E3 2019 Rundown – Part 1

Hey folks, I am writing this up ahead of time because there is way the hell too much to cover in a normal morning post. Essentially at this point I have watched the Google Stadia, EA Play and Microsoft event. Tonight we have Bethesda and pending how much time I have to digest that before the morning… aka when you are actually reading this post it might be included. I am not going to be covering everything, but instead cherry picking the specific things that interested me from each of the shows. My interests are certain to be different from yours.

E3 for years has been the equivalent of the Christmas Catalog or the Toys R Us Big Toy Book depending on your age bracket. However things appear to be changing a bit in both format and who is in attendance.

Google Stadia Show

Now I have already talked at length about this show, but there was one specific game that I have not really talked much about that came out of it. If you want further commentary on Google Stadia we talk at length about it on the recent AggroChat episode as well.

Darksiders Genesis seems to be taking the Darksiders franchise in yet another direction, this time in the Diablo-esc Action RPG loot crawler. I am very intrigued and given my love of all things Diablo I am always interested in playing another take on that style of gameplay. What I wonder is if we will be limited to only playing Strife or if we will be able to play the other Horsemen. Looking forward to seeing more about this game as we go.

EA Play Show

EA seemed to be experimenting with changing up their format, and I am not yet certain if it actually worked. Normally speaking the shows all seem to have a similar style and this time around it feels like EA is trying to take notes from Nintendo Direct, but also at the same time failing to really capture the same spirit. Instead of a polished presentation with a bunch of trailers we are presented with a Twitch TV/YouTube E3 Coverage style with trailers intermingled with sit down chats and an awkward amount of video game hype men that come off as exceedingly fake. All of this seems to be disguising the fact that EA had a pretty weak showing.

Essentially they showed off six things at during the course of the afternoon… three of which were DLC addons to existing games, two of them were formulaic yearly sports titles, and the only thing really new or interesting was the game we once assumed was Vaporware… Jedi Fallen Order. It seems to be a bad year for EA, either that or everything they have in the works is targeting the next gen consoles.

I am not yet sure how I feel about this game. It looks very much in the same style as Force Unleashed, and I have seen a bunch of comparisons to Tomb Raider or Uncharted. Right now there is a lot of gameplay that feels awkward in the scenes that we are seeing. I am not sure how I feel about this new supposedly cannon hero using a lightsaber as a flashlight. I am also not sure what his fighting style is because it most certainly is not fluid. I am guessing we are going to find out that he was maybe a young padawan when the events of Order 66 came down and that he has more or less had to train himself. I feel like they missed an opportunity to reboot and reshape the character of Kyle Katarn. This pretty much represents the only thing worth really paying attention to on the EA front for me at least.

Microsoft Show

Going into this show we had a high suspicion that we would at least get a formal announcement of the supposed next gen Xbox console. We did in fact get this and some information about that Halo Infinite is a launch title. We don’t know a ton of information however other than the general flashy industry buzzwordology of better, faster, and more detailed. That should not distract from the fact that I feel Microsoft had a really good showing.

They have also had a phenomenal year of largely proving out the value of the Xbox Game Pass and its delivery of first day exclusives ready to download and play without having to make an additional purchase. They hinted some at XCloud, but again did not go into much in the way of information. They did however present a ton of titles, several of which interested me. So I am going to try and do a rapid fire run down of my thoughts.

I am fully on board with this title and looking forward to playing it now that we have an October 25th release date for this year. Fallout 3/5/New Vegas style gameplay set on a Firefly esc steam punk space opera setting? Sign me the hell up. It seems like you can choose your pay and be the savior of the colony or be the scourge.

Another really interesting title that was shown is 12 Minutes by Anna Purina. Essentially you are caught in a 12 minute time loop and are trying to figure out how to solve some sort of a mystery as your life resets back to the starting point Russian Dolls style, each time in theory learning more information on how to stop whatever it is from happening. I largely bounced off of the Sexy Brutale, but this for whatever reason seems more interesting because of the weird top down view.

We got another cinematic trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, that gives us a glimpse into the story a bit and reveals that Keanu Reeves is tied to the project now. We also got a release date of April 2020, so folks can stop hoping it would drop this year. The setting is gorgeous if you think the urban decay of a Shadowrun-esc sprawl is gorgeous. I am totally on board with the way that the augmentations feel, and I am very much looking forward to this title.

We got another trailer with some gameplay for Ori and the Will of the Wisps and we finally have a release date. Again folks can stop hoping it will release this year, because it is going to be launching February 2020. I need to go back and finish the first one, but what I did play of it was pretty great. It just had a level of difficulty that I was not ready for at the time in which I played it.

Game I was absolutely not expecting to see was a remaster of Age of Empires II. I guess if Blizzard can remaster Warcraft 3 then anything is possible right? I am not super nostalgic about this game but nonetheless it is worth mentioning. The gameplay footage looked gorgeous, so there is that.

So Minecraft is now a franchise and not necessarily a game I guess, because originally I was expecting this title to be an addon of sorts of the base game. However instead it just seems to be borrowing the theme and the look and instead seemingly represents a brand new four player dungeon crawling co-op experience. It looks like a cross between Zelda and Diablo, and it might be interesting to watch as it progresses.

Mixer chat seemed not to be into this game, and it also represents the point at which I disabled chat during the show. Way to the Woods reminds me so much of Tokyo Jungle…. but just seemingly way less violent? You play a stag that is trying to guide your faun across a seemingly Japanese city, foraging for food and using your antlers as some sort of a magical flashlight? I am on board with this largely because it looked really cool and seemed extremely sweet. Also giant mama cat!

I am not exactly certain what this game is… but it seems to be something along the lines of Stardew Valley on a boat, that you can build as you travel and that you pick up various people to join in your journey. I am not sure what is going on at all other than it involves building and exploration and adorable animal friends and I think I am mostly on board for all of this.

State of Decay has been a favorite franchise of mine for a long while, since it initially released on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360. The infatuation only got worse once I was able to meet and hang out with some of the Undead Labs team at my very first Pax South. I played quite a bit of State of Decay 2 when it first released and they announced a stealth drop DLC called Heartland that is in theory playable as of the show. You either like the game series or you don’t, and I happen to so it made me happy and want to install and replay.

I have no clue what this game is about other than the pedigree of coming from the creator of Dark Souls franchise and George RR Martin. I am not necessarily a fan of the Dark Souls series, but I am intrigued to see what this game turns into.

We got another trailer for Psychonauts 2… sadly no release date. What is more interesting however is the fact that Doublefine is apparently now a satellite studio owned by Microsoft? I am not sure how to react to that given that Tim Schafer was one of the very first creators to break out and use Kickstarter to fund game development. I feel like those early days of Kickstarter were much like the early days of Image Comics… and maybe reality has set in and it is way harder to fund a studio than they maybe thought it would be? Microsoft seems to be snapping up a bunch of studios that I care about so I hope they take good care of them.

So… I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for Battletoads because I never owned a copy. I was always way more into Double Dragon because I played the hell out of it in the Arcade as well. I am interested to see how this game plays and feels. I think the artwork and colors are way different than the original, but also seem fun. I mean ultimately this franchise is a bit of a parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that weirdly developed a devoted fanbase of its own.

I backed Wasteland 2 but the end result wasn’t really for me. I am however watching this game to see if it maybe improves upon the base gameplay of the original. Wasteland 2 was likely very true to the style of gameplay… but it felt very stiff and not super responsive. I would love to see them evolve the genre a bit and offer some voice acted characters, because I never realized how much I have gotten used to that until I go to try and play a text only game these days.

I cannot fully explain how damned happy this makes me. If you have read my blog for some time you will know that I jumped through a bunch of hoops to be able to play the Japanese version. There even was a fan subtitled patch that allowed you to play MOST of the game in English. However were a bunch of places where the subtitles just stopped… and also there was the core problem that the game started you in Chapter 4 of the story. At which point they basically expect you to know a whole cast of characters that you have no clue about… which made the entire process of playing super confusing.

I will be a day one hour one person when this game officially launches especially if they start us at the beginning of the story. I consider the original Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast to be my very first MMORPG, and I still carry a pretty big torch for the franchise. So excited to see this coming.

I am not a big fan of Halo because I completely missed the franchise at the point at which it would have bonded me to it. I did not have an Xbox and by the time a crappy port existed on the PC, I already had far better shooters to be playing. Quite honestly my Halo is probably one of the Unreal games that released around the same time with a very similar theme. This is of note because this is supposedly footage from the Xbox Scarlett using the AMD based Raytracing engine. I didn’t really see anything super special with the footage that was shown, but I guess this is one to watch.

Bethesda Show

Going into the show we were expecting it to be a down year for Bethesda, and I greatly appreciate them announcing beforehand that we would not be seeing news about either Starfield or Elder Scrolls VI… aka the two big titles we have been waiting on. So I personally more or less went into the show expecting to see a bunch of news about Doom Eternal given that they had told us essentially to expect that. What I saw instead was a bunch of stuff that I am personally interested in, but still as a whole probably accounts for a somehow slow year.

I personally am a fan of Elder Scrolls Blades. I think it does a good job of representing the Elder Scrolls feel on a mobile platform. There are issues with the whole chest timer mechanic, but I expect that sort of thing from a mobile game. There doesn’t seem to be a single mobile game on the market that does not have at least one bitter pill that you have to swallow. I am however super excited to see that the game is coming to the Switch and will feature cross-save and cross-play with the mobile version. I enjoy playing this on my tablet, and I like the idea of being able to pick up my switch and have a more immersive experience. I think this will do well… and I really want Nintendo to take this idea to heart and finally give me Dragalia Lost on the Switch.

Fallout 76 was not well received but the AggroChat crew enjoyed it greatly and spent a significant amount of time exploring the world together. I think it is beneficial that during the show Bethesda effectively admitted as much to the struggles, but also to spending a good deal of time trying to improve the game. With that in mind they announced to additions to the game, the first of which being Wastelanders… which are effectively storylines and NPCs making their way into the game for the players to interact with. The second major change is that they are adding a game mode called Nuclear Winter which is a PVPVE Battle Royale mode which involves a shrinking ring of fire as players are tested by the automated systems of Vault 51 with the position of Overseer on the line. That doesn’t interest me much, but I am super amped to see proper NPCs with quests and an overarching storyline making it into Fallout 76.

First off can we talk about how damned adorable Ikumi Nakamura is? She does such a great job with this presentation and is so insanely excited to be showing us this game. This is from the team that brought us the Evil Within series and serves as a bit of a departure. Supposedly this is not going to be a survival horror game, but still involves supernatural elements. I got a little bit of an Onimusha vibe but it isn’t like we see any real gameplay so will have to watch and see what this turns into. You seem to be a Shinobi like ninja character that does battle with evil spirits, and probably I am on board with this concept especially since a lot of the character designs look badass.

Since Elsweyr just launched I was not expecting much from Elder Scrolls Online, but they did show off a really cool cinematic trailer for the next bit of story content in an upcoming expansion called Dragonhold. Additionally they teased an upcoming Dungeon DLC hitting before then called Scalebreaker but they didn’t give any real information about that. At this point I am so far behind that I will continue to plod along at my own speed and ignore the fact that the content is stacking up on top of me.

I am shocked beyond shocked to see a Commander Keen game showing up at the Bethesda Show. So lets stop for a moment and revel in the fact that this is indeed happening and that Zenimax is apparently in the drivers seat instead of ID. The only gotcha unfortunately is this is a mobile game, which in itself is not a death sentence given that I am actually finding myself playing a ton of mobile games. Mario Run for example does a pretty damned good of emulating everything that is right about a platformer. This game however is not a platformer… and is instead a sort of puzzle game where you lay traps and create inventions to solve obstacles. I am sure it is probably going to be enjoyable, but wow do I wish I we were getting a true Commander Keen game in the same style as the previous classics. I will give it a shot, but I am hoping that this isn’t the only Commander Keen project.

I gotta say I love the 80s sitcom video that went along with the announcement of the Rise of the Ghosts expansion. Mostly it looks like we are getting a bunch more stuff added to the game including a slew of interesting looking vehicles and weapons including a mini-mech. This game is just stupidly fun so I am not expecting a lot out of it. I just find it fun to roam around and kill stuff, and this appears to be more of the same.

This one came from out of nowhere, but Arkane studios is working on a new shooter of sorts called Deathloop. It seems like you are stranded on an island as one of two assassins, and you are stuck in a timeloop that resets periodically. One assassin is there to stop the loop and one is there to make sure nothing happens to the loop. It has a really cool 70s grindhouse feel, so I am interested to see how this shakes out in the end. I am a huge fan of Arkane Studios so I will give them an awful lot of leverage when it comes to trying something completely different from them.

So this is an interesting announcement that goes a long way with a lot of the other announcements we have been seeing. Apparently ID has developed a tech they call Orion that improves game streaming and they purport to be able to use less bandwidth to stream back flawless 60 fps gameplay. There is a demo going on that I have been trying to sign up for… but apparently the site is being slashdotted and does nothing but 500 error out. Supposedly this tech is an SDK that developers can include into their games to make them capable of working better with cloud services regardless of what the end platform actually is. Worth watching and I am hoping to get a beta copy to play with it. They showed someone streaming Doom to a mobile phone with a controller attached and it looked super fluid.

The final thing shown was Doom Eternal and they did in fact spend a lot of time on it. From what I can tell it seems like the Doom mythos follows similar to the Diablo 3 mythods… where we as the Doom Slayer end up running afoul of both Hell and Heaven, and by fighting back we are apparently going against what is prophesied. It looks like an over the top game like Doom games should be, and I feel like it is probably going to be every bit as good as Doom 2016. Lots of impressive visuals and what looks to be much larger battles.

Next Up

Monday we have PC Gaming Show, Ubisoft and Square Enix. It might take me a bit longer to watch all of these because unlike Sat/Sun I have to work and will not likely be able to tune into any of the shows as they are actually being broadcast. Then on Tuesday we have another Nintendo Direct to look forward to. The lack of Sony really feels weird especially since there isn’t anything that I am aware of scheduled on the horizon. I am not exactly sure when they will make their own next gen console announcement. Regardless this is my quick summary of the shows I have seen so far. Hands down the thing I am the most excited for is a Westernized Phantasy Star Online 2.

What has been your “best in show” so far, and what are you looking forward to?