Okay, I realize I probably should’ve done a write-up on Sony’s and Bethesda’s respective conferences. Honestly I got caught up in the whirlwind of E3, sadly from my couch in South Texas, and they just got lost in the shuffle.
First, I feel I should give a little explanation. I have a PS4 and while I don’t get to play it enough as I would like, it’s because it is plugged into the large living room television and is the designated Netflix and Hulu box. Once I acquire an XBO-X my old Xbox One will be the media player and the PS4 is coming straight upstairs to be part of my gaming office. So while I do have Horizon: Zero Dawn, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD, and the Uncharted series, playing through them is a “when I get a chance” kind of thing. I would probably own more Playstation titles if my gaming opportunity was more abundant. So while I do prefer to game on my Xbox because of the controller and some of the features and extras Microsoft offers, it’s not because of some fanboy hatred of Sony.
So that little bit of exposition aside, every year I eagerly anticipate Sony’s E3 press conference. They usually put on a great show, and they script it specifically to get us whooping and cheering. But I noticed the smoke and mirrors years ago, so while I’m hopeful, I’m always looking at Sony with a bit more skeptical eye. What I saw this year has me excited for a few games, but there are others that I still don’t know about.
God of War looks great, and I’m excited to play it. I’ll admit with a little bit of shame that I never played through GoW III. I own the first two for PS3 and to be frank, those two were enough. GoWIII always looked to be more of the same, and at the time I was a little burned out on the button mashing action genre. But this new God of War looks to shake the series up a bit and bring it into the modern generation, and I’m all for it. It also doesn’t hurt that it looks awesome.
Shadow of the Colossus was a major OMG moment for a lot of people but let’s be honest. It’s a PS4 remake of a PS3 port of a PS2 game. And while I can certainly say I’ll give it a play, I couldn’t get that excited about it during the show. That’s just me.
Days Gone was shown again, and there are a lot of people pimping this game, but I just don’t get it. When you have a game with an intense story like The Last of Us, and then an awesome open world adventure like Horizon, I’m a little confused where Days Gone is supposed to fit in. I just haven’t seen enough of it yet to convince me it needs to exist in my gaming library. I haven’t made up my mind on this one yet, but so far it’s on the “wait and see” list.
Spiderman looks awesome, as if there was any doubt after Insomniac’s criminally under-appreciated Sunset Overdrive. It’s nice to see them working on a game that has a wide enough appeal to actually get them the attention from the mainstream audience that they deserve. Everything looks awesome, and the combat seems fast and fluid. A lot of people are comparing it to Arkham Asylum, which I suppose is fair, but Spidey looks to be way more interesting and fun. Definitely looking forward to this one.
Several multi-platform titles were shown. I’m not going to get into those.
Detroit: Become Human just didn’t do it for me. If you’re a fan of Quantic Dreams’ past games though, this should be right up your alley. They almost did themselves a disservice in the presentation though, because I don’t think the trailer gave a good idea of the gameplay. I’ll admit when it first started playing and I saw the character, I thought it was another Infamous.
In short, Sony’s conference was serviceable but not really jaw dropping. It’s hard to get excited over some games we know we won’t be playing this year. However…
Bethesda’s conference showed a lot of what we can play this year! While I’m not going to go full on recap like I just did above, I will mention that Wolfenstein II looked incredible, if what we saw was actual gameplay, and we now know that The Evil Within II is a thing. That game can only look better than the first Evil Within, because that one was fucking hideous. I do hope they update the control scheme though, as it was always kinda wonky. There will be a standalone expansion to Dishonored called Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. I played through the first Dishonored but never touched the sequel. I know a lot of people hyped for this though so if that’s your thing, you’ve got a reason to look forward to September. They also announced Fallout 4 and Skyrim for VR, if you’re into that. Oh they also announced premium mods coming to Skyrim. Because that worked out so well for them the last time.
Aside from those things though, there wasn’t really any huge news from the Bethesda camp. Certainly nothing along the lines of a bombshell announcement, like say… an HD remaster of the original Fallout games, or a RAGE sequel. Say what you want, Rage was awesome.
