The E3 Breakdown

So E3 is upon us again this year, and this time I'm actually watching the conference live (via Nerdcubed). So I decided to give my take on the conferences and games that are being showcased this year. Without further ado, let us begin!

EA
Starting off, I feel like it isn't the best thing to open a games expo by touting your paid DLC for a game that's been out for a year. I have to admit, EA is not the studio for me; short of Garden Warfare I don't play much of their stock, and my Origin account doesn't go beyond retro stuff and free giveaway games. But I still find it disappointing that their Sports branch can't open their minds beyond the annual ball games - Madden, NBA, FIFA, I have little to no interest in these sports. I'd be interested in seeing something like a climbing simulator (beyond Ubisoft's Grow Home there's nothing that compares, save for a kinect sports bit that was not fantastic) or an extreme sports video game. And the latest Need for Speed shows a lack of imagination and an over-reliance on cutscenes, there was perhaps a minute of gameplay to the same of cutscenes.

The high points: A Way Out looks genuinely interesting, and the guy presenting it seemed genuinely interested and passionate about it. Oh! And it turns out he's a director! Also, props to Janina Gavankar for being so enthusiastic and interesting about Star Wars BattleFront 2. Personally I find it dull as dishwater when I can have massive battles in the original, and I'm not seeing just two other people on-screen at any one time, but I'm glad they finally got it in gear and got some decent, energetic people to present it.

EA just isn't my studio, they're not making things I'm particularly interested in. But the sports games looked good and polished, and although Need for Speed Payback felt very farmed-out, there was nothing truly offensive there. Star Wars Battlefront 2 drew my ire because it felt like a step backwards but overall it was bland save for a couple of spots where their presenters seemed to actually know what they were doing.

Microsoft
Microsoft came out strong with some good-looking ads, but their overall presentation fell flat thanks to characterless presenters. Ads were allowed to run on with no commentary and no narration, and after the big noise and demonstrations of the EA conference this one felt muted and a little tame. You could tell how scripted it was, there was no stand-out presenter. Although props to Sea of Thieves from Rare, whose trailer was bursting with personality! A lot of the indie darlings looked vibrant and fun, and there are a lot of games coming to the system which seem like they're pushing the boundaries of gaming. Unfortunately their main showpieces were nothing special, Forza Motorsport failing to grab knowing the vibrancy and freedom of Horizon 2 and 3. Metro Exodus, The Darwin Project, and State of Decay 2 all fail to stick in the mind, and Deep Rock Galactic looks like a spider-filled version of Astroneers, which I am noping straight out of right now.

I'm kinda disappointed that this system which is touting itself as a platform for all gamers doesn't have any focus on puzzle games, because the only games I'm interested in as of now are Sea of Thieves and Middle Earth: Shadow of War. There were one or two smaller offerings that caught my eye but honestly they went by so fast I couldn't catch their names. Which sucks when we get several minutes of pre-rendered footage for Metro Exodus and Assassin's Creed Origins. There's a point where I wonder if it's worth plugging in my Xbox, because there's nothing else I want to play beyond the things I already have, and most of those I've played to death. I'm sure I've missed several dozen games (and I have, because there are some 42 Xbox games announced in this conference and I've named seven), but there were so few they actually paid attention to that I can't pay attention to them either.

Bethesda
This has been a conference I was looking forward to, so it's an absolute pain that it was at 5am. But I woke up on time and watched it, and if I'm honest I kinda wish I'd stayed asleep for the first ten minutes. DOOM VFR and Fallout 4 VR are hugely tempting me to save up for a Vive and a computer powerful enough to run it, but nothing else was noteworthy. A Quake tournament just makes me gag, The Evil Within 2 looks utterly uninspired, Wolfenstein 2 had me disappointed because I clocked that it was a Wolfenstein game early into the trailer and I was bored because I wanted a new IP. They were all first-person shooters and if I'm honest I'm kinda bored of shooters.

Oh, and doubly screw them if it turns out that Creation Club is just a marketplace for paid mods. I saw horse armour in there, people, and we've done that whole song and dance before. Twice.

UPDATE: clarification, no current mods will be allowed into Creation Club. Bethesda are running it more like an actual business. Ideas get pitched, Bethesda works with the creators to get them created, there are milestones and whatnot. It seems from the FAQ that they're talking about modders because the sort of content they want to see for their games - new items, locations, new quests - is the sort of thing they're already attempting. Bethesda is simply going to pay them as external developers for creating professional-level content.

Devolver Digital
I... Did they announce anything real?

Okay, Mahria Zook as Nina Struthers was amazing. She was hilarious and intense and it was a great conference. I laughed for the first time at this expo. But the post-pre-pre-post-post-whatever show was just bad. The games they played were hilarious, although apparently they're not actual Devolver games? I have no idea, I don't know what to believe about this conference. Anyway, the aftershow pre-show post-show-show was like watching bad improv, there were people shouting and that was the joke. It was exactly the sort of humour I hate.

But fair play to them for actually playing the games.

PC Gaming Show
The PC Gaming Show was an interesting one. By rights there were a lot of things I should be excited for - Battlemech sounds really cool, there was a new Total War game, Warhammer II, and of course they announced Middle Earth: Shadow of War and a remastered Age of Empires Deluxe Edition. But it was like watching a bunch of adverts. There was no style to the substance, and although what substance was there seemed promising, I'm not interested in the Total War series for its Warhammer ties and Intel taking the main stage to announce their Destiny tournament sucked the life out of the place. Nobody was particlarly excited about their own games and it was disappointing.

I don't have a lot to say about this one because they didn't announce anything really beyond tactical games which felt built for MOBA combat rather than single-player strategy, and that worried me because I'm a single player kinda guy. And I'd be less disappointed in Total War if their original Warhammer tie-in weren't still full price.

Ubisoft
Hey! This was actually a pretty good start! Watching them open with Mario and Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was brilliant, because they seemed to be having fun, there was a lot of energy on-stage, and sure it might have ended a little awkwardly but it was fun while it lasted.

Sadly, everything after that was a monument to Ubisoft excess and unnecessary faff within games. Assassin's Creed: Origins, The Crew 2, Transference VR... all their games had that air of unoriginality whilst still displaying the brand of ubisoft "iconic" that is empty and meaningless. Assassin's Creed: Origins not only made me think of the worst X-Men movie with that subtitle, it cribbed Watch Dogs 2's drone cam in the form of an eagle which makes zero sense, and while I understand it as a game mechanic it feels like typical ubisoft everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mentality, they are loathe to throw out a mechanic. And beyond their first-person-horror VR game, and pirate game (hey, we've had pirates before in E3 this year! What a coincidence!) Skull & Bones, they had nothing original. Although I imagine there are many people who are ecstatic at the prospect of Beyond Good and Evil 2.

Look, I think Ubisoft just got unlucky this year. They certainly came out with the best original game thanks to Mario and Rabbids, and Just Dance is always fun. But nothing really stuck in my head: even Far Cry 5, which looked in some ways interesting, just felt like more of the same, and the attack-dog mechanics made it feel a lot like Fallout 4, and I have Fallout 4 for that already. I'm chalking this one up to bad luck.

Sony
Honestly, looking at my list of announcements for Sony, I'm not feeling any pang of recognition. Another Uncharted game - I don't play them; a remake of Shadow of the Colossus - never interested me; Detroit: Become Human - I've already forgotten it; Spider-man - It looks like every other third-person brawler out there. As does Days Gone. Nothing really stuck out, beyond the wildly colourful Monster Hunter World and Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, and if they don't have Moon Knight in the latter I shall disregard it entirely.

Their VR games were where the main action was happening: beyond Skyrim VR, a foregone conclusion given Bethesda announcing just about every other one of their IPs being virtual reality games too, most everything else was an original IP. That's not to say they were good-looking, however, and I found the weird mix of third-person side-scrolling platformers to be a strange thing to bring to VR. I mean, what's the point? It doesn't add anything to a game of that sort to watch the character run from one side to the other in virtual reality, any more than it adds to a fine meal if you shake the customer about and push their face in it while they're trying to eat. It annoys me, more than the typical horror offering of The Inpatient, which is set in that most unoriginal of settings, the abandoned insane asylum. And Bravo Team looked positively dull: they've turned a brown military shooter into a brown VR military shooter, how novel! The only thing I found remotely interesting was the Final Fantasy XV spin-off, Monster of the Deep.

Poor show, Sony. Poor show.

Nintendo
And finally, Nintendo! What did we get with Nintendo?

Well we got a bunch of adverts for Switch games, mostly, and a lot of them made me damn well want a switch. Kirby and Yoshi getting their plush, cuddly outings got me watching, interest piqued. Splatoon 2 made me sit up and take notice; and honestly the idea of playing Rocket League on a switch sounds amazing. I had to look up a lot of this on youtube, based on the things I knew were announced - it turned out to be difficult, finding a full livestream, because it seemed to end rather suddenly after twenty-five minutes - but Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Fire Emblem Warriors and Metroid Prime 4 were all announced. They're not things I've been hugely interested in before, but they were enough to keep me going (but please Nintendo, you don't need to make your RPG trailers as long as the RPGs themselves! Okay?) and I was impressed with just how much they were announcing and touting when all I had hitherto heard of the Switch was that it had maybe ten games, and one which was at all decent.

Speaking of, plenty of Breath of the Wild DLC, ugh!

The Verdict
Honestly I expected E3 to be more exciting. Everyone seems to rave about it whenever it comes around, but it was such a dull affair - I guess you have to be in the industry to really get it. And while I was excited about the prospect of some games (I already have Shadow of War on my wishlist) there was nothing that particularly grabbed me that I hadn't already heard of. As I say, I think Microsoft focused on all the wrong games, touting the big names when a lot of the smaller fare they just breezed over looked much more interesting, and I think that was a problem with a lot of the conferences; they were pushing Big Names which weren't changing, everything was the same stagnant mechanics and the same brown graphics. The only times I sat up and took note were Nintendo and Ubisoft, the latter only because of their massive opening focus on Mario and Rabbids. I love the rabbids, they're fun and lively and colourful, and that makes them different. It's the same with Nintendo, there's a playful air to these games. It was something that was lacking from the other stages, was that sense of play. Nothing really pushed the boundaries, challenged genres or conventions this year. Well, maybe Devolver Digital's conference, but they didn't announce a single game which was disappointing, because as a publisher Devolver have brought out some amazing things which really make me love gaming.

This year was a bit of a wash, nothing new or interesting or really game-changing (pun intended) came out, and that's kinda sad.

Adieu!