Yesterday was a huge day of E3 shows with Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony all strutting their stuff with big press conferences. While I still stand by my statement yesterday, that Bethesda software is winning this E3, everyone involved had some interesting things to show off. Mainly for me this is the year that Microsoft figured out how to do a relevant press conference. The past two years since the announcement of the Xbox One have provided extremely awkward and disconnected moments, but for the most part Microsoft nailed it this time around. They provided a wide scope of games to appeal to all genres, and while I don’t believe in their exclusivity after seeing titles appear on steam months later, I do feel like they are trying really hard to wrap up a large stable of winners as far as software goes. The big title that I am interested in is the new Tomb Raider game, which makes me realize that I really need to finish the last Tomb Raider game.
I’ve never been a huge Halo fan , but even I have to admit that the Halo Guardians demo looked pretty amazing. The title I was most amped about seeing again however was The Division, since we had not really seen much since the last E3. It seems like now we have a pseudo release date and a beta beginning towards the end of this year. My big concern was with the lackluster showing of Destiny so far, that this title might have simply quietly been cancelled. Thankfully that is not the case, and we will be exploring a new action role-playing game setting early next year. The video that takes the cake however for Microsoft is the Hololens demo showing off a special Hololens version of Minecraft. The more I see of Hololens the more I think it is going to be a real force in gaming, and not just another gimmick hoping to find a Market. Virtual Reality headsets extract you from the world, and Augmented Reality keeps you interactive with the world… I think that is going to make a big difference. The little I have played with the Occulus Rift was cool, but I suffered a pretty massive headache and was dizzy as hell as my mind tried to readjust to the “real world” after being in the unit for only around fifteen minutes. I cannot imagine what it would be like after some of my marathon gaming sessions.
EA and UbiSoft E3 2015
As good as Microsoft did with their press conference, EA doubled that effort in the opposite direction. The entire thing was this awkward and disjointed mess trying to play towards too many different demographics and just coming off as frustrating to I believe all of them. The biggest frustration for me personally was the fact that this press conference was about one thing for me… getting to see the new Mass Effect game. We got a minute and a half trailer… and that was quite literally all we saw of Mass Effect. Similarly with Mirrors Edge Catalyst… the game so many people have been amped to hear more news about… we got a two minute trailer. It seems that all EA actually cares about is peddling the new years edition of the same damned sports titles they have been selling for decades. From what I can tell roughly an hour of the presentation was tied up in these sports titles with blips at the beginning and the end about something interesting. I do have to say though that Star Wars Battlefront still looks amazing, however I have had that on preorder from the Playstation network since the Fan Fest announcement. They didn’t really need to sell me on that title, but I am looking forward to it all the same.
UbiSoft on the other hand unleashed a whole bunch of interesting stuff. We are apparently going to colonize the moon in Anno 2205, which looked amazing. They are releasing a version of Trials Fusion where you apparently play a cat that rides a flame breathing unicorn. We got to see even more staged footage of The Division, this time centering around the “Dark Zone”PVP area. The game I never thought I would be interested in however was Ghost Recon Wildlands, which for all intents and purposes seems to be their answer to the Just Cause franchise. Big open world game where you take on drug lords in whatever fashion you see fit. It looks like it is going to be extremely fun in the same way that I lost serious amounts of time to Just Cause 2. The real triumph of the show however is that Aisha Tyler is amazing, and I want her to host every press conference from this point on. Additionally they brought out Angela Basset at one point, who is the absolute badass mocapped leader of the new Rainbow Six. While there was not a whole lot that I was extremely interested in, it was nonetheless a good show or at least looked amazing as compared to the train wreck that was EA.
Sony E3 2015
Finally we wrapped up the night of E3 events last night with the Sony Press conference, and honestly even hours afterwards I am not 100% sure how well it went. They dropped some massive bomb shells on the crowd, but it only really plays to the folks who were already PS4 fans. Ultimately the goal of an E3 press conference for both Microsoft and Sony is to sell hardware, and at the end of the day I end up with the same equation. Most Xbox One exclusives also come out on the PC, and I own a fairly solid gaming PC. Most PS4 exclusives don’t, and as a result that is the hardware I chose to buy. This years game conference only serves to give me more reasons to be happy with my decision. The show lead off with finally giving a date to a game many had just expected got cancelled… The Last Guardian. This game was originally slotted for the PS3, and it was questionable if it had survived the generation hop. The big reveal of the night however is that Final Fantasy 7 is in fact getting a Remake. It was glorious to see at least glimpses of Cloud and Barret as they moved past the camera in all their ps4 glory.
The title that both came from out of nowhere and stole the show for me however was Horizon Zero Dawn from Guerilla games. This apparently ushers in a brand new breed of post apocalyptic storytelling, that manages to do so without weaving in a zombie premise. We live in what seems like a Clan of the Cave Bear like setting, until we see the first giant robot roaming the landscape. This is Turok the Dinosaur hunter, meets Last of Us, meets Zoids. We get to see the female bow hunter protagonist take down a giant robot t-rex like creature. As Tam commented during the stream, we have apparently gotten really good at making fighting giant monsters seem awesome. Had I not already purchased a PS4, this would have been the title that sold me the console. I am really hoping this ends up being a vast open world landscape that lets us wander around and explore, hunting the big game and unfolding what happened during “the darkness” that lead to the machines roaming the earth. There were of course other titles announced that looked great, and that I will likely play, however at six in the morning… the day after the show… the Sony conference was all about FF7 and Horizon for me. You can check out the full show trailer below.
It is nights like last night that make me realize I am wired just a little bit weird. Last night while the world seemingly was watching the season finale of Game of Thrones, I was tuned into the E3 2015 festivities over YouTube and eventually twitch. It started early in the evening with the 2015 Nintendo World Championships, and concluded later with the phenomenal Bethesda Softworks showcase. E3 is this miraculous time of bottled hope, that seems to pump up the heart of a gamer about what might be or at least what could be. If you did not have a chance to watch it, I highly suggest you check out the Nintendo Championships. It was equal parts charming, and thrilling… and when we finally got to the heads up match between the last two contestants I have to say I was literally tense for them. The hoops that they were asked to jump through were just silly, and in the proud tradition of the Nintendo Championship… they were in fact forced to play a “game” they had never seen before.
Doom 4
The real excitement however started when the Bethesda showcase began. When a game company shows off its wares at one of these shows, it is a rarity that there are so many different titles that I care about coming from the same place. Doom will always hold a special place in my heart, because in theory it was the game that really sold me on the power of PC gaming. I remember my parents getting so damned frustrated with me for tying up the phone lines as I dialed into a friends computer to play the game cooperatively. I remember spending hundreds of hours creating my own levels and imagining what my own version of the game might bring. I devotedly played the derivatives like Heretic and the oddball narrative spinoffs like Strife, because I literally could not get enough of the game. The problem being that with Doom there also comes a lot of disappointment, and strange decisions like that god awful movie.
The problem is that ID Software for whatever reason lost its way. The last Doom game shipped in August of 2004 and we have had to endure a decade of waiting. There was this period of time where ID seemed to forget what made its games great in the first place, as it curiously focused instead on building more complex engines… than creating interesting games. That wait however is apparently nearing its end, because last night we got to see Doom 4 in all its glory, and I weep at the system I will need to have to play it in all its glory. The game play I saw was this gorgeous carnal ballet of demons and zombies erupting into red volcanoes of gore and blood on the screen. It seemed to capture everything that made Doom amazing, and strutted its stuff with a level of technical detail that I am just floored by. What makes me even happier is it seems this time they did not forget that it was ultimately multiplayer that made the Doom franchise famous. They showed off this awesome new tech that will maybe once again make level creation simple enough that anyone can pick up the map builder and start making awesome things. The builder also seems to support the creation of game play modes themselves, so I am really hoping that we once again start to see some innovation from the community in moving the FPS genre forward.
Dishonored II
If Doom was not enough, moments later the folks from Arkane Studios took the stage to talk about the leaked announcement of Dishonored 2. Dishonored holds a special place in my heart because it is in theory a “stealth” game that I actually loved playing. Granted this is because it allows you to play the game in a way that takes all sneaking about and stealth game play out of the mix. The awesome thing is, it apparently also plays extremely enjoyably for the folks who do want to stealth about and have a zero body count. It is one of the few games that both myself and Tamriello raved about when it was released, so quite honestly I was going to snatch up whatever game came from them next regardless of its hype. All of that said it looks like the continuation of the original Dishonored game is going to be amazing. One of the most interesting features of the first game is the interaction of the character Corvo Attano and his “charge” Emily Kaldwin. As you play through the game, your actions effect the upbringing of Emily. If you play the part of a bloodless hero she focuses on the good things in life, or if you are like me and go for 100% bodycount… she focuses on the death, destruction and carnage.
In Dishonored II the trailer shows us that dear Emily has apparently followed in your footsteps and takes up the role of righting wrongs at the point of a sword. Ubisoft really needs to watch what Arkane is doing because they are fucking nailing it. They are giving us both an awesome and interesting male lead, but an equally interesting female lead. To make things even better it seems that they are apparently not just carbon copies of each other. Both Emily and Corvo will have unique abilities and game play styles that will cause you to approach the level design slightly differently. In theory this means that you have at least two fresh play through of the game, and four if you are trying to get a bloodless victory on each and a full body count victory as well. Personally I am likely going to play through twice because there is no way I can somehow stomach playing through this game in a full on stealth fashion. If my actions in the last game “raised”Emily… I would not want to meet her in a dark alley, because I am certain “my” Emily would be a brutal and heartless killing machine.
Fallout 4
If all of the above was not awesome enough… we all were waiting anxiously for more tidbits of news about the latest game in the Fallout franchise. The Fallout fans out there were absolutely not disappointed, as the floodgates opened with information about the new game. This game is apparently set in Boston as has been long rumored, and for the first time we get to see the world “before the bomb”. They showed a few minutes of the character creation segment of the game, and the events leading up to being forced to go into Vault 111. I am really happy with the way they are doing this, but one of the confusing parts about the demo was that people seemed to be excited that you can create a female Vault Dweller. Far as I remember you have always been able to choose to create a female vault dweller, or at the very least you have been able to since the birth of the modern Fallout series with 3. That confusion aside the new system looks great and I should be able to create a Vault Dweller I am happy with. The world out there to explore looked phenomenal, and I got flashbacks to the moment I set foot of the vault into the Washington wasteland for the first time.
What was even more amazing however is when they started going into the systems. Apparently this time around we are going to be able to fully mod out our weapons and our armor to create brand new items that don’t exist out in the world. Each component is modular and changes the function of the items they are attached to, and while they spent a lot of time creating brutal versions of Laser and Plasma rifles… all I could sit there and imagine were the awesome shotguns I would ultimately create. This was not all of the awesome however, in that they showed this amazing modular housing system that was like the next version of what was made possible with the Skyrim Hearthfire system. In the trailer they showed these insane bases that they had built using the system allowing us to essentially create our very own “Megaton”. This is playing down my alley because I always spend so much time kitting out my player housing in the Fallout games, because it allows me to have a place to be a packrat. After showing all of this goodness, to have me salivating… they did the ultimate mic drop. Apparently this is all going to be available this November 10th. I should probably give warning to everything that I know… because I will not be seen or heard from for at least a month.
Missing the Point
This is your standard reminder that Bethsoft rarely makes compelling worlds. Every complaint about themeparks in MMOs goes double for them.
Now is where I am going to diverge from the full on “fanboyism” for a bit to comment on something I have seen said so many times. I do not know who Fierydemise is, but the above comment was retweeted into my timeline. I have no problem with this person, and my commentary isn’t really directed at them, but instead something I have seen for years. When a traditional Bethesda “Fallout” or “Elder Scrolls” series game is released, there is a group of people that seem to go into them expecting a deeply tailored narrative experience. Quite honestly if that is what you are looking for you might be missing the point. These style of open world sandbox games are not really about being told a story, but instead giving you a launch pad and a creative engine for you to wander off and tell your own story through your interaction with the world. I love them so much because they give me the freedom to enter a world without deep narrative shackles. They don’t care one bit if I wander off in the opposite direction the in game indicator is telling me to go, and find my own experience out in the wasteland.
There are so many games out there that give you a very “on rails” narrative experience, and in each of them I try my damnedest to ignore it… and tell my own story. I appreciate these games so much because I don’t have to ignore anything. They give me little nuggets of story when I crave it, but also the insane hardcore explorer porn of going off and conquering an uncertain world. It has been said that these games sacrifice fidelity for freedom of exploration, and I am completely fine with that. I guess for me maybe it comes from cutting my teeth playing games in an era essentially “before stories”. It also helps that I am far more combat drive in a game than story driven, and often times finding myself frustrated when getting bogged down in a series of cut scenes. There have been so many times when I have waited for games to “open up” and let me “do my own thing”. With Bethesda titles, I know the moment the character creation is over… that they are going to let me off my leash to go bounding madly into the distance and cause havoc. These games are designed specifically for me, and people like me… and please don’t try and shackle them with deep narrative.
Last night we were down a handful of people with Thalen and Grace being gone, but by that same token it is mostly a cast of original AggroChat folks. Kodra is back from his traveling and it was awesome to get to spend the night hanging out with him again. We have all been spending quite a bit of time in ArcheAge as we have been taking a break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the launch of Heavensward. We talk about our further impressions of the game, and Kodra talks about his since he quite literally just started today. From there we talk about our expectations for the coming launch of Heavensward and how Ashgar and I apparently have enough faith in the release of this expansion to have taken the day off work. From there we meander into talk about the upcoming Four Job Fiesta, and how all of our listeners should really take Ashgar’s money, since he has put up $5 for every AggroChat listener to defeat the game during the event. There was talk of Wildstar and Tam injuring himself, but we had a grand time just chatting about the games we had been playing.
As promised in the show I also posted a picture of the absolutely amazing Fred from Scooby Doo cosplay by Kodra over on AggroChat so you should totally check that out. The title of the show comes from the fact that I am apparently a sick and twisted bastard. One of the happiest moments I have in video games is when I am zoned out and just mindlessly slaughtering stuff for loot and prizes. This is the reason why I have always been able to grind up levels in video games so effectively and why I so insanely over leveled the various JRPGs I have played. Last night while recording the podcast I found myself cheerfully wrecking undead for a good hour of the time we recorded. I slip into this mode from time to time and just got lost in the motion of combat, and as a result I end up over leveled almost all of the time. It is a happy place… just a very bloody happy place.
Beach Racing
ArcheAge is this collection of really strange systems, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface of figuring them out. Yesterday my friends and I took a trip to Mirage Island, which is this strange second life esc showroom allowing you to buy crafting patterns for all sorts of random stuff. The awesome thing about it however is that you can test drive most of them. So Tamrielo and I went off on a tour of the island on the roadsters. The only problem you have a very limited around of time to use it…. and we did not realize that before running off out into the ocean. There is a giant track around the island… and part of it is a sandbar that cuts out into the middle of hte ocean. The problem is…. this island is really freaking huge. I crashed out of the game that apparently dropped me out of Mirage Island, but poor Tam I don’t think he made it around the sandbar before it despawned the roadster. Luckily we had mounts so at least we didn’t have to walk back home if we got stranded.
The biggest problem I am having with ArcheAge is it seems like there are dozens of currencies that I am accumulating but I have no clue where to spend them. I thought maybe Mirage Island would give me some idea, but I didn’t really find any traditional vendors. Some of the kiosks required various currencies that I had not found yet, but I didn’t find any that took any of the ones I actually had. The takeaway is that ArcheAge is a really strange game. I am still liking it but I don’t feel any closer to actually understanding it. The system I want to try and figure out how is that supposedly you can tame named bosses in the world and turn them into combat pets. There is a tiger in one of the zones I have encountered and I am kinda hoping I can figure out how to trap it. I remember in alpha I got some sort of a fox pet as a drop and it was insanely fun to run around with. Not that it was sturdy enough to tank for me, but it did add some additional damage. Who doesn’t like additional damage right?
Delving the Sewers
A few days ago I stumbled into the first dungeon of the game in the sewers under the City of Towers. I managed to sneak my way through the dungeon, carefully pulling mobs and cleared my way to the first boss… only to get my face rocked. However the trash leading up to that boss dropped some really nice items. Since I have massively out leveled my friends I figured I would revisit the dungeon when some of them got closer to my level. So last night after the podcast we thought we would give the place another shot. Unfortunately after getting Kodra and Tam out there, it looks like the 3 man dungeon had a minimum level requirement of 18. So at this point I was sitting at 27, and Tam at 20… so we decided to try and work our way through it. The first room or so was pretty easy because both of us are dual wielding blenders. The first boss however…. ended up to be just as much of a challenge with the two of us as it was solo. We managed to make it through it however with both of us extremely low in health.
The second boss was significantly easier mechanically, but involved me running around like a madman and kiting him for a bit while Tam finished him off. Then we got to the final boss… and quite frankly it rocked our worlds. It took lots of rethinking the situation and a series of I think ten attempts before we finally just barely managed to defeat the encounter. Quite honestly I have no clue how someone would manage to do this dungeon at 18 with three people, when we technically over leveled the hell out of it. This makes me super anxious however to try the next dungeon, because it was an awesome challenge. The dungeon design like much of the game reminds me of an older era of MMOs. There were moments when I was taken back to the mob density and layout of the dungeons in Dark Age of Camelot. We had to very carefully pick our way through the targets and use line of sight to pull things back in order to make sure we only got the one target we needed. The game is far better than I gave it credit for… and I am hoping to piddle around on the side for awhile.
Yesterday I did something fairly uncharacteristic for me and took off a half day from work, just because I felt like it. It was shortly after turning in the paperwork that I realized I should really use this opportunity to go see Jurassic World. So I got my ticket for the 1 pm and settled into the theater expecting it to be largely empty. I was completely wrong, the theater was absolutely packed, so I am guessing I was not the only person with this idea. As far as the movie, I have to say I liked it quite a bit. My initial review was not as good as the original, but better than the sequels, but shortly realized that it sounded like I didn’t like the movie. I actually enjoyed the sequels quite a bit, just nowhere near as much as the original. I remember seeing the original in the theater and being enthralled, and that kind of magic just can’t be captured again.
The movie was enjoyable, but mostly once things started going to shit. The best moments in the movie involved Chris Pratt. He has become this loveable goofball of an action hero, and in many ways he reminds me of he way Harrison Ford played a lot of his action roles. The movie is kind of a big dumb action movie romp through dinosaur land, and I am perfectly fine with this. There were a lot of call backs to the original movie, which played well for a nostalgia factor, but also gave certain aspects of the movie a “been there done that” feel. It was well worth the $5 for the matinee ticket and hell it was probably worth a full priced ticket as well. I have a feeling we will see a reboot of the franchise considering that they left things open in the end for sequels. No one seems to make a one off movie anymore, they have to leave things open to make a desperate ploy for more money later in the form of a sequel.
Sequels that were Better
My initial reaction to Jurassic World being better than the original sequels got me thinking. The concept of a sequel is such that we immediately expect it to be worse than the original. So today I am going to delve into some direct sequels that worked surpassed the original games. Now there are some ground rules here. For example Castlevania Symphony of the Night is a sequel in theory to the original Castlevania… problem being decades passed between those two games so it is a no brainer that SOTN surpasses the original. The same is true for the original Zelda and Link to the Past. It isn’t really fair to talk about those games, because they are not direct sequels and had a lot more to work with than the original did. Similarly I am going to ignore games like Doom 2 and Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny… because they are quite simply the original game with more features added onto it. I feel like in order to declare something a sequel that surpassed the original, it needs to actually go past what the original game offered. I am looking at you Fallout and Fallout 2… because while I enjoyed the second game a lot, it probably should have just been an expansion pack since the engine was essentially the same.
Master of Orion II
I loved the original Master of Orion game, but when the sequel came out it just did everything better. The graphics were higher fidelity, and you could delve into things at a much higher level of detail. The game kept my favorite race the Silicoids and seemed to make them even more badass. Additionally you had the ability to design your own ships, which gave me the fantasy fulfillment of rolling into a star system with a death star and destroying it. The game was far more evolutionary than revolutionary but it surpassed the original in a way that it completely took it off the map. The funny thing is that this game still holds up, and I can still lose an entire afternoon playing it through the GOG galaxy client.
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
This is probably going to be the most controversial pick that I make, because people either seem to love this game or absolutely hate it. For me it took a game that I already liked and simply made it matter more. By the time this game came out I was already heavily leaning towards roleplaying games as my primary source of enjoyment. Simon’s Quest took the Castlevania game that I loved and added a persistent component that let me improve over time as I explored the world. Now there were moments in the gameplay where it was not terribly obvious how you should proceed, and these got frustrating apparently in tracking down a couple of draculas parts, but for me at least this is the game that really cemented “Metroidvania”. It was part Castlevania, part Metroid and part Adventure of Link, and melded together in a way that I enjoyed immensely. The critics at the time bashed it because it was not enough like the original Castlevania, and ultimately the third game in the series became more popular, but I still feel like Simon’s Quest was the best of the 8 bit Castlevania games.
Warcraft II
When this game originally came out, I for the most part ignored it. I thought Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans was a boring title, and in truth at the time I would have rather played Dune 2. It was not until the first Battlechest existed that I finally gave this game a chance, and I spent the next three months obsessed with it. The gameplay felt much more responsive and you had so many more options of things that you could build. I’ve always been a base builder when playing an RTS and this game allowed me to go to stupid lengths to build impenetrable fortresses. What really extended the life of the game past the original release however was the fact that you could download all of these user created maps in the form of “PUD” files, which in itself was a bit of a play on the Doom “WAD” file format. After a few months I spent as much time designing new maps for the game as I did playing them. Warcraft 3 really gets credited for the birth of World of Warcraft, but I think this is the game that made us first give a damn about the setting.
Assassins Creed II
First off I have to admit that I am not really a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I have spent a bit of time piddling around in them but quite frankly they don’t offer the mad hack and slash game play that I really crave. Ultimately the game is ruined the moment I need to stealth around and complete a mission. The rest of the time I have a blast killing random guys on rooftops, but that pretty much is ignoring the thing that people seem to like about it the story. I have to give this game credit however because when the first Assassin’s Creed game came out I played it on a friends console, and found the controls to be some of the most frustratingly cludgy things ever. I pretty much ignored the game from that point on until at the urging of Tamrielo I finally gave the game a proper shot. The second game improves on everything that was wrong with the first game and manages to make moving around the world feel natural. If it weren’t for the fact that the game is largely about assassins that like to stealth about and attack from the shadows… I could probably enjoy it. That said I have to give this title credit for eclipsing its predecessor and spawning the franchise proper.
Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect 2 took all the bits that worked well in the original Mass Effect and then sanded down all of the bits that never worked that well. The end result was the best game in the Mass Effect series as far as I am concerned. The first game was okay, and upon going back and playing it I can appreciate it for what it was. At the time however I just could not get into it. The combat in that game was maddening at times, and felt like it wasn’t quite certain how to do turn based third person combat. The second game however made it feel fun to duck behind objects and snipe things, in the same sort of way that Gears of War did. The other thing that made the game amazing was the sheer scale of the number of characters you could ultimately recruit into your party. I still think the Mass Effect series would make an amazing television show, that played out over the course of five or six seasons. If I have to play one game in the series though, I will always return to playing ME2. It still has the most enjoyable mission system, because I like the feel of going off on these smaller strikes rather than getting bogged down in the length on rails story missions. I would seriously kill to have a game that was just a bunch of going off on random strikes forever, that was Mass Effect game play at its finest for me.
I Showed you Mine…
I just scratched the surface on sequels that ultimately trumped the original game. Now that I have shown you mine, its time for you to show me yours. What games did you feel outpaced the original, or what games did you not manage to get into the series until the second iteration. I am curious what games you hold a torch for after all these years. Not sure why I was feeling particularly nostalgic today, but ultimately I decided to just run with it. I am hoping that this post spawns other posts or at least some comments below.
Yesterday was a huge day of E3 shows with Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony all strutting their stuff with big press conferences. While I still stand by my statement yesterday, that Bethesda software is winning this E3, everyone involved had some interesting things to show off. Mainly for me this is the year that Microsoft figured out how to do a relevant press conference. The past two years since the announcement of the Xbox One have provided extremely awkward and disconnected moments, but for the most part Microsoft nailed it this time around. They provided a wide scope of games to appeal to all genres, and while I don’t believe in their exclusivity after seeing titles appear on steam months later, I do feel like they are trying really hard to wrap up a large stable of winners as far as software goes. The big title that I am interested in is the new Tomb Raider game, which makes me realize that I really need to finish the last Tomb Raider game.
Finally we wrapped up the night of E3 events last night with the Sony Press conference, and honestly even hours afterwards I am not 100% sure how well it went. They dropped some massive bomb shells on the crowd, but it only really plays to the folks who were already PS4 fans. Ultimately the goal of an E3 press conference for both Microsoft and Sony is to sell hardware, and at the end of the day I end up with the same equation. Most Xbox One exclusives also come out on the PC, and I own a fairly solid gaming PC. Most PS4 exclusives don’t, and as a result that is the hardware I chose to buy. This years game conference only serves to give me more reasons to be happy with my decision. The show lead off with finally giving a date to a game many had just expected got cancelled… The Last Guardian. This game was originally slotted for the PS3, and it was questionable if it had survived the generation hop. The big reveal of the night however is that Final Fantasy 7 is in fact getting a Remake. It was glorious to see at least glimpses of Cloud and Barret as they moved past the camera in all their ps4 glory.
The title that both came from out of nowhere and stole the show for me however was Horizon Zero Dawn from Guerilla games. This apparently ushers in a brand new breed of post apocalyptic storytelling, that manages to do so without weaving in a zombie premise. We live in what seems like a Clan of the Cave Bear like setting, until we see the first giant robot roaming the landscape. This is Turok the Dinosaur hunter, meets Last of Us, meets Zoids. We get to see the female bow hunter protagonist take down a giant robot t-rex like creature. As Tam commented during the stream, we have apparently gotten really good at making fighting giant monsters seem awesome. Had I not already purchased a PS4, this would have been the title that sold me the console. I am really hoping this ends up being a vast open world landscape that lets us wander around and explore, hunting the big game and unfolding what happened during “the darkness” that lead to the machines roaming the earth. There were of course other titles announced that looked great, and that I will likely play, however at six in the morning… the day after the show… the Sony conference was all about FF7 and Horizon for me. You can check out the full show trailer below.
