There is a lot of content to cover, so let’s jump right into it. A rundown detailing the E3 2016 presentations of Microsoft, PC Gamer and AMD, Ubisoft, and Sony. There’s a stupid amount of content to cover, and simply getting all of this done in one day has proved to be quite the challenge. So let’s go!
14-year-old Mika Saft began this day with a book report on what cool upcoming things people will be positively pumped about for her favoritest console, the Xbox One. Still not having gotten over how people called it the Xbone, and insisting they call it the One, like the foolhardy little truffle she is.
Actually, let’s start with the hardware before getting into any games. As was leaked, because when you task 20 people with doing something at least one of them is bound to screw up, the Xbox One S was revealed as a sleeker, smaller, and slimmer machine with 4K Blu-Ray and streaming support, a revised controller, and a sleek new white design that looks slick, as it is the variant to the big black box that defined the console originally. It will debut this August at the price of $300, the same as the original Xbox One. Which explains why the system’s price dropped a few weeks before E3. They want to start getting rid of the older models.
That’s how the conference opened, and the conference closed with the announcement of Project Scorpio, a stupidly powerful Xbox One with a 6 Teraflop GPU. To alleviate people’s fears, Microsoft stated that all variants of the Xbox One will be able to play the same games and nobody will get left behind,l which is reassuring, but likely a lie of some sort. This claim that they are somehow beyond generations is difficult to stomach knowing their history, but the idea of adding new and more powerful consoles continuously without ushering in a new generation is at the very least interesting. I’m anticipating that things will go wrong shortly after games start taking advantage of Project Scorpio, but I’m also hoping for the best.
Onto the games, starting with Gears of War 4, which continues what I assume are the beats the franchise has played since it came out a decade ago. A series of high energy action set pieces that offer just enough to vary and distinguish each section of the game while sticking to a gameplay foundation firm enough to have inspired an entire generation of shooters and the cover shooter sub genre. The game looks competent, engaging, and there is enough seen in the enemy and audio designs to allow it to remain a seemingly intense game, even though the presence of regenerating health and a really big chainsaw gun prevents the player from ever being vulnerable.
The drab aesthetics of the series always turned me off immediately, and while better than the predecessor, the reliance on visual and graphical effects over beginning an artistic vision to life is a major turn-off. Oh well, those who like this sort of thing will surely partake in it when the game comes out on October 11, 2016 for Xbox One and PC.
Yes, that’s right, Gears of War 4 will also be part of Microsoft’s initiative to begin Xbox One games to PC, which has been an abysmal practice so far with a prohibition of mods, extensive PC requirements, and a lack of options, namely that the games can only be played in borderless windowed form. This is not the case for every game Microsoft brings to PC, just their own platform, and it’s clear that many people are upset with this.
I appreciate the inclusion of crossplay and cross buy with these games, but so far their Xbox Play Anywhere initiative has fallen on its face. Nevertheless, just about everything they show will be coming to PC in some way, shape, or form, and hopefully they’ll improve their output going forward, as they are making Windows 10 versions of most of the games shown during this conference.
This includes Forza Horizon 3, which was revealed to the world, and I’m left with little to say about it. The game looks beautiful from a graphical perspective, the Australian environments looks lavish, I’m sure it controls very well, and will have a lot of content and customization to play with, and the open world and co-op elements sound nifty. Showing that the developers were clearly inspired by Ubisoft’s… um… that 2014 online racing game– The Crew. But I have next to no interest in this horse I only see once a year during these E3 showings, but it will likely sell a few million copies when it launches for W10 and XBO one September 27th, 2016.
Gameplay footage of Recore, the brainchild of Keiji Inafune and the former Metroid Prime developers of Armature Studio, has finally been revealed, as the game is a third person shooter with an emphasis on speed, fluidity, dashing, and some unique environmental traversal. Also grappling hooks, which are kinda this year’s thing. It looks to be a fast yet manageable experience, set in a world that, thanks to a series of interesting looking locales sprinkled through some more humdrum looking desserts and a color scheme that is not intimidated to incorporate saturated oranges and blues, manages to looks pretty appealing as well. That is before getting to the slender and intricate robots that litter the game, who make the game look quite different than anything Inafune has done before. Recore comes out on September 13th, 2016, and I’ll likely check it out shortly thereafter. Or whenever there’s a good sale, as I’m cheap frugal like that
I have many reservations about Final Fantasy XV, made no better after going through the XIII trilogy just a few months ago, and while I will openly admit that the graphical prowess and sheer scope and scale of the game is a technical showcase in its own right, what was shown confused me more than the gameplay featured in supercuts. It was a boss battle against a Titan I believe, and I’m not entirely sure what the person demoing the game was doing. He was constantly getting hit, and only managed to win because a prompt came up at a specific time, which triggered a victory cutscene. I even looked through the trailer a second time, but I still can’t make heads or tails about what exactly is going on. Whatever, the gameplay looks fluid and intricate enough to be enjoyable, and I’m just hoping the praise Final fantasy XV will inevitably be given come September 30th, 2016 will be well warranted.
Some softball fluff followed from there, such as new features being added to Xbox One, namely background music, clubs (community groups), region and language settings, and Xbox Arena. A cross platform update for Minecraft, which included support for dedicated servers and the ability to use add-ons on more platforms will be added this fall. The ability to build and customize your own Xbox One controller… which actually sounds quite appealing. Limbo will be freely made available to all Xbox One users, while the studio’s next title, Inside, will launch on June 29th, 2016. In addition to an obligatory small game sizzle reel, as those are actually the best things to come out of most E3 events.
We Happy Few is a captivating game simply through its art style, which captures the lovely aesthetics of 1960s England, channeled through the art style of Contrast, while taking some inspiration from the Bioshock series. It is a game about a man who dares to disobey the greater society order of being drugged up in order to fail to realize how this seemingly utopian society is actually a dystopia, with clear nods to the like of Brave New World, and even a bit of 1984. The gameplay seems to be based on trickery and stealth, but the breed of stealth wehre running away and hiding are your goals, not eliminating guards and the like. I’m quite excited to check out the final product, but it is currently in early access, which you can partake in on Xbox One come July 20th, 2016.
Dead Rising 4 was properly unveiled after a series of leaks soiled the surprise. It is a return to form with Frank West as the main character with the setting being that of a mall and the surrounding areas during the holiday season. A perfectly reasonable idea, and a great way to vent out holiday related stress by murdering the masses that exist solely to get in your way… I mean zombies, but a rather narrow minded premise as far as I’m concerned, as it makes the idea of bringing this game up in June come across as bizarre. Nevertheless, there is some color in the world, plenty of ways for zany murder to be conducted, and a jolly time for all is likely when the game launches in Holiday 2016.
Scalebound continues to look like a streamlined yet not compromised take on what makes Platinum Games so darn awesome without the same complexities that come with a grade based character action game. With intense action, giant set pieces, and enough design sensibilities in order for everything show to remain memorable. Gameplay itself is nowhere near as melee focused as the rest of their output is, with regular use of a bow in the boss battle shown, and the ability to get on your pet dragon and reign fire on your opponents.
Also, the protagonist’s headphones are worn when the game is making use of the amazing lyrically driven songs that platinum’s original games are known for. I’m actually really looking forward to checking this out after having difficulty with enjoying Platinum’s prior titles, and I should be able to come 2017. Oh, and I guess there’s multiplayer in it as well. I’m probably never going to touch it though.
Sea of Thieves was properly shown for the first time, and it certainly doesn’t look like a Rare game like Microsoft was proclaiming. Instead, it just seems to be a big multiplayer sandbox where a bunch of players need to cooperate to do anything, and there is no real discernable goal. You just screw around in a world while enacting your pirate fantasies. Like getting drunk or… steering a boat… and… exploring… Yeah, I don’t see much appeal here.
There’s no real structure or characters present as far as I can see, and the world itself just looks fairly boring. Which is in stark contrast to just about everything they made from 1994 to 2001. It looks like a bore based on what was shown, and that genuinely sucks to say.
To make light mentions of all the subjects I’ve omitted. Gears of War 1 antagonist General Raam is coming as a guest character in Killer Instinct, and is due out this week. State of Decay 2 is coming out in 2017 as a cooperative and dour zombie game. Halo Wars 2, despite a very grey trailer, looks to be a decently colorful RTS that is due out on February 21st, 2017, but if that’s too long of a wait, a multiplayer beta began shortly after the press conference. Also, Tekken 7 is coming early 2017, and looks like a modern fighting game.
As a whole, the press conference was pretty good, with a nice selection of games shown, although nothing very surprising. Because all the surprises leaked like a broken fire hydrant… Okay, that’s one conference done. Onto the other!
Last year, Penelope Cooper stammered through an overly long presentation where she desperately tried to win over an audience who was grumbling by the time she was halfway done with her poorly constructed research paper on why PC is the best system for video games. Although, she is an eighth grader, you can’t really expect her to do a proper research paper can you?
Okay, this was a 100 minute showcase of games through a talk show format, and I’ve only got so much time to make this. So I’m going to just ignore the trailers and details for games I don’t care about, as I can only exude so much apathy before it devolves into frustration. Plus, I skipped through a bulk of the show after the first ten minutes bore me as much as the one from last year did. What I saw was not as cringe worthy and dull as before, but slightly better, and not almost three hours long.
Before getting into anything specific though, I feel I should talk about VR. Now, I have not tried VR, nor do I wish to as I dislike the idea of it being a major means of playing video games on a fairly fundamental level. Quite simply, I don’t see any single game that seems to truly benefit from virtual reality and needs to be built around it, as the experience could be emulated just fine using a basic monitor. It is largely replacing the tilting of a right stick with the movement of your head, and placing you in a partial sensory deprivation chamber. 
The inclusion of motion controllers, as see in the Oculus Touch and HTC Vive allows for more control options, but once again, I don’t see much purpose for them. Especially when considering that the industry already proved that motion controls only work for a very select number of games, and almost all of them would work without them.
I think that VR is something of a fad, and it will not truly ever blow up in the way people hope it will. It is an expensive novelty, and while I can see its limited virtual reality capabilities being appealing for things outside of games, I don’t see any game that necessarily needs it to function as intended. I also don’t get things like Superhot VR, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, and Killing Floor Incursion when the games clearly didn’t need VR in the first place, and the VR versions that were shown look like tacky recreations. Except for Superhot VR, which just looks cumbersome.
On that note, Giant Cop: Justice Above All is VR game that set in a world where you are a giant omnipotent pair of all seeing eyes and hands that is tasked with maintaining the sanctity of a resort town that has an art style that… I’d actually struggle to describe beyond a more sepia tone color scheme, and the fact that it is reminiscent of the 60s in some way. You are given mysteries to solve, people to subdue, and crime to bring justice too, or if you want, cause a lot of destruction because you are a pair of giant hands and people are slightly smaller than a crayola crayon.
There is enough humor and personality in the trailer to warrant one’s attention, and its premise sounds like one of the better uses of VR I’ve seen, even though I don’t quite get why it is an exclusive. Regardless, Giant Cop will come from the heavens to throw a baby into a fire on fall 2016.
Vampyr is the next project from the studio Dontnod of Remember Me and Life is Strange fame. However, what was shown looks drastically different than a heavy science fiction story about memories and an LGBT friendly adventure game about a girl who can see the future. Instead, the game is set during WWI and deals with the main character struggling to cope with his vampirism and his insatiable bloodlust.
From what was shown, gameplay seems to be an evolution of the combo system in Remember Me, where the player needs to customize and string together their own unique moves to maximize damage, with one of those moves being to latch onto someone and bite their necks to steal their health. Unfortunately, the serious tone, dreary world, and general concept don’t really appeal to me, and I can’t say I’d offer this game a glance when it releases in 2017.
I briefly mentioned Tyranny before for being an interesting game for Obsidian to make, as the studio has thrived with morally complex characters in the past, and the setting of an incredibly oppressive authoritarian state that your main character is tasked with overthrowing is one of the better scenarios for exploring the nitty gritty grey areas of morality and having people question their own decision. However, these games are normally very dense, requiring a lot of contemplation, pondering, and attention of the players to both the story, and to much of the gameplay of this PC RPG. That is to say, a genre I just cannot seem to get into before I get bored and said boredom extends to the otherwise excellent story. *Sigh* I’m sure that others with more patience will be able to enjoy this game when it comes out in 2017.
Turing Test actually proved to be something of a surprise from this conference, a science fiction first person puzzle game that is named after the test used to determine whether or not a computer’s responses are indistinguishable from a human’s. Certainly some interesting science fiction stuff, and there looks to be enough to the intuitive and fast puzzles shown in the trailer. It’s ideally building off the simplicity of something like Portal and using the general framework to tell a story about the ever closing lines between humans and robots, or at least that’s what I’m lead to believe. Whatever the game ultimately manifests itself as, I’m going to keep an eye on it.
Dual Universe is undoubtedly inspired by the still unreleased No Man’s Sky, being a massive space simulation game based on exploring an interconnected and singular world with other players, if it took a page from EVE Online and… I don’t know, Minecraft, I guess. The game is not as fixated on exploration or any such thing as much as it is focused on player interconnectivity, factions, and economic manipulation, which sounds like a very different audience than the aforementioned title. Yet there’s also a lot of settlement establishing and customization in your plane and space you own within this world, which makes it far more tangible than an effectively infinite collection of planets. For as interesting as this is though, the game still looks to be in pre-alpha, and most of the models look to be unfinished, or at least I would hope so, as it really does not look particularly good from a graphical and visual perspective
From here I could talk about the official mod for ARK: Survival Evolved where you can play as a dinosaur, but I’m already at six pages here, so… yeah. You did alright AMD and PC Gamer, keep on trying and shoot for the stars, you bright eyed youth… Man, somebody is going to get super angry at me for being so reductive about VR. Oh well, I’m sure I have nothing to worry about.
The exchange student Urbi Softich is quite the odd duck when it comes to these things, as he enjoys fusing with his mother’s black friend in order to present a collection of video games that his illustrious parents have been funding. He does this for no reason other than he enjoys showing others how much better he is than them, and he likes being a six foot something black woman more than a mildly disproportionate French dandy boy.
The Europa flavored festivities began a really stupid dance number involving clowns and people in animal costumes and Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now… Because those fit. It was naturally for Just Dance 2017, which is going to have a Hatsune Miku song in it for all the hip young weeaboos and their slightly overweight mothers. Afterwards, they brought up the tragedy in Orlando… because Urbi Softich is a master of segways.
If I am understanding this right, the central premise behind Ghost Recon Wildlands is what if Mexican drug cartels took over all of Bolivia in order to produce as much Cocaine as possible in order to sell and distribute it on a global scale for absurd profit? Well, some white American dudes would need to come in and shoot them all for being dirty little criminal boys. The world is massive, it contains drop in and out four player co-op, and everything looks gorgeous given its realistic aesthetic, but my goodness does this premise sound stupid and greatly insensitive. I really hope this is just me and the game proves to be at least aware of what it is doing come March 7th, 2016.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole will be a direct sequel to the Stick of Truth, where the gaggle of boys have decided that fantasy role playing is for nerds, and decided to play superheroes instead. A plan that quickly divulges into them planning on creating a myriad of movies, but arguments end that rather quickly, separating them into two factions once more. It’s all clearly based on the influx of Marvel movies of the past couple of years, and the premise sounds like it has enough to be a nifty, if a little immediately dated, storyline.
Gameplay has substantially evolved from the basic Paper Mario-esque set up of Stick of Truth, and is instead closer to Radiant Historia and the like with lightly grid based combat where you can push enemies into obstacles and use a few environmental pieces to your advantage. The basic class system now involves a lot of superhero specialization built off of several different types. Your party has expanded well past two characters. And farts return as a crucial gameplay mechanic, except now they can transcend time. While I was not into the past season, South Park is still a reliably enjoyable show, and I am interested in how this game will play out when it releases on December 6th, 2016. Oh, and if you preorder the game, you get the first one for free. Nice.
Ubisoft also had two VR games to show off, the first being Eagle Flight, the game where you play as an Eagle soaring through the skies, and it is set to take place in a nature overrun Paris and feature a series of cooperative and competitive modes. Its art style still looks clean and simple, but if I hear anybody actually compare this to the act of slight as they are sitting in their chair, I’m probably going to take that chair away from them and ask them how much they like being in a virtual reality. I share the same mentality with Star Trek: Bridge Crew, which is basically that starship simulation game Artemis but using headsets, which is appealing, I guess, but is far harder to pull off and more expensive than a game that can be played on any decent PC. I’m just saying, this has a stupidly high barrier of entry.
Despite originally being announced as a multiplayer affair, For Honor received a full blown story trailer and footage from one of the game’s campaigns. The set-up is both absurd and stupidly awesome. The world was positively wrecked sometime in the 1500s or so and everybody hated each others so they entered a chaotic war that has been going on for 1,000 years, and is forever driven by the bringer of war and goddess of destruction, Apollyon! Now people are fighting because it is all that has been known for all of history, and now samurai, vikings, and knights are all beating each other to death.
The gameplay consists of what looks to be a fairly simple fighting system when you get down to it, but complicated through the inclusion of a series of stances that are determined through the right analog stick, choosing whether you want it to be high, right or left. Your blocks and attacks vary from those stances, and presumably a well timed block can turn into a parry. At least I think that’s how it works. Regardless, the game looks legitimately cool despite being a shameless power fantasy, but at least it seems to be done out of love for medieval warfare. For Honor will be out on February 14th, 2016 for your significant other to play while you enjoy some Persona 5.
Grow Home was a cute little tech demo turned game that I was theoretically interested in, but the core gameplay of climbing a big plant that occasionally shoots you to other platforms to climb before shooting another plant sounded rather humdrum to me. From what I can tell, that is the same gameplay loop incorporated in the game’s successor, Grow Up. Except now your goal is to make your way to the moon for whatever reason. It is scheduled to come out this August, where it will hopefully be more complicated than I’m preemptively giving it credit for.
Trials of the Blood Dragon was revealed through a leak a couple months back, and it looks to be exactly what everybody assumed it was. A combination of the gameplay of Trials HD and the aesthetic of Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon. I absolutely love the fact that Ubisoft was willing to greenlight something like this and okay a commercial rifle with the 80s nostalgia, but I can’t help but be a little buthurt that it is tied to a game that I struggled to play once before giving up on the series forever. Whatever, people are enjoying it… right now in fact, as the game released immediately after the press conference. Neat.
As I stated before, I’m tentatively interested in Watch Dogs 2, but after seeing the gameplay, I’m actually changing that to fully interested. There are enough fun possibilities to be had with all of your means of interacting with the world. The characters, while not particularly gripping, at least sound like they are having some fun. While the stealth and hacking based gameplay looks versatile enough to carry an entire playthrough. It’s not a serious and melodramatic mess that had to be delayed for six months like its predecessor, it’s a game about a bunch of twenty-somethings wreaking vigilante justice against a Donald Trump analog. Needless to say, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the reception of this game when it releases on November 15th, 2016.
I initially pegged the next game for another SSX, but revised to include skiing, paragliding, and wingsuits in addition to snowboarding, but that’s not the case. Steep is an extreme sports game set in the European Alps, one with a focus on online connectivity, social interactions with other players, and going about challenges imposed on you by yourself, the game, or your friends. Which I understand to at least some extent, but I really don’t see a hook for this game unless you are really into that idea, as the gameplay doesn’t look particularly fine tuned, and with a world so large, there is always the appeal to go exploring one location to another and not focusing on perfecting one course. Or if you do decide to do that, I’m guessing the game will get stale rather quickly. But that’s just speculation, for a game that will be released in December, and blah, blah, blah.
My steam is basically gone at this point, and Ubisoft did a pretty adequate job at presenting interesting titles, or showing people more about titles that everyone already knew about. No major surprises, no thrills, and nothing much to say other than… I guess I have three games from this company that I’m looking forward to. Onwards to the final frontier!
The festivities closed with Soni Entin, having long abandoned all hope for her Vita project and focusing exclusively into her Playstation 4 project, which has been doing splendiferously after Mika Saft accidentally supported fascism and called terrorists admirable back during elementary school three years ago. Which people remember, while nobody remembers when Soni said the N word on the bus in first grade.
God of War 4 has been rumored for a while now, and it was revealed under the mantle of… God of War… You know, there’s nothing wrong with added a subtitle, right? Especially since the game is so clearly fundamentally different than the original incarnation of the series. The live demo shown depicted a new character who looks like and I assume will also be named Kratos teaching his young son how to hunt, using a bow and his dead mother’s knife. He berates the child for being a child, and eventually shows that he ultimately does care for the boy by both saving him from baddies and a troll and taking a more nurtured way of teaching the boy how to take the life of an animal, and not scolding him when he admits that he dislikes the feeling of murder. So he’s certainly more admirable than Greek Kratos.
The gameplay itself is far closer and more direct than it ever way in the original series, involving Kratos using a magical teleporting axe along with his fists to dispatch one enemy at a time, while still having access to absurd strength that can be fueled by his infallible rage. It certainly looks different, but also more cinematic, which I’m sure the developers were aiming for given how gracefully the game verges in and out of cutscenes. It also looks quite beautiful with its depiction of a winter weathered norse landscape, which does beg the question about why Kratos isn’t wearing a shirt, when I would given him a bear coat. That would be both cute and cool. No release date was given, but based on how polished the build looked, I’m guessing it’s due out for PS4 in 2017.
Though it’s mention was brief and only a thirty second supercut showing the first proper enemies and another member of Trico’s species of dog-cat-griffin-rats, it has been revealed that The Last Guardian is finally coming out on October 25, 2016. Which, after nearly a decade of waiting, is actually a bit alarming. Everything looks striking and intentional in some degree, but I just hope that the developers were actually able to live up to… nah, who am I kidding? I’m sure the game will be good, great even, but after this long, there’s no way people will have their dreams fulfilled, whatever they may actually be.
I commented on Horizon Zero Dawn in my PRE3 2016 Rundown, and it still stands that this is one of the most impressive looking publicly AAA games currently in development. The nature riddled world has enough color and variation to every area to make the game seem regularly unique, there is a lot of versatility in the abilities at your disposal, and the machines that now rule large portions of the Earth all have a sleek yet animalistic design to them that I just adore. Though, I’m not sure if I’m sold based on the gameplay footage shown.
It all seems very contextual and staged, presenting that the game takes place in a very large world and your actions, even in the menu, are commented on by the main character. Who can also participate in dialogue scenes where her response is dictated by a conversation wheel… For some reason. Minor qualms aside, I like the inclusion of RPG mechanics, such as strength and weaknesses that can be determined by scanning the robots, I love the fact you can actually hack into animals, and I can only hope there are a wide array of side quests that will take advantage of the vast world. In case you happened to forget, Horizon Zero Dawn is due out on February 28th, 2017.
Despite having a pretty poor track record, I’m actually quite interested in seeing what David Cage and Quantic Dream will be doing with Detroit: Become Human, a game that I initially thought would be about a young Android who, thanks to an error of some sort, has her own dreams, goals, and ambitions. Well, it is… partially. Another character was introduced in the most recent trailer, a detective android, who is tasked with preventing a rogue android from killing a child… Have you ever heard about the three laws of robotics?
You seriously think that robot servants wouldn’t exist without the explicit instructions of do not try and kill humans? How defective are these things if this is even possible? Oh, and then there is the claim that your decisions in the story actually matter in the end, which has been, by in large, a lie for every game the company made before this. It’s frustrating when these two things are the only aspects I can really comment on with regards to the trailer other than how it unsurprisingly looks graphically impressive and the game have PS VR support.
Speaking of PS VR supported games, which will be a theme for a while, one of them is going to be Resident Evil VII: Biohzard, which has reimagined the series as a first person game that is deeply rooted in both the past and its more horrific roots. Taking influence from stuff like P.T., Outlast, Amnesia, and so forth. Which is a little curious. Why go and change the point of view so drastically with a soft reboot of your franchise, when you’ve always relied on a third person camera? Other than to jump on the VR bandwagon that is. Oh well, the game actually looks quite interesting regardless of this dramatic change and people can judge the game all they want as a demo of the game was released after the show. Resident Evil VII will creep onto store shelves and the PC, XBO, and PS4 storefronts on January 24, 2017.
Actually, let’s just jump in and deal with the rest of the VR games right now. The peripheral will launch on October 13th, 2016 with 50 compatible games that will be available in 2016. Farpoint not one of them, but it is a space shooter about a group of astronauts who explore a distant planet and find a race of hostile aliens of some sort who begin assaulting them and destroying their ships and equipment. The premise sounds familiar, the world design is basically that of a mountainous desert free of vegetation, and the aliens are nondescript robots of some sort. There appears to be little in way of gameplay variation, and the entire thing looks fairly forgettable.
Star Wars Battlefront is getting a PS VR exclusive X-Wing mission to fulfill dreams never fulfilled outside of the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter games of the early 90s and several others games. While Final Fantasy XV: VR Experience will be a mode of the game where you can play as the playful member of the boyband, Prompto who can shoot at enemies with a pistol and look at the world from a first person point of view. There will also be a Batman Arkham VR game due out in October 2016, in case you ever wanted a first person Batman game of some sort… and weren’t burned out on the Arkham series after Arkham Knight.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is also getting VR support, but what is more noteworthy is how the franchise is basically unidentifiable from where it was about five years ago. With space battles, grapple assisted gunfights on the sides of massive spaceships, and space dog fighting. Yet when compared to a collection of other first person shooters shown at E3 thus far, such as LawBreakers and Titanfall 2, the gameplay fails to look anywhere near as far or fluid. It’s pretty much destined to perform worse than the series has in years, which could put an end to this series, which I have become positively sick of talking about over the eons it has been since it began to dominate the industry.
When you think about it, a lot of the industry could be happy if they just get the same games they loved remastered every ten years. Or twenty as the case may be for Crash Bandicoot, whose original trilogy of games are being fully remade for Playstation 4. Nothing was shown, not even a new render of the everybody’s pizza dog, but he is coming back in Skylanders if you want that… you don’t? Okay.
How about a new game from Kojima Productions? Because only a few months after ending his relationship with Konami, Kojima’s new studio has begun work on a new game with Norman Reedus entitled Death Stranding. Only a real time trailer was revealed, and details are incredibly vague. Norman, who is also an army boy, finds himself surrounded by dead sea creatures, he grabs his beautiful baby, the baby turns into an invisible creature that leaves a dark residue, and leaving Norman to stare up at the sky where fie figures float high above him. It is wonderfully staged, features an amazing song, and whatever final form the game takes shall not be seen for many, many years.
Speaking of games that will probably be unheard of for quite some time, Insomniac is making a Spiderman game. A game that lacks so much as a title, and was only presented through a prerendered trailer, but considering the developer’s track record, these are probably the finest hands the property has even been put in. With Sony’s close relationship to the Spiderman franchise, based on the movies and such, I’m quite surprised that this hasn’t happened sooner. I would speculate, but I’m guessing development on this game just began a few months ago.
The show closed out with Days Gone, a game from SIE Bend Studios that tells the story of a gruff white man with nothing to lose going out to murder people after his wife died. Also it’s a zombie game, the one set piece shown looks to be very scripted with only one way in which you’re suppose to progress through them. It looks almost like a parody of what a modern video game is, except it isn’t, and it actually looks quite polished from a mechanical point of view. I’m sorry, but how does a developer choose this as their first major new IP in years? I… I’m ending this night while grumpy aren’t I?
Sony’s conference was solid, but a far cry from the year of dreams with The Last Guardian, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Shenmue III… Is that a good enough closing note? Even if it isn’t, that’s all I have to say for the 0th day of the Electronic Edutainment Exposition, and the majority of news from the convention with it. Now I’m going to bed. G’d night!