’re released.
Bond also guaranteed that every Microsoft Game Studios’ game would be on the subscription service the day they are released.
The previously announced Windows version of the Xbox Game Pass “For PC” (Windows) is in open beta today. It’s a separate $10 subscription from Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass for the Xbox. Here’s the trailer of games they played for the Windows version of Game Pass which promises “Over 100 High-Quality PC Games by August”:
Presumably Xbox Game Pass for Windows doesn’t require Xbox Live for online multiplayer, but bond also announced Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, a $15 subscription that includes the Windows and Xbox One version of Game Pass and Xbox Live Gold.
The open beta appears to be not entirely functional. It requires version 1903 of Windows 10, which Microsoft says is available to anyone who manually checks for updates on Windows 10, but doing so didn’t provide my install with the update. It’s also hard to find the beta installer of this new app, which is linked from this page TK https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/pc-games
Microsoft Flight Simulator is getting rebooted in 2020 for the Xbox One as well as Windows.
Age of Empires II Definitive Edition got announced. It’s a remastered version of the original game, for Windows only.
Inxile Wasteland 3 was announced a few years ago for the ridiculous Fig crowd-funding faux-investment platform, here it got a trailer all about the isometric action-RPG in Colorado. It’s on Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One. Spring 2020.
Matt Booty came out to talk about games games games games games games great games games games games great games and they’ve also acquired Double Fine.
Tim Schafer appeared to joke about DF making Halo Stuff, Forza Stuff, and Excel Stuff, before introducing a new trailer for Psychonauts 2:
The description of that page promises that Psychonauts 2 is still coming to every platform it was announced for, Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
WB’s Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was announced for 2020, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows, Nintendo Switch. They say it’s all nine films in a “brand new” game, so, not redone versions of the original games? We’ll see.
Bandai-Namco’s Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot appears to be an action-RPG with lots of DBZ yelling, powering-up, and drama in addition to fishing, eating, and training with Goku. Those things don’t seem usual for DBZ games, but I wouldn’t know. Early 2020 release window. Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows platforms according to Cyber Connect 2’s Twitter.
Annapurna’s Luis Antonio’s Twelve Minutes looks like an interesting take on the mini-groundhog day nature of stories that repeat themselves. “Coming soon” for Xbox One, Windows.
Anthony Tan’s Way to the Woods was shown again. It’s a third-person game about a deer and fawn adventuring through some version of our world. 2020, Windows, Xbox One. Tan’s video description on YouTube is good. Recommended to click through.
It’s Gears of War 5. I am struggling to stay awake, the protagonist appears to be struggling, too. Rod Fergusson appeared to give a release date, September 10th. Xbox One, Windows. Game Pass Ultimate gives people access a few days early which is kiiind of shitty.
Fergusson introduced this trailer for Gears’ 3-player co-op Escape mode in the under-stage dungeon that also held some wrestlers who are playing the game for some reason:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErqsgG0HRR8
A third trailer said that some people would get to play as an Endoskeleton from Terminator if they pre-order the game or play within the first week. Don’t pre-order games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSaZPvtSIBs
The Xbox Elite Controller is getting an update on November 4th. It finally gets Bluetooth support that the Xbox One S controller has had for years in addition to other promised improvements. Unfortunately there is a now a built-in battery pack, so you can’t use your own recharagable batteries. That isn’t going to be fun when you run out and can’t just swap in recently charged set. It’s $180 for the new version.
Techland’s Dying Light 2 is still in the works. Spring 2020. Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows.
Forza Horizon 4 was released last year, but this year Microsoft announced a bunch of Lego stuff is coming to the game on June 13th in a DLC pack Lego Speed Champions. I am on-board. Finally, the on-stage Forza car is a Lego car.
Funko Pop is objectively awful, Gears POP is that mobile game we talked about last year. It sure looks like a free-to-play game inspired by Clash Royale and absolutely nothing like the majority of the videos we’ve seen so far. iOS, Android. Another sad reminder that Windows Phone is dead. No release date yet. Please don’t encourage the Funko people.
State of Decay Heartland is an expansion for State of Decay 2 that’s out now.
The Free-to-Play Phantasy Star Online 2 is finally coming out next Spring for Windows and Xbox One. It had been available for years, but not localized for English. I’ve played a bit of this through the hacked version that the community had put together.
Phil Spencer introduced SmileGate’s Crossfire X, a ridiculous trailer that contained 0 gameplay. It’s “First to console on Xbox One in 2020.” Apparently the FPS has been around in one form or another since 2007.
Tales of Arise is another Tales game from Bandai Namco. 2020. PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows.
It’s Borderlands 3. I enjoyed 1 & 2, but wow it’s almost like any time I think about this game now, I think about how Randy Pitchford is probably at minimum a creep, and possibly someone who has embezzled money to steal from his employees, assaulted his employees, been a complete dickhead online to everyone, and much more. This game is coming out for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows on September 13th. There’s a free DLC pack to link Borderlands 2 and 3 out now called Commander Lilith & The Fight For Sanctuary. That DLC pack is “free to download” until July 8th if you have Borderlands 2.
Elden Ring is coming from From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazak and Gerorge R.R. Martin’s George R.R. Martin. It’s another fantasy action-RPG from From. Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows, no release date.
Phil Spencer’s xCloud Soapbox
Spencer promised that E3 attendees would get to try the xCloud service at the event. Spencer said that you could stream from your home Xbox or their Xboxes in data centers “wherever you go”
Xbox Project Scarlett is the code name for the next Xbox. All of the technical details in this video are completely ridiculous. 8K, “up-to 120 frames per second” “ray tracing.” I would not buy into what either Sony or Microsoft are selling us about anything besides possibly quicker load times. Any kind of real ray tracing means there won’t be high frame rates, and especially not at an 8K resolution. I am going to bet that some people will be a little upset with Microsoft and Sony for advertising these features that they cannot deliver. Microsoft says that the new console will be available late in 2020. Halo Infinite is the only announced launch game. No information about the size of that SSD.
Here’s the Halo Infinite trailer:
Overall
Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is obviously extremely compelling as a “Netflix for games,” just like EA’s Origin subscriptions and Apple’s Arcade could be. The first problem with these subscriptions is that they can be assumed to be a little like a pyramid scheme for developers. Presumably the first people on board with the subscription services get better marketing placement and better cuts. If these subscriptions become the dominant way that we get our games, the middlemen providing the subscriptions will look to decrease the developers’ cuts over time until it’s like Spotify and Apple Music with artists receiving 0.0002 cents per play.
The second problem is the same as with streaming platforms, a decreased ability to preserve the games for the future. Some day the Xbox platform won’t exist. Microsoft will be out of business. The games that are exclusive to their platforms could be lost forever.
The only platform I know of that isn’t directly opposed to game preservation is Humble’s subscription service, but even that only provides DRM-free downloads for some of the games.
Lastly, ongoing subscription billing services are the parasites that corporations are desperately seeking to attach to our bank accounts at every turn. As fun as it is to have access to more music, movies, games, and shows than we could ever consume, there are just too many of these services. It’s the greatest irony that the introduction to this year’s show was The Outer Worlds with a trailer that was incredibly faux-anti-corporate when it’s produced by a subsidiary of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Apple held their annual World-Wide Developer Conference event in San Jose, California today. Here’s what they announced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa5p19APgd8
The event opened with this ad romanticizing overworked developers.
Tim Cook’s Services Showcase
Tim Cook hosted and reiterated how great he thinks Apple is, and briefly recapped their services event. As if to fix their perplexing lack of trailers or clips of their original TV programming (Apple TV+) from the services event, Cook introduced a clip for For All Mankind. It’s the Ron Moore-led show about the Russians winning the space race, and it was extremely incongruous with the rest of the event.
tvOS Updates
Cook introduced a redesigned home-screen for tvOS with full-screen background previews of shows.
Up next, multi-user support for tvOS so you only see your shows. A blessing for parents who never wanted Game of Thrones mixed with Sesame Street. Unless it’s in a Sesame Street parody of Game of Thrones, which I am ready for.
As an aside, Cook showed how you could swap users in tvOS using a new control-center menu that looks like it is available via a swipe in from the right.
The components in the new tvOS control center showed the time, date, profile pictures for the different tvOS users, a quick option to put the Apple TV to sleep, music controls, the audio output dingus which will be handy for AirPod users, and a search icon.
Cook showed that users would have personalized music options, again, my recommendations will no-longer be destroyed by the music I play for my family. Fantastic. This multi-user stuff needs to be on every Apple device.
The updated Apple Music app for tvOS would display lyrics while you’re listening.
Apple Arcade was demonstrated with Oceanhorn 2.
Cook promised that the Apple TV would now support the Xbox One S and the PlayStation Dual Shock 4 controllers, which both have Bluetooth functionality. This is fantastic because the only MFi controller that has clickable thumbsticks is wired. I believe this functionality is coming to iOS as well.
Screensavers are getting updated with underwater vistas in collaboration with the BBC’s Natural History team.
watchOS 6
Cook boasted the current functionality of the watches Apple makes before introducing Kevin Lynch to talk about new features.
Lynch promised “more watch faces this year since the very first Apple Watch.” I think he meant that there are more new faces this year than there have ever been before.
Lynch demonstrated five new faces. A gradient face that moves an angled gradient with the minute hand. A “large numerals face” that showed the current hour in multiple languages. A modern digital face with huge chunky numbers. Finally, a hideous analog California dial with roman numerals (X, XI, I, II) above the horizontal midpoint of the watch and traditional Arabic numbers (8, 7, 5, 4) below. Finally, a new solar face that had multiple circles to represent the movement of the sun during the day.
According to Lynch he new faces would have an optional hourly chimes that they call Taptic Chimes. Each hour you’d either feel a nudge on your wrist from the “taptic engine” of the watch or if sound is on you’d hear something like a bird singing with the new modern face. This is extremely obnoxious. I can’t imagine anyone using it.
There are also new apps for the Apple Watch, an audiobook app for books purchased through Apple’s book store and a Voice Memos app to match the phone’s. Another new app is an Apple-provided calculator.
Finally, WatchOS gets apps that run only on the Watch. Previously, every Watch app had to have a companion app for the iPhone, even when that made little sense.
In the first actual nod to developers for the event, Lynch promised new APIs. An Extended Runtime API lets apps run for longer. Lynch specifically called out that this would be for apps using sensor data, like meditation, exercise, or tooth brushing.
A new-to-the-watch Streaming Audio API would let developers stream audio over the network. Three examples were given, podcasts (Outcast app), music (Pandora), and the MLB’s watch app with the Phillies versus the Brewers.
Lynch also promised a new UI framework this year.
Independent apps also mean that the watch gets its own App Store app to browse for & install new apps.
Dr. Sumbal Desai, Apple’s Vice President of Health was introduced to talk about new health and fitness features for the Watch.
Desai promised an updated Activity app with more long-term information through trending data. The updated app is supposed to provide new data points that weren’t previously exposed.
One of the new features of the Watch is the new Noise app that monitors your auditory environment and alerts you when it’s so noisy that you could damage your hearing. There’s also a complication for the watch face to display the current noise level.
Desai promised that the Noise app wouldn’t record or save audio, and instead just sample the volume every so-often.
Another new feature for the Watch is the Cycle Tracking app for period tracking. It’ll also be available in the iOS Health app.
Lynch returned to discuss a newly redesigned iOS Health app. A Summary view provides health related notifications and other summarily-provided information. He also promised that all of your health information would be private and securely-stored on your iPhone or encrypted in their data centers.
WatchOS program lead Haley Allen demonstrated the new watchOS functionality. Allen started with a new watch face, the Modular Compact face that had four items on the screen, a large analog dial in the upper right, two new complications (Wind and Rain) on the left side, and a large complication space in the bottom with an upcoming calendar item. Allen replaced the large calendar complication with a Noise complication to measure the environmental volume and had the audience cheer to raise the volume.
Allen moved on to the Infograph Modular face with a pretty cool two-tone color scheme of whte numerals with red highlights. Allen demonstrated the audiobook complication that let her tap to get back into the audiobook watch app.
The new app store was demoed, and it looks fine, although it isn’t clear how easy it will be to navigate from these short demos.
Finally, Allen demonstrated the MLB app streaming Red Sox versus Orioles game.
Lynch returned with the traditional “didn’t have time” feature jumble and mentioned that the watch would finally update itself without requiring the user to do so on their iPhone.
Lynch said there would be new watch bands and colors, he specifically called out a new pride band.
Apple shortchanges all of their retail workers equally when they make people line up for mandatory off-the-clock searches before being allowed to leave at the end of their shift.
iOS 13
Cook returned to move things back to iOS and introduced Craig Federighi who joked about the tremendous creativity behind the iOS 13 name, and then moved on to talking about how much performance has increased in current devices with the new operating system.
Federighi gave some examples and said that Face ID would be 30% faster to unlock devices.
Apps would be packaged differently for iOS 13, and would be 50% smaller to download and updates would somehow be 60% smaller. Who knows how much work is involved on the part of developers to attain those numbers, and what exactly is going on. Compression, selective assets, it could be any number of things and those could be effective or not across a wide variety of apps and games.
Apps, Federighi said, would launch twice as quickly on iOS 13.
Moving on to new features, Federighi introduced a video advertising the new iOS dark mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Jg4Wm9b7o
Dark Mode is a feature that debuted on macOS last year. Federighi demonstrated it in use on an iPhone, starting with the lock screen switching from a light version of a wallpaper and theme to a darker version. He moved on to News, which will no-longer blind you in the middle of the night, then swapped to the Calendar, Notes, and Messages. It’s a feature that should have been on iOS as soon as OLED screens became an option.
While in Messages Federighi demonstrated that the keyboard, also updated for dark mode, has swiping functionality. He later called it the “quick path keyboard”.
Federighi showed that the new share sheet in photos also adjusted to dark mode, and it had sharing suggestions in addition to a redesigned interface for sharing to apps and actions.
The darkness embraced the music app, which also has time-synched lyrics just like the TV Music app.
Federighi exited the darkness and talked about other app updates.
Safari is promised to have quick functionality to scale the text of the site you’re viewing, and per-site preferences.
Mail is to get “…desktop-class text formatting, including support for rich fonts.”
Notes has a new gallery overview, shared folders, and “much more.”
Reminders has been “completely reinvented” and “completely rewritten from the ground-up.” It’s supposed to give you suggestions of when or where you might want to be reminded, a quick-type bar lets you quickly add locations or photos to your reminders.
To-do lists can be embedded inside a top-level reminder for more organizational functionality. People can be tagged in a reminder so you’re reminded to talk to them about something you wanted to remember.
The Maps app is supposedly updated with new information from a fleet of Apple’s mapping vehicles. The entire US is to have the new data by the end of the year.
Meg Frost was introduced for a demonstration of the new maps app. She’s wheelchair bound and has what I can honestly say is the most awesome looking wheelchair I’ve ever seen.
The redesigned Maps app has a horizontally-scrolling list of categorized favorites under the search bar, collections of places in a vertical list, and then your recently viewed places.
Finally, there’s a street view mode with a binocular icon that launches users into a “look-around” view that appears comparable to Google’s app.
Federighi returned to quickly list off a few more changes to the maps app. A junction view for China that lets people see how traffic will flow in an upcoming intersection, and ETA sharing via quick on-screen shortcuts.
Federighi reiterated his company’s commitment to privacy with another word jumble and then talked about new privacy controls. Location could be shared with an app just once, and then it’d have to ask for approval the next time. You’ll also get regular alerts to apps using your location in the background, and said they wouldn’t allow apps to scan WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track your location.
Federighi promised that Apple would create a new single-sign on functionality for streamlining logins to apps without third-party services or new accounts. It’ll be up to the developer to support this method of sign-on. Federighi promised that this would create a new account for the app without revealing “… any new personal information.” Signing in would use Face ID, or presumably Touch ID. Developers can optionally request your name and e-mail address. Users can optionally share a one-time email address that Apple creates on the spot to forward mail from that app. Federighi said that you could delete the new address at any time to stop receiving mail from that app.
This will inhibit situations where, for example, you want to log into the web version of an app, so it isn’t clear to me how that will work but Federighi said that it’ll work on websites. It won’t work in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge unless Apple has built something for those browsers.
Next, Federighi talked about a new feature of HomeKit, Secure Video, for home security cameras to analyze video locally (on an iPad, HomePod, or Apple TV box) instead of on remote servers. When the video is uploaded, it’ll go to iCloud but be encrypted and Federighi promised that Apple can’t even see the video.
Federighi said that storage for 10 days of video recordings would be included in existing iCloud accounts, and that this video storage wouldn’t count against iCloud storage limits.
The first companies to support this new Secure Video functionality are Netatmo, Logitech, and Eufy. At leat two of those sound like Pokemon.
Federighi promised that there would be HomeKit enabled routers which just makes it even more infuriating that they stopped developing their AirPort line of network routers. HomeKit-enabled routers would segregate the network connections of internet-of-things devices. Federighi said that Linksys, Amazon-owned Eero, and the Spectrum ISP would make these routers at first.
Moving back to Messages, Federighi immediately sherlocked Casey Liss’s Vignette by saying that you could optionally share your name and photo with people you message so they wouldn’t just get a random phone number.
Federighi introduced popular YouTube spec workers’ “Memoji” avatars to talk about new features for those avatars. There are a ton of new features, here’s the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x7_w9Oz8lQ
After the video, Federighi spoke about Memoji stickers. These could replace regular emoji with automatically generated Memoji versions of the regular emojis. It’s interesting that these are also included in the system keyboard, and Federighi said that the customized stickers would work in mail or other apps.
Finally, Federighi said that users without FaceID, but who had at least an A9 SoC, could create, edit, and share Memoji. Although they wouldn’t be animated without the iPhone and iPad Pro sensor suite.
The Camera and Photo apps have also been updated.
New Portrait Mode features include “high key mono,” and you’ll be able to move the virtual portrait lighting lights further or closer to your subject.
Edits are promised to be easier to make, have new features, and be available for video as well. You can finally rotate a video while editing without using another app.
Browsing photos is to be easier, separating out screenhots and photos of things like receipts, and organizing photos to only show a single photo of a particularly scene instead of every duplicate.
Justin Titi demonstrated the new Photos app, and how it organizes photos into easier collections of days, months, years, or still allows users to dig into every photo.
Federighi returned to introduce Stacy Leizeig (not sure on the spelling of that name) to talk about AirPods, HomePods, CarPlay, and Siri updates for iOS 13.
AirPods can optionally announce incoming messages as soon as they come in, so you can reply immediately. Leizeig said this would work with any messaging application that uses Apple’s SiriKit API.
Audio sharing will be available in iOS 13 to share audio between multiple devices. There is a user consent dialog before this happens, and audio is controlled independently.
Leizeig said that people could use the HandOff API to share music or a podcast to a HomePod by holding their device close to the HomePod. Recovering the listening session happens by the same gesture.
Siri is promised to have live radio access with over a hundred-thousand live stations.
The HomePod will finally recognize multiple speakers and personalize answers and data for Messages, Music, Reminders, Notes, and so on.
CarPlay updates include a new dashboard view with more information. Siri is promised to stay “out of the way” and not obscure the entire display. We need that functionality on regular iOS.
Siri Shortcuts is built into iOS 13 and “more powerful than ever.” The Shortcuts app will make more suggestions about multi-step shortcuts that might be useful to you.
The Siri voice in iOS 13 is promised to be entirely software generated for the first time, as opposed to generated using clips of different speech sounds to create each word. I hope this fixes Siri’s pronounciation of Hawaiian names, because it’s pretty awful. Leizeig compared iOS 12’s Siri to iOS 13’s Siri pronouncing a complex sentence scientifically describing absolute zero. The iOS 13 Siri sounded much more natural and human.
iPadOS
Federighi returned to close out the iOS 13 discussion and talk about the split to iPadOS. He introduced a video that has not been excerpted onto Apple’s YouTube channel yet, it showed new functionality that would be exclusive to the iPad.
Federighi demonstrated the newly defined iPadOS. He showed that an iPad Pro (2018) running iPad OS with more icons on the home screen, and by swiping over from the left, the widgets previously on their own home screen are now visible on the regular screen.
Multitasking is improved by giving slide-over windows their own grab handle at the bottom of the slide-over window that lets you quickly choose a recent window.
Split-view was demonstrated in Notes by grabbing a note from the list and splitting it off into a different split-view window. Finally. The iPad has been available for almost 10 years and multitasking needs these improvements.
Federighi demonstrated dragging and dropping individual notes next to other “spaces” with other apps open in other windows. App Expose would allow you to see any fullscreen space with a Note open, in Federighi’s example.
Federighi also demonstrated two Microsoft Word documents side-by-side in SplitView.
Federighi then demonstrated splitting e-mail composition into a new window while continuing to browse through other emails before dragging and dropping an image from another e-mail he had received to the e-mail he was composing. He also showed previewing a link in another e-mail, and then dragging that link and dropping the link into the e-mail he was composing.
An e-mail in the background joked about screensavers for iPad OS, including Flying Toasters. I’ll be holding out for the Dancing Disco Pig.
Federighi also talked about improvements to the Files app. New views like icon and list views. A Column view with previews, and quick actions.
iCloud Drive will finally get folder sharing.
The Files app in iPadOS is to get Samba sharing, it sounded like it was just to access network shares and not share from iOS.
Finally, the Files app will get external storage support for thumb-drives, SD cards, and other connected drives. Holy shit this took forever.
Finally, you can import directly from a camera into an app (Lightroom was the example) instead of going through iCloud Photos.
Safari is also getting updated on the iPad with “Desktop-class browsing” so that iPad users won’t get served the mobile version of websites.
Federighi specifically said that browser apps like Google Docs, Squarespace, and WordPress would work better now.
As rumored, Safari is getting a download manager. There will also be 30 new keyboard shortcuts for Safari.
Also rumored, fonts are easier to manage in iOS 13. They’ll be downloadable from the App Store. Fonts have been an important focus of Apple’s software for as long a very long time, this is a big Finally for iOS. It will be interesting to see how fonts are managed, and if they will be freely loadable without going through the App Store.
iPadOS multitouch is supposed to be easier. Federighi showed a giant hand grabbing the page scroll indicator directly on a long document, grabbing the cursor while editing a note and moving it easier while also adjusting that movement into a selection. A new gesture enables copy and paste on the iPad. Once text is selected it is possible to copy by pinching with three fingers and then pasting by moving the cursor and spreading three fingers out.
A three-finger swipe left is the new iPad undo gesture. Federighi joked about how people won’t have to shake-to-undo the iPad anymore.
The Apple Pencil latency is supposed to be reduced from 20 miliseconds to 9 miliseconds. The Pencil drawing tools are improved and available to third-party developers via a new API called PencilKit.
iPadOS 13 will allow you to mark-up “…anything on any app” by dragging up with the pencil from the corner of the screen to get a screenshot of the screen and mark it up. This is said to also work with an entire document, instead of just the currently visible screen area.
Toby Patterson was introduced to show off iPadOS’ new editing functionality, including bringing up a small iPhone-sized keyboard for typing with one hand. He accessed that new small keyboard by pinching the large keyboard with two fingers. Patterson was visibly flustered when trying to demonstrate some of the text selection gestures, which weren’t cooperating with him.
Patterson said you could still shake to undo, but he also showed off the new three-finger swipe. He said these gestures would work in any application that supports cut, copy, and paste with undo and redo, not just text-based document applications.
Moving onto the Pencil’s new tool pallete. Patterson showed it being dragged and dropped around the screen, so it could get out of the way of his work. It can be pinned to the edge, or minimized out of the way.
Patterson also showed the markup mode, and how it works with screenshots and can be toggled in apps that support it to the document mark-up mode.
Mac Pro 2019
Cook was brought back out to move things to the Mac Pro. John Siracusa’s dreams have come true. After a decade he can finally get a new 2019 Advanced-Cheese Grater Mac Pro.
John Ternus was introduced to talk about the long overdue replacement for the Trashcan Mac Pro. The Intel Xeon-based computer supports up to 28 cores.
The RAM is 2933Mhz ECC RAM, 6 memory channels, there are 12 DIMM slots. You could havce up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM.
Ternus said the new Mac Pro has 8 internal PCI-express slots. Four double-wide, three single-wide, and one additional half-wide slot that has IO ports. That card has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A ports, and a regular 3.5 mm audio minijack. There are two more Thunderbolt 3 ports on the top of the computer.
There are two gigabit ethernet ports near the power connector at the bottom of the back of the 2019 Mac Pro.
Ternus said there is a new Mac Pro Expansion (MPX) module specifically for containing video cards that has it’s own 500 watts of power, a regular x16 PCI express edge connector, and then an additional PCI express/ DisplayPort/Power thing on the end. The starting graphics card would be a Radeon Pro 580X. I’m a little confused by that part, because it sounds like the 2017 Radeon Pro 580. Another option for graphics is the Radeon Pro Vega II, or two of those Vega II GPUs. I really wish the Nvidia and Apple feud would end so some other competing options could be availalbe.
Ternus called the dual Vega II configuration “The world’s most powerful graphics card.” before he introduced another marketing term, the Infinity Fabric Link, which supposedly lets data move between the GPUs five times faster than the PCI express bus.
Ternus said you could also configure the new Mac Pro with two dual Vega IIs modules.
Ternus talked about an add-on card for editing ProRes and ProRes RAW video. This card has a custom ASIC that allows the Mac Pro to process huge video data streams. Ternus said the Mac Pro could play 3 8K ProRes RAW streams.
The new Mac Pro has a 1.4 kiloWatt power supply. Ternus said that “under typical load conditions” the new three-fans-and-one-blower thermal cooling setup in the new Mac Pro is as quiet as an iMac Pro.
There are optional wheels for the Mac Pro.
Ternus boasted about the third-parties that are working with Apple for the new Mac Pro and specifically boasted about performance beating an Nvidia+Windows configuration.
David Earl was introduced to talk about Logic and Final Cut, and showed adding hundreds of instruments to a soundtrack for a documentary. He added about a thousand tracks and then worked with 8K video.
The starting price for this Mac Pro $6000. The availability was given as “this Fall.”
There will also be a special version of the 2019 Mac Pro for rack-mount configurations.
Apple Pro Display XDR
Colleen Novielli was brought out to talk about the new display for the new Mac Pro. She compared it to a pro display that costs $43,000. The APDXDR is 32 inches and has a resolution of 6016 x 3384. Novielli called it a 6K Retina Display. The new display was said to support P3 wide color gamut, 10-bit color, and has Reference modes built-in. Novielli said the display has contrast that is 25x better than a typical LCD.
Novielli also said there was a superior matte option available for the display that doesn’t degrade image quality compared to older technologies.
This display is supposed to maintain higher brightness levels, 1000 nits in perpituity, 1600 nits at the peak. Novielli said the display would have a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
Novielli said the 15 inch MacBook Pro can have two of these displays connected, while the new Mac Pro can have six of these displays connected.
The arm for the display is custom, and supposedly makes the monitor feel weightless while it is being adjusted. There is also an optional VESA mounting adapter.
The Apple Pro Display XDR costs $5000. There is also a “Nano-Textured” version of the display that costs $6000. The VESA adapter is $200. The “Pro-stand” is a laughable $1000. If you don’t have either I guess you’ve gotta get some plywood and screws out or keep it on your lap?
macOS 10.15 Catalina’s iTunes Breakdown
Cook returned to summon Craig Federighi to talk about the new version of macOS.
Federighi walked us through some of the features of iTunes added over the past 18 years, paused to joke about adding Mail and Safari and a Dock to iTunes, before introducing a split of iTunes into three apps. Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV. It wasn’t immediately clear if the new app would still support local libraries of music and features like iTunes Match.
Federighi talked about how the Apple Music experience would be better in the new app before introducing the idea that sync for iOS devices would be moved to the Finder app.
Apple Podcasts gets its own app, as well. Federighi said that the new Podcasts app has machine learning’d it up to scan the spoken word content of the podcasts so you can search for the actual content instead of just the name or episode title.
The Apple TV app is split off into its own app. Federighi boasted that the new app would support 4K HDR playback supporting HDR-10, Dolby Atmos, and Dolby Vision standards.
The rumored iPad-as-external-display feature is real, and it is called Sidecar. Goodbye to the podcast ads? This functionality supports the Apple Pencil, and works wired or wirelessly.
Accessibility
Federighi introduced an accessibility ad for new voice features to control Macs and iOS, as well as rich text composition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqoXFCCTfm4
Find My
As rumored, Find My iPhone and Find My Friends have been combined for both iOS and macOS into one app just called Find My. Apparently devices will now emit Bluetooth signals so you can track them down even when they are offline, via a mesh network of Apple devices. Federighi promises that this is encrypted and anonymous.
Activation Lock
Macs with the T2 security chip (an ARM SoC from Apple) get the ability to be locked down via activation lock.
macOS 10.15 Catalina, Again
Federighi talked about how the new updates to Photos would make it to this version of macOS, along with an updated start page in Safari, and the new gallery view in Notes. Reminders is also coming to macOS along with Screen Time.
Project Catalyst (Marzipan?)
Federighi’s got a marketing name for the stuff that brought shit iPad versions of News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home to macOS Mojave. Federighi says that this new cross-platform support is much improved, the slides are not very convincing.
In terms of third-party support, Federighi boasted about the racing game Asphalt, Twitter’s iPad client which is not somebody I want to hear about when they hate third-party developers to a degree that is profoundly disturbing for the long-term success of that platform. Finally, Federighi introduced somebody from Atlassian to talk about Jira for the Mac. Zzz. it’ll be in the Mac App Store this Fall.
Catalyst is available to developers in Xcode preview today. No multiple window support was demonstrated. I am not hopeful that this feature is at all improved over the awful News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home apps on macOS today.
AR
Federighi talked about the new AR API RealityKit, for developers that don’t have experience with existing game engines. Reality Composer is a new app as part of Xcode, or for iOS and iPad. It has a bunch of pre-existing models to stuff into your app. Very strange. ARKit 3 was demonstrated with a new people occlusion feature to allow for people to be better placed in-between AR models. Motion capture was also demonstrated.
Minecraft Earth AR Demo
It wouldn’t be a modern Apple event without an awkward demo featuring VR or AR. VR is a little out of fashion, so it’s an AR demo from Lydia Winters and Saxs Persson of Mojang. I’m not sure how many people will want to hold an iPhone or iPad for hours to view an AR version of Minecraft called Minecraft Earth. All things considered this demo could have been much worse.
SwiftUI
Federighi returned to talk about a new framework for the Swift programming language, SwiftUI. Federighi gave an example of a huge list that would be a huge piece of code but minimized when it was converted to the SwiftUI framework.
Federighi said that new features would be brought to apps with SwiftUI automatically, like Dark Mode. He also said that there’s a new interactive, upgraded preview type of thing in Xcode for SwiftUI. Federighi compared it to Swift Playgrounds but said it was much more powerful.
Josh Schafer was brought out to demo SwiftUI’s new editor in Xcode. He made a joke app to make up phony versions of MacOS, and immediately showed his changes both in the Xcode Preview as well as on a live iPhone.
Federighi returned to say that the SwiftUI framework was also available for watchOS, and all Apple platforms.
Cook’s Close-out Deals
Cook returned to tell us that developers betas were available for all of the new operating systems and software today, with public betas in July. The usual promised release window for the new operating systems was “The Fall.”
Overall
The world’s most performant Mac Pro is great if you’re working on movies or high-end audio production Apple still can’t ship a reliable laptop keyboard or a tower for normal people who aren’t at Pixar. It’s also not clear at all what storage upgrades for the Mac Pro will look like, I’m not sure if the word “T2” was mentioned during the keynote, but the product page for the new Mac Pro mentions the dedicated ARM SoC Apple calls T2 so it seems like you might be limited to add-on PCI-express modules or hooking up external peripheral storage. This is especially galling on the base-model Mac Pro that only includes 256GB of storage.
The display that costs extra if you want to put it somewhere besides flat on your floor is just the ridiculous cherry-on-top of unapproachable high-end hardware.
The OS update for the Mac was couched in the end of iTunes, which will hopefully still be available if some functionality is missing from the new Music, Podcast, and TV apps. Windows users, are of course still suck with the worst version of iTunes.
iCloud is still capped to an increasingly paltry 5GBs of free storage. I am very tired of reading help posts from iPhone users online who have lost their entire photo and video library when their phone breaks and they couldn’t afford enough iCloud storage. Somehow Apple has deemed the subset of their user base that has home video security cameras more important than the millions of iPhone users who would refuse to pay for secure backups.
One way that Apple could work around this is with their own home network router that had a disk inside for backups of all your devices, but the AirPort line of routers is dead and I am sad about that.
I’m not sure how much I buy the split of iOS and iPadOS, it didn’t seem like this event was organized to emphasize that split, but I am glad that they’re working on the iPad to make it a better competitor to a traditional laptop computer. Still, there are so many limitations of an iPad compared to a modern Mac. For example, there is still no generally available multi-user mode for the iPad. The HomePod is getting that feature first, I’m glad the HomePod is going to be more useful, but it’s ridiculous and looks more like a cash grab that everyone in a house needs their own iPad if they want it to be tailored to their uses.
I am a little concerned that the only way improvements can come to these platforms is bundled in a cute marketing name. The iPad needs more improvements yet to be more competitive as a laptop replacement, maybe we don’t need our home screen to be just a list of apps and a select few widgets. Maybe a home screen could include files and be arranged however someone wants it, just like a real computer. Apple is so slowly trickling out features to the iPad, I’m looking forward to more. Perhaps they’ll come faster with the rebranding to iPadOS.
The most important Pro app for iPads to be a full computer and ship their own apps is Xcode, and we still don’t have it. Until an iPad can ship iPad software without any other device, I’m not sure Apple is really onboard with the iPad as a real computer.
