E3

At this point we are out of the big shows that are associated with the lead up to E3. Now we are left with whatever happens to leak out of the show floor or through the various extended meet and greet streams that so many of the “networks” happen to be running. At this point I have talked about Stadia, EA Play, Microsoft, Bethesda, PC Gaming, UbiSoft and Square Enix. That simply leaves the lone standout from Tuesday… Nintendo and their latest Nintendo Direct.

Nintendo Direct E3 Show

There are a lot of folks that feel like Nintendo “won” E3 and I will admit it was a packed show. However along the lines of EA Play it was packed with a bunch of stuff that I didn’t necessarily care about. Two of the big reveals were related to Smash Bros, which is not really a game that excites me. Other than that we got some dates for games that had been in the pipeline, but it failed miserably because the one game I wanted more information on and or a release date… was completely absent. I am all about Metroid which is still more or less missing in action.

One of the highlights of the show is that we saw more footage of the Link’s Awakening remake and with it got a firm release date of September 20th 2019. There isn’t a lot to say here other than I am looking forward to playing it. I never played the original on the Gameboy as I had moved on to other things at the time. I would love to see more games get the remake treatment that look as gorgeous as this one does.

This was definitely a shocker title, because it appears to be a remake of the Sega Saturn Panzer Dragoon title. I mean these were fun back in the day because it was a 3D shooter while on back of a Dragon. It does make me wonder if we are also going to get a remake of Nights into Dreams on the Switch given that it ran on I think the same engine? I can’t tell if this is a remake or a remaster to be be honest. Regardless it is really cool to see this showing up.

I’ve never played a proper Animal Crossing title, but I did enjoy Pocket Camp quite a bit until I wandered away from it like I do most mobile games. I have been looking forward to this being my first title in the series to play so I am hoping it is excellent. Graphics wise everything looks awesome so far. I am not as pumped as some people might be for the title given again… I’ve never really played a mainline game in the series.

I am mostly including this one because… first off I was shocked to see a Contra game at the show. Secondly it looks like absolute shit and I am wondering if this is something that had been in the works for the 3DS and then was later re-purposed to be a Switch game. The textures are blurry and muddy, and the color palette is complete nonsense. This just does not inspire much confidence. Coming back to this… after looking at the PS4 trailer it looks like this is just a shitty port to the switch because the Sony version looks way better.

Just like I was excited to see Romancing SaGa 3 get a proper localization I am very happy to see this game get a localization and a remake. This has been on the list of games I wanted to play for ages since the Super Nintendo era when I found out it existed but only in Japanese. Not a lot to say, it looks good and it also looks like the cast of characters have been represented from what I can remember as faithfully. The positive about a lot of these 16 bit era Japanese games is there was an awful lot of artwork that existed to be used as a reference.

Now we really shouldn’t be shocked at this announcement, but at the very end of the Nintendo direct they showed off that they were working on a Breath of the Wild Sequel. Now the internet or maybe just my twitter feed… seems to be losing their shit over short haired Zelda. Then again it is mostly just Ryuhkin generating most of those retweets. There had been rumors that they were planning on building a new story in the same engine and get it to market quickly, but now we have confirmation of that. Something definitely to look forward to but past that not an awful lot to go on yet.

General Thoughts on E3 2019

So at this point I sorta want to sit back and talk about E3 2019 as a whole, which I realize the show itself won’t be over until the weekend. However for the gamers at home the “show” is effectively all of the presentations leading up to the actual events. There were really two takeaways that I had, the first being that the absence of Sony was noticeable and felt really weird to have a vacuum from team blue. The second big take away is that in general it was a down year with what it feels like everyone preparing for the next console generation which by all looks seems to be targeting Holiday 2020.

I would have to go back and check my notes from the various E3 presentations of the past, but it definitely feels like this might be the first year when nothing really surprised me. What I mean by that is always in the past it seemed like there was a game that had come from out of left field and gave a demo or a slick marketing video that made me extremely giddy inside. That just didn’t happen this go around, and it could be the sign of a bunch of things. Maybe the industry has moved away from whatever games really made me tick, or maybe like I said before this is just an in-between year.

Regardless the end result is a very let down feeling after exiting E3 season. That is not to say there won’t be a lot of awesome things coming out during 2019, but we already knew about them ahead of time. I guess indicates that companies are retracting around the importance of E3 as a construct. Activision/Blizzard was a complete no show during the proceedings and so many of the games that I didn’t necessarily talk about… had been announced and were already deeply ingrained in the zeitgeist before the show happened. For an industry that used to revolve around E3 and CES… it seems like neither holds any importance at all these days which is bizarre as a gamer.

Early on I gave the analogy of the Christmas Catalog or the Toys R Us Big Book… and I guess it continues to be apt. Those are both things that faded over time as they lost significance and importance to the consumers. Similarly it seems that the E3 show is fading as they are no longer the primary vehicle of delivering information to the customers for the coming year. Nintendo Direct and shows like it seems to be the way we are heading. On one level I like getting little bits of information throughout the year within months of the release of a product. It feels good to know that the thing you just saw is going to be in your hands within a few weeks time.

However there is a part of me that misses the pomp and circumstance of having this big show meaning so much. That said of all of the shows I have to give credit to Microsoft probably being my favorite. They showed a lot of great games and gave a vision of being able to play those games on whatever platform you wanted to with XCloud. They also announced what the future was going to be with the Scarlett product, and because of all of that the E3 format still seems to be working well for them.

As far as a second place I would probably place Square Enix and Nintendo in a tie because they also delivered really great presentations. The worst is EA Play which is not shocking because I often time place EA at the bottom. However I was shocked to see just how bad the UbiSoft presentation was this year, given that is usually firmly in the middle of the pack. Bethesda did a fine job of displaying the titles that they had to show off, but it most definitely felt like an in-between year for them. I guess the ultimate question is… when is Sony going to do their own console reveal? Additionally after the sluggishness of E3 2019 and the financial troubles reported surrounding the convention… will there be an E3 2020?

So after seeing all of the shows at this point, which was your favorite? What were your general thoughts about E3 as a whole? Leave me a comment below.

Yesterday we had three shows of note, namely the PC Gaming Show, Ubisoft and SquareSoft. This morning I am going to do my best to cover all of the topics of importance to me personally. Like I said yesterday this is my rundown of the show and I am certain I missed something that you really dug. However these are the things that I consider to be worth watching on a personal level.

PC Gaming Show

The PC Gaming Show is such a weird crapshoot as far as whether or not it is going to show something that I ultimately care about. As a whole it has come a really long way in production quality because that very first year seemed like it was legitimately happening in a High School Auditorium. Now it at least rivals the production of the big shows and I think Day 9 does a really great job with his reoccurring role as master of ceremonies. As far as substance goes… there really was not a whole lot that interested me, and definitely not much that I had not already seen before.

In the category of games I find interesting but will almost certainly not like playing once it releases… we have Last Oasis. The game appears to be based on gathering resources in a post-apocalyptic world where everyone has weird land-strider ships There is one that is clearly a pirate of sorts since it is flying banners with skulls on it. Late in the trailer a giant strider that looms over both of the other two shows up proving there is always a bigger fish in the sea… or in this case strider on the land? This describes itself as a nomadic survival MMO… which probably means having to deal with a lot of horrible people to get resources to be able to keep playing the game. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I am intrigued by the machinery.

This is the point where I admit that I never played the original Vampire Bloodlines. I am not sure what I was doing at the time, but the time I did attempt to play it I had all manner of technical difficulties. I hear from lots of friends however that it was an amazing experience, and as such I am really looking forward to playing a modern version of that franchise. This is definitely something we knew about going into the show, and I still think it looks great.

I like the Age of Wonders series and I loved Alpha Centauri. So I am most definitely interested in a game that appears to blend these two things together. It also has Dinosaurs with Lasers… who doesn’t love Dinosaurs with Lasers? Again another title that I definitely knew about but am still interested in.

This appears to be a blend of a game like FTL and something along the lines of Rimworld. You are building a colony of folks that have been in cryo pods and are responsible for their survival in a world that has other groups of individuals trying to do the same. My biggest turn off with Rimworld is the complete shit graphics and the seeming lack of support for adding new graphic packs that make them less shit. So when I saw this I was definitely interested given the large amount of customization that the trailer shows. I will be watching this one.

I’ve never really played Brawlhalla even though it has been at literally every Pax South event. I don’t have the deep nostalgia towards Smash Bros that the generation younger than me seems to. However I do love Adventure Time so if they keep adding character packs like this it starts to make me more and more interested in the game as a whole. Going to give this an honorable mention.

Ubisoft Show

UbiSoft traditionally is a pretty good show, but this year… things were just not in a good place. For starters can I just talk about how much I miss Aisha Tyler as the host? UbiSoft used to be this super fun show filled with weird dancing numbers that brought forth the joy of videos games… and this time around that dancing number just felt weird and forced. The highlight of the show without a doubt was getting to see Jon Bernthal’s dog… at which point my twitter feed erupted into a slew of comments about that good boy.

There was a subscription plan for Uplay announced for $16 a month… which seems extremely high once you factor in that the PC Only basic Microsoft Game Pass is only going to be $5 a month. They announced that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is getting a Story Creator addon that will allow users to make their own content… which I guess will allow them to stretch one more year out of this AC title. I am somewhat excited about the Division getting a Netflix movie staring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain, so we will have to see how that ultimately turns out. As far as game releases however it felt really hollow.

I’ve never played a Watchdogs game, but Legions so far looks amazing. It isn’t so much the gameplay but instead what it is promising. According to the demo this is a game where you can legitimately recruit and play as every character you can encounter. If that is true that is just a level of nonsense I have never seen in a video game. They show off footage of playing as an adorable little old British lady that happens to be a renowned hacker who is responsible for stealing files from Scotland Yard. I’ve learned recently that I actually do like the Ubisoft formula for games, so I need to go back and play through the first two Watchdogs to get a feel for how this one will ultimately play out.

The only other game really worth noting at the UbiSoft show was a title that we saw next to nothing about called Gods and Monsters which appears to be a sort of Breath of the Wild set in Greek Mythology type of game. That premise seems like something I would be interested in and the visuals are gorgeous… even though this is a high production trailer that is likely not going to represent anything even vaguely close to what the final game looks like. I am grasping at straws folks… it was a really weak show other than Watchdogs.

SquareSoft

Square was definitely the strongest of the publisher shows, and probably comes in a close second behind Microsoft as far as the total quality of the show experience. That is not saying a lot because the absence of Sony was most definitely felt this year. Square however showed off a ton of stuff, but a good number of the announcements were platform reveals of games that have already been around for ages in other forms. There were a few big ones that I will go over.

This is the most anticipated title that we were expecting from the show and I am not entirely certain what sort of game it really is going to be? There was a lot of switching of perspectives during the trailer but it appears to be a game along the lines of the most recent Spiderman offering where you are placed in control of one of the avengers as you move your way through missions. They stated that it would be a 4 player co-op experience and that they would be adding new characters as they went… with a late trailer Hank Pym tease. So we can mostly assume this is going to be a live service game but they stated that all new champions would be free and that there would be no loot boxes… they did not however say anything about cosmetics so I could in theory see a bunch of alternate costumes for your heroes. They have Thor and they have Cap so I am going to be good.

We also saw a lot of battle footage for Final Fantasy VII Remake as well as character reveals for Tifa and Sephiroth. The combat system seems to be a blend of something along the lines of Final Fantasy XV that is purely action combat with the ability to pause and queue up specific attacks in a menu structure very familiar to Final Fantasy VII. I am largely on board with everything I have seen to date and look forward to replaying this game in what seems to be a greatly expanded version. They said the game itself would be two blu-ray discs worth of content. I guess we have reached the point of disc swapping in this generation as well?

I loved playing the first Dragon Quest Builders and was amped when I saw the second one announce. However it has been out in Japan for quite some time now and I was curious when we would actually get it on this side of the pond. The answer apparently is really soon, because they flashed a July release date. This unfortunately will get delayed behind Shadowbringers for me, but I am definitely looking forward to it.

This is largely exciting only because it is more official localization from Square. I attempted to play a fan translation back in the day of Romancing SaGa 3 which was a Super Nintendo Era title, and I didn’t get terribly far due to the incompleteness. I am looking forward to playing through it at some point, but god I have no clue when I am going to squeeze in all of the gaming that I already have in backlog.

This one came from out of left field and is not something at all that I would expect from a Square show. This appears to be a co-op scifi shooter and since I like those… I will be watching it. The trailers were at least compelling, but sadly there isn’t an awful lot more available even on the website. You fight giant monsters and apparently open big doors… so yeah… hopefully we get more information during E3 about this.

Going to mention this one largely because it is a style of game that you really don’t see much. They are planning on delivering a top down racing experience ala Micromachines or R.C. Pro-am with high fidelity controls. The art style is adorable, so I want to check this out whenever it is available. This is more my speed than the ultra realism style racing games that we are more used to.

Not much was announced regarding Shadowbringers in part because we are just about to get the game legitimately within two or three weeks. However they did drop the final release trailer, which includes all sorts of nonsense that I don’t even know what to make of. It sets up some individuals that are in theory going to be our enemies in the new expansion. It also seems to show us cooperating at least in part with an Ascian. The mic drop moment however is when it comes out and says that Hydaelyn and Zodiark are primals. Nonsense is incoming and I am on board with this!

Slowing Down

There is only one show left and that is the Nintendo Direct happening at some point today. I am not exactly sure what to expect but I am ultimately hoping we get more information and a release date about the Metroid Prime project. I feel like I am going to need to write about my general thoughts at some point regarding this E3, because across the board it has been a bit of a disappointment. I get the distinct impression that all of these publishers are holding things back and will be announcing the next batch of franchise titles on the Xbox Scarlett (if that name sticks) and the PS5 whenever we actually see it.

What were your favorite games of the day? Anything in particular that you liked that I did not talk about? Let me know in the comments.

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?