The Reign of Not-E3

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the beginning of the Geoff Keighley replacement for E3 called the Summer Games Fest. Quite honestly I think I like this construct better as it is something that sort of meanders its way through the summer connecting a number of disparate events and looping in Gamescom as part of it. I am going to talk about a few games that piqued my interest, but really… you are going to have to listen to me gush about the new Path of Exile II Teaser that we got as part of it. All in all, I think the show was well worth your time, so if you are interested you can check out the official video here.

Path of Exile II

It would not be Path of Exile if we did not start on a beach somewhere. The challenge with this teaser is that it is very much the definition of a “sizzle reel”. In the gameplay trailer from two years ago, the game did not feel that fundamentally different from POE1. This however feels way more story driven as combat unfolds as you are clearly investigating a location. I also find it deeply interesting that just a very short way into the fight the character seems to do a dodge roll, which makes me wonder if this means that like D4 and D3 on the console… POE2 is adding some sort of an evade button. This does worry me a bit because the way movement abilities work in Path of Exile generally negates the need for an evasion button. However Ruthless mode lacks movement abilities of the same caliber as the base game, so it does make me a bit concerned that they are leaning into that more sluggish gameplay style that bugs me with Diablo IV.

The other thing that is interesting in the trailer is that the character seems to be using a lot of abilities. Like in Path of Exile, you tend to build around one main ability and I guess in part this is due to the lack of access to multiple six links. However with Gems working completely differently in Path of Exile and them socketing support gems into ability gems… does that mean we will have access to a six link for every ability? Again this sort of concerns me in a different way because it makes me wonder if we are going to be forced to use a ton of different abilities due to cooldowns on each individual one. Again the cooldowns and the sluggish pace of combat in Diablo IV drive me up a wall, so it does concern me a bit that what I am scrying from this teaser might be heralding a slower-paced Path of Exile experience. Slower-paced does not equate to a more enjoyable experience for me at least. I guess we will have to wait until ExileCon at the end of July to see more details.

Alan Wake 2

I was happy to see more discussion about Alan Wake 2. The more I see of this the more I am interested. It seems like you will be shifting between Alan and a new character called Saga. It sounds like essentially Saga will be playing through the story that Alan is telling, with the ability to shift back and forth between the characters at various points. My biggest hope is that we also get a crossover with either Director Faden herself or at least some Federal Bureau of Control agents. I am here for Alan Wake, but what I am even more here for is the expansion of this nonsense shared “Remedyverse”.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

Another game that we are getting to see a bit more of is Banishers, which feels like a gaslight-era game where you play a medium of a sort that can banish restless spirits. What is interesting about this specific trailer is it adds a bit of the hook of the game. It seems like you have lost your partner and have to make a Bioshock-like decision do you spare the inflicted humans, or do you steal their life essence in a vague attempt to resurrect your love? The combat looks interesting and the visuals are most excellent. I want to play through this whenever it lands but given my affinity for “forever games”, it will likely have to wait until a holiday break when I seem to grind through a bunch of single-player stories at once.

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando

I feel like this game is calling me out directly. I still love Zombie movies and games. I am not tired of them. I was a fan of the Zombie genre long before it blew up with Walking Dead, and I am still a fan all these years later after that same series more or less ruined it for the masses. This seems like a Bulletstorm-style nonsense shooter with lots of zombies and an 80s soundtrack. Putting “John Carpenter” in front of it is also a siren song for those of us who grew up idolizing Snake Pliskin. Will I actually play it? Who the fuck knows. It is going to have to compete with all the other games that seem to look just interesting enough to buy, but never critical enough for me to actually devote the time to finishing them.

Space Marine 2

There are a lot of Warhammer games out there. At some point Games Workshop went from carefully curating their licenses to the maximalist approach of letting anyone use their licenses… which resulted in a ton of shovelware. Space Marine is maybe the single best game that ties into the Warhammer franchise and it is good enough to stand alone as an amazing experience even if you do not care one iota about Adeptus Astartes. I’ve been playing Boltgun lately which apparently sits in between the story of the first and second game, and I am highly looking forward to ripping into things with my chain sword again in non-retro glory. Well worth checking out the first game if you have never played it as well.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

The Prince of Persia reboot… got rebooted again. Do I have any faith that this one will actually make it to market? Absolutely not. However, I do have to say that this looks much better than the previous attempt at rebooting this franchise. I like the focus on a more 2.5D feeling harkening back to the original games a bit at times. The Sands of Time remake may at some point make its way out of development hell, but this definitely looks way more interesting.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

They closed out the show with a powerhouse and gave us footage of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I am here for this game and unlike many single-player outings, this really probably will be a day-one play for me. I loved the Remake and the Yuffie expansion, and quite honestly dig the action reboot of this series way more than a turn-based option. I get that this is a divisive thing, but it works for me personally. I honestly even liked the tweaks and changes to the setting that this alternate version of the world has presented. The open world looks gorgeous and apparently, on consoles this is going to be a two-disc game, which seems like nonsense. I feel like you are either into this with all of your heart, or you have long since checked out of everything Final Fantasy VII related and just do not care in the least. FFVII is not my favorite of the series by any means, but I greatly enjoyed the first bits of this reboot universe so I am here for the continuation.

I think the next show that I am looking forward to as part of Summer Games Fest would be the Xbox/Bethesda showcase at 10 AM PDT on the 11th. It apparently also has a follow-up “Starfield Direct” with a further deep dive into that game since we are getting closer to its launch. I often watch the PC Gaming Show as well since it occasionally has some weird PC-only gems in it. That takes place on the 11th but a bit later in the day at 1 PM PDT. The Capcom and Ubisoft show on the 12th are definitely going to be “look at any relative trailers later” shows because I am not that deeply connected to either publisher. Quite honestly I think I am bored with the Ubisoft formula at this point, and I am not into a return to stealth gameplay with the Assassin’s Creed franchise either. It may not be E3… but it certainly feels like the same sort of experience that I used to have watching the streams leading up to the official trade show that none of us had access to anyways. As much as Geoff Keighley claims that he didn’t kill E3… he certainly helped prove that the companies no longer actually needed a costly in-person show.

ReedPOP and E3

Good Morning Folks! Last week we got some news that E3 would be returning fully in 2023 and that it would be handed off to ReedPOP. If you are not familiar with that name, then you have likely never been to a PAX show. Essentially this is the management company that brings you all of the various PAX shows, New York Comic-Con, MCM Comic-Con, and the Star Wars Celebration among others. They do an extremely good job of running these shows and as a result, I think this is probably a great call to add E3 to the bounty of their responsibility. As a company, they have a unique understanding of how to navigate the communities of pop culture fandom.

Pax South 2015 – Heart of Thorns Announcement

The only problem that I see with this, is that ReedPOP is extremely focused on Fan experiences, and E3 has traditionally not been a fan-based show. Sure over the years, they have flirted with having fan-specific events happening around the show with public access hours to the floor. However, the crux of what E3 was designed to be… was to be a business event where game companies could mingle with both gaming press and distributors to show off what was coming in the next calendar year. E3 came into existence when the video game industry effectively outgrew the Consumer Electronics Show and needed its own vehicle. As such this became the show to announce anything, but most specifically new hardware generations.

As fans what this also gave us was a single week where an entire year’s worth of news coalesced into major presentations by large games companies. If there is anything that I miss from E3… it is this aspect where during a single week I would have back-to-back shows to watch and write about. Some of these were phenomenal and others like the ill-fated 2013 Xbox presentation linked in supercut form above, were not so great. Regardless you knew that over the course of a few extremely condensed days, you would reap the whirlwind of gaming news and have new things to daydream about. Sure most E3 demos were utter fabrications rushed to market to have something shiny to show off, but it represented a fulcrum on which games media turned and as a result something that the fans could bank on.

The first blocks to fall from the E3 fort, came when major publishers broke away from the core convention and started hosting their own elaborate pre-E3 reveal shows. These were still in person and still at venues surrounding the main E3 event, so it seemed “fine”. However, it was a sign that publishers were all too happy to abandon E3 as a concept and do their own thing if it seemed to be a better deal for them in the long run. Then came the digital-only shows like Nintendo Direct, which effectively replaced the pomp of the larger venue-driven events. They were not something that people who were already attending E3 could walk over to, but instead something that was more focused on the fanbase.

This trend was already starting when we all had to shift and deal with a global pandemic, which ultimately canceled pretty much every in-person show. The thing is… life finds a way and effectively EVERY game publisher shifted to doing their own version of Nintendo Direct. Geoff Keighly did what he does and organized a replacement for E3 in the form of the Summer Games Fest, and I legitimately assumed that E3 as we knew it was a figment of the past. The thing that I mourned the most however is how spaced out the entire process has become. Essentially the “Not-E3” shows started sometime in late May and are continuing still with upcoming events still planned to take place in July. The end result is… that I personally just don’t have the focus to follow a long schedule of events that spans the course of three months. I could tune in and be focused for four or five days max… and this year I think I watched TWO of the dozens of shows that were available.

Don’t get me wrong I think that ReedPOP is going to do a phenomenal job with organizing this show and making it run smoothly. However, E3 only has any gravitas if it can somehow convince the major publishers to play along. PAX already exists and does a much better job of supporting the smaller publishers and indie developers that get lost in the mix of a large show. Without PlayStation, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Square, and Nintendo on board with the notion of a return to “in-person” shows and events… then E3 is just a brand that serves no purpose anymore. The problem there is I am not sure if the math adds up to E3 making sense for them to make a large deal about. During the time of the pandemic, they have all built their own direct marketing brands and with them their own shows. The eyeballs that used to be on E3 have how shifted to being focused on publisher-specific shows and whatever amalgam Keighly happens to be promoting at the time.

I have to admit that Microsoft did a phenomenal job this year with its Xbox, Bethesda, and soon-to-be Blizzard showcase. This is the only show this past year that I watched in real-time because it summoned forth enough interest to make me anxious over what I might see. As much as I might want to return to a time when we had a tight block of news updates all landing within the same week… I think that era is gone. We will continue to see the shows spread out more so that they are not in direct competition with other publishers. The way the E3 system worked the shows all happened within mere hours of each other, and as a result, it encouraged direct comparison. Fans talked about who “Won E3” and presented the best showcase… hint… it was never EA. Now in the post-E3 reality that we have been living in for the last two years, the individual publishers can give their shows a bit of breathing room… and plausible deniability.

Like I said before E3 was always a working convention, and one centered around the business of making, selling, and writing about games. I do have to wonder if the addition of ReedPOP to the mix signals a shift in the show to being more fan-focused. I do not think that E3 is likely going to get the major publishers back in the fold, and the best they can possibly hope for is some E3 adjacent events. Instead, the show itself is going to have to change into something different. Essentially I think going forward E3 is going to be PAX Anaheim for lack of a better term. The Keighly machine will keep rolling and keep courting publishers into his larger-reaching digital productions.

The above chart is from The Video Game Awards website and shows the significant growth that little venture has seen. In 2021 not listed on the chart there were a reported 85 Million viewers across the various global live streams. No matter what you think about E3… it never reached those sorts of heights. I think publishers have realized that they do not need a physical presence in order to reach fans and that the money spent on the small number of people who can actually physically go to a venue is better spent on digital outreach. I think the zombie of E3 will continue to linger for a few more years, but ultimately at some point, the decision will have to be made if it just ends… or pivots into becoming another PAX-style show. I think the last few years have shown that fans care way less about bespoke venues and instead just want some cool video game trailers.

Microsoft Bethesda Show 2022

Good Morning Folks! I’ve found myself weirdly checked out most of the time during this “Not E3” period. Normally this is my Christmas catalog as I drool over all of the trailers of games to come. However as the various shows have gone whizzing by, I am having trouble even catching up on the news. One thing that is not this way however was the Microsoft and Bethesda show that took place on Sunday afternoon. This show I absolutely watched live and with much anticipation. Microsoft has uniquely placed itself through acquisitions as being the arbiter of good stuff for the coming years. There is part of me that is deeply troubled that a single company owns all of these franchises. Then there is another part of me that loves that I can start a game on my Xbox Series X and then continue it on my PC… and maybe even get in some playtime from bed on my phone via XCloud all without missing a beat.

Another thing that I love is the GamePass ecosystem because it gives me easy access to a large list of titles that I might have missed otherwise. This is really where XCloud shines for me because it gives me fast streaming access to games with a very low time commitment. While I am laying in bed at night, trying to figure out something to do until sleep claims me… this is often when I hook up my controller and try something out on the phone. It will take a lot of effort to really dislodge me from the Steam ecosystem, but just having games available and ready for me to play… as part of my existing GamePass subscription is a good start. I really dig that they are supporting smaller games in addition to all of the big titles because it means that there is a regular flow of new titles coming into the system. What I do wish is that they would include things like ESO Plus into GamePass to expand the player base of Elder Scrolls Online, or a World of Warcraft sub when the Blizzard purchase completes.

There were a massive number of titles that interested me, so here is a quick run down with some discussion about each.

Free Riot Game Champions

I have to admit this one blew my freaking mind. I don’t play League of Legends all that much anymore, but when I did… I regularly liked trying out new champions. Essentially if you have GamePass you are getting every champion in every Riot game unlocked as part of that subscription. This legitimately makes me very interested in diving back into the game and checking out all of those champions that were released since 2015ish when I last gave the game any attention. Granted I hated playing solo queue, and mostly only really enjoyed bot games… but still had a certain measure of enjoyment doing that. I wonder if Wild Rift supports a controller.

Persona Games

This was another massive mic drop because fans have been begging for a PC release of Persona 5 Royal since the game was released. As part of GamePass you are getting access to Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal on both Xbox consoles and PC. I’ve yet to really beat any of these games and I know that I should really attempt to get into P5R. There is just something about the daily chores section of the game that always kills my interest. I want to experience the story, but don’t want to have to shuffle through the dross.

The Last Case of Benedict Fox

I am extremely interested in this game. It pretty much looked like what you would get if you took Castlevania and took away the vampires and skeletons and instead swapped in elder horrors and void creatures. I love Symphony of the Night and this is giving me DEEP vibes. This is a perfect example of a game that is probably going to fall between the cracks, but absolutely will have new life because folks are going to play it as part of GamePass.

High On Life

Okay, I still unironically love Rick and Morty. This game basically seems like you take the weird as fuck space stuff from that cartoon and make an entire shooter-based video game out of it. The catch is you have talking sentient weapons. This legitimately makes me wonder if someone played Cyberpunk 2077… got Skippy and then thought… let’s make an entire damned game around this. I am absolutely at least going to give it a spin and check out whether or not I personally find this mess enjoyable or not.

Scorn

I like HR Geiger and I like Body Horror, so I think I am probably uniquely in line with the goals of Scorn. This has been appearing periodically at shows for quite some time now, and it just seems to keep getting higher resolution. I am mostly intrigued by the game at this point and want to see it in action. Do I think this is going to be a good shooter? No, not really, but I also don’t think that is the point of the game. It seems like avoiding combat is going to be the name of the game more than anything. Do I think this is going to be one of my favorite games? Nope! However again because it is on GamePass I am absolutely going to check it out.

Forza Horizon Hotwheels

So they spent way more time during the show on the version of Forza for people who get horny over cars, but I was happy to see we are getting a Hotwheels expansion for Horizon. If you have never played a Horizon game you really should. They are this weird fun arcadey car MMORPG for lack of a better explanation. They are just fun as hell to drive around in and unlock new cars, and I am super on board with taking my cars and now racing them on literal Hotwheels tracks.

Redfall

I am deeply interested in this game, but also probably deeply out of the core demographic. My hope is that this is going to be a game that is solo-player-friendly. My expectations are that it is going to be all groups all the time, and expecting you to bring your ready-made group of exactly four friends into the game with you. I already struggle at matching up with people to play games with, and I doubt Redfall is going to be the game that changes that. Between timezone constraints and my own anxiety over player expectations of me… yeah no this is going to be a fraught mess for me personally. I still think it looks cool as hell though, so I guess I will watch this evolve over time.

Ravenlok

I am getting deep Legend of Zelda meets Harry Potter vibes from this game and I am on board with that. Again this looks like it is going to be one of those many smaller titles that come out and the fact that it is on GamePass gives me the freedom to just check it out guilt free. The only thing that is really tweaking me a bit is the mix of voxel models and traditional models that seems to be going on. Like I enjoy voxel graphics, but I prefer if games completely commit to them like something along the lines of The Touryst. I just hope that the actual game while playing it does not seem jarring as the two model styles clash.

Hollow Knight Silksong

I would likely be disowned by several of my friends if I did not at least talk a bit about Silksong. This is a game that so many of the AggroChat folks have been anxiously waiting for. I am not sure what it is about Hollow Knight but it never really clicked with me. I think partially it is that the game requires so much more technical prowess than Symphony of the Night, and by reference Bloodstained Ritual of the Night. That is pretty much my perfect form of the Metroidvania. Ash and Kodra, however, love the skill-based games, and more specifically they both seem to enjoy the randomization mods for Hollow Knight. I am hoping this is the game that they have been anxiously waiting for. Me… I’ve not decided to devote the amount of time needed to actually get good at Hollow Knight so I could decide if I enjoy it or not.

Flintlock The Siege of Dawn

This is another game that I am cautiously interested in. I say cautiously because I am getting deep Dark Souls vibes from this game. Everything about the setting and lore makes me interested, but generally speaking, don’t want to work as hard at combat as a Dark Souls game wants me to work. I play games to relax, not cause more anxiety. Jedi Fallen Order bridged this gap because I just played the game on a lower difficulty setting and it stopped feeling like a Dark Souls game. So I guess I have hope that maybe just maybe this game will work for me as well. Again the low investment of it being on GamePass means I can boot it up… check it out for a bit and then decide if I like it or not.

Diablo IV

Oof do I have some feelings about Diablo IV. Of all of the Blizzard games, Diablo is the franchise that I have cared about the most over the years. First, it was weird as hell to see Blizzard games now just being included as part of the Microsoft conference. Second, I have been on this emotional rollercoaster lately thanks to the collosol fuckup that is Diablo Immortal. The team working on Diablo IV has come out trying to stem the bleeding and guarantee that this game will not be an egregiously monetized pay-to-win mess… but I am not sure if I am willing to trust them yet. What I saw in this trailer and the other trailers at the show excited me, but also made me think that maybe this game is going to be a direct competitor for Guild Wars 2. A lot of the big open-world multiplayer stuff felt a lot like events and zone metas in GW2. I am sad that there will not be a Crusader at launch, but generally speaking, I can be happy with a Barbarian for the time being.

Starfield

This was the reveal that I think most of the folks who tuned in were waiting for. I get that “No Mans Skyrim” is a meme, but this felt way more like a Fallout game to me. I have deep concerns for this game, namely that I think maybe Bethesda bit off more than they can chew with the whole “1000 planets” thing, including full space flight and seemingly a whole dogfighting game. That also gives me pause because I like the concept of spaceflight… but I don’t actually like flying ships. I really do not like flight sims, so I am hoping that this is very “starfox” in its interpretation of space flight. Either that or I hope there is an option to just let the computer calculate the space combat because I am not really interested in doing much of that. I would be down with the equivalent of VATs but for ship-to-ship combat. Planetary exploration and the improved gunplay though… I am all on board with that.

A Solid Show

This year’s Microsoft Bethesda show was legitimately one of the better ones I have seen over the years. There were so many things that I was either extremely interested in or tangentially enough to play them with GamePass. I need to spend some time and sift through the other presentations and cherry-pick some of the other gems. I might turn that into a single post covering multiple shows. If you have been more plugged into the “Not E3”, which of the shows should I check out? What games do you think I should watch trailers for? Drop me a line below.

Categories E3

Sony State of Play – June 2022

Good Morning Folks! We find ourselves entering the time of the year that used to be dominated by E3. Now instead we get a number of individual shows all orbiting this concept of the Geoff Keighley Summer Game Fest. Last week on the 2nd we got one of the first of these shows, but it has been a crazy sequence of days and I am just now getting around to talking about my thoughts. Ahead of this show Sony had released some warning information to make sure that folks were realizing that it would be largely focused on third-party games and things involving the new PSVR2 system. I still don’t have much interest in VR as a concept, so it threw out some interesting offerings like Resident Evil 8 in VR or a wholly unique Horizon Zero Dawn universe game set in VR. Even once you cast off the VR-only titles, it still left a lot of meat on the bones for the rest of the show.

Stray

I believe we first saw a sign of Stray at the PlayStation 5 reveal conference several years ago. From that point forward I have been hooked on the concept of this game, where you play a cat roaming around a cyberpunk landscape seemingly made up of humanized robots. It is very prescient that I am writing about this game as one of my own cats, Mollie, winds her way around my office to find a perch to sit on while I write. This is very much a “cat person” game and I hope it is every bit as enjoyable as it looks. The only problem is… this has consistently been revealed at Sony shows… but I am also finding out that it is going to release on Steam which immediately skews the scales towards a PC purchase for me.

Eternights

The first game of the show that I had not heard of before was a title called Eternights. This very anime game seemed to center around a protagonist that has had part of his hand replaced with a rainbow and then can turn that into weapons. The gameplay looked fun, but I guess the determining factor if I play this… will be just how obsequiously anime it really is. I like Anime just fine but I am not super engaged with it and as a result, am mostly into the very surface level and “poser” properties. I think I will need to see more of this to determine if it is a purchase. Again however this is a game also coming out on PC via Steam, which leans me in the direction of purchasing on that platform… so I guess strike 2 for PS5.

Street Fighter 6

Capcom seems to have resolved its problems with the clipart logo and is now presenting additional footage of Street Fighter 6. I am still not entirely certain what I think of “thickboi” Ryu, mostly because I have always thought of him as a fairly agile character. What I do really dig about this game is the paint splatter style as they do attacks. I am certain this is probably some sort of special meter, but I dig the way it looks. It has been decades since I have really been into a fighting game and my old man reflexes keep me from ever being competitive again… but I still enjoy the idea of them. Trying a night fighting game is essentially me wallowing in my nostalgia about the early days of the fighting game arcade scene. Again this is absolutely coming out on Steam so strike 3 for the PS5.

Callisto Protocol

This was the second game in the show that I had never seen, and at first, I thought we were just getting an early reveal of the Dead Space reboot. This appears to be a game from one of the folks behind the Dead Space franchise and the studio started by Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame. At a time that last part would have been a serious pedigree for me… but after having watched that franchise more or less die over the last several years it starts to shift in the other direction. The game is also described as a Survival game, which could be really cool or could be not so much depending on how that genre is implemented. I am interested in it for certain, and right now the game is targeting pretty much all platforms… so again that shifts me towards a PC purchase. That would be strike number four for the PS5, which isn’t great given this is a Sony show.

Final Fantasy XVI

Friends, I am so freaking into this game. This trailer spawned one of the comments on Twitter that concerned a number of my friends. What really did it for me… were these scenes shown in the above image, featuring what appears to be a Kaiju fight between two primals/eikons. So this game is being led by the same studio that works on Final Fantasy XIV and I am hoping that we are essentially getting to see another one of the reflections of the source as a result. The recent shift from Final Fantasy being turn-based to more action combat has been controversial, but I tend to land on the side where I actually enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay better as a result. I am so ready for this game and expect to pretty much give it my full attention whenever it releases. This will once again be released on PC, which means I will be purchasing on that platform rather than the Playstation.

The Others

As always with my reviews of the shows, I tend to focus on the things I was most interested in. That is not to say that there were not a number of other interesting games shown. For example, Resident Evil 4 is being added to the list of high production value Capcom remakes. This is really cool but also I have not played RE 1-3 remakes, but if I ever get around to doing this… I will be interested in this game as well. Also of interest is that Spiderman is getting a remastered edition and is being released on the PC platform, which interests me a bit but I already have those games on the PS5. Seasons: A Letter to the Future looked really neat, but also seemed deeply “Walking Sim” which is not exactly my jam. It very much looked like the sort of game that I would probably rather watch a “Let’s Play” for while doing something else than actually play it myself.

All in all, it was a pretty solid show. It lacked some of the big reveals that I have come to expect from a Sony E3 show, but was a relatively solid showing. The biggest problem that I saw from the product offering is that there really was nothing shown that would move units. The only thing truly limited to the Sony platform is anything PSVR2-related. Even “Seasons”, is coming out on PC… so for me personally this seemed like more of a big win for Steam as a platform than it was for Sony. Maybe this was intentional to try and relieve some pressure on the supply chain and lower demand for new PlayStation 5 units? I sincerely doubt this, but it could happen. I’m extremely interested in seeing how Microsoft answers this show on the 12th.

Categories E3