E3 2016 - Conference times, news and hype (!)

[Scrustle]

Just finished watching the Sony show. Couldn't watch it last night, so I had to watch this morning. It was okay I guess. Nothing was as bad as I was expecting. Even Resident Evil and Call of Duty didn't look awful, which was surprising. RE7 looks like it's taking clear inspiration from PT, but I have to say as the CoD demo went on, and became more CoD-like, the less interested I got in it. Not that I was ever going to get it in the first place.

But as for the good stuff, Horizon continues to look good. Nothing particularly new was shown, just the same kind of thing we've seen before in more depth. A release date for The Last Guardian is good, although yet again we just see a trailer with little info. I kind of don't want to see too much info on that game though, so I suppose it's a good thing. I want to try to go in fresh to a certain extent.

I don't know what to think about God of War 4. I actually like what they've done with Kratos as a character. I was really against them bringing him back if they were moving to Norse mythology, which they did. Having the same guy just still constantly angry, looking for more gods to kill for the sake of it would have been a total disaster. Now they've changed him in to a stern father, which is a good place to take him I think. But I don't think I like the change to the genre. I want God of War to be a big bombastic game where you fling your crazy magical weapons around yourself. Not something where you're in close with relatively restricted movement. Also, that camera position and gameplay style in Norse mythology is already being done in Hellblade. But still, I guess it won't be a bad game, just not what I want from God of War. Also it looks like this new game is an RPG or something, with the XP and location discovery prompts showing up on screen. I thought that was kind of weird.

Oh, and that Quantic Dream game was kind of surprising in that it actually seems like more of a game this time. Still not for me, but it was interesting to see they're actually trying to add something more to it that's not just inconsequential QTEs every so often.

Kojima's game had a cool trailer, but that's all I can say about it. Zero information shown, but the imagery was intriguing at least. Although if I'm being selfish, I would much rather it be a spiritual successor to Zone of the Enders. Maybe this new game could be that, since we got so little from what was shown. Somehow I doubt it though.

I was glad there wasn't too much VR stuff either. Some of it looked alright, but I'm glad it didn't take up too much of the show.

And I have to mention the crowd too. Ever since E3 2013 it seems like the Sony crowd has been this embarrassing whooping mob. Chanting "Sony, Sony" before the show, getting way too excited for release date announcements, etc. Pretty cringey, and I think it paints a pretty bad picture for gamers in general.

So yeah, overall the show was alright. Some good stuff, nothing terrible, but nothing I'm blown away by. Also a lack of a lot of the Japanese games I was hoping to see. Stuff like Gravity Rush and Yakuza. I guess that was always going to happen at TGS instead though.

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

Putting the third party publishers to one side for a minute, both platform holders did a sterling job I thought.

All told I thought Xbox maybe edged it for personally, but then I am a sucker for a hardware announcement!
+ Scorpio! They handled that well didn't they? No doubt in my mind that Sony got wind of Microsofts plans and pulled Neo late on as quietly as they could (a Financial Times interview? Really?), No full specs, but based on what we know about this and the Neo, Sony's team will be scratching their heads wondering what they can do to beef up their machine as quickly and cheaply as possible.
+ The Slim! Seems like a lovely thing, and if it weren't for the Scorpio I'd be switching. As it stands I'll hold on to my day one XBO and upgrade next year, but if I didn't own an Xbox at all even with the Scorpio I'd be buying this and having a blast before re-evaluating in 18 months.
+ Horizon 3 looked flawless.
+ Gears 4 looked great. Story-wise this franchise has never really grabbed but the gameplay is so strong this can't fail to be good.
+ Dead Rising 4. Frank is back!
+ Indies - Inside and Cuphead stand out, but there's a lot to like in there.
- Recore wasn't what I expected and didn't grab me.
- Scalebound looks off, and that character is annoying as hell. My confidence in Platinum is shaky at the moment.
? Sea of Thieves. I want to love it, but for some reason I don't. Cautiously, blindly optimistic though....

I can see why everyone is super-hyped by Sony's showing, and it was really strong, but a lot of what they announced didn't massively resonate if I'm honest.
+ Horizon is shaping up really well and is one I'm looking forward to, although the recent story trailer featured some pretty hackneyed writing and over-earnest voice acting which has me worried a bit.
+ Spider-man! If you played Sunset Overdrive, you can easily see how Insomniac will probably do a great job of this.
+ Detroit is right up my street thematically. I'm sold as long as Quantic have learnt some lessons from previous games!
+ All the VR stuff looks super-cool, and I've had the hardware pre-ordered for ages so glad there's so much support coming. My only reservation is that I'll be massively surprised if much of what they showed is a fully fledged game and lasts any longer than an hour max.
- God of War looked lovely but never been a franchise that's grabbed me.
- The Last Guardian - I'm in the camp that this isn't going to turn out well and that they're hoping to snare enough people early out of pure curiosity before negative buzz kills it. Really hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be pre-ordering in a million years!
- Days Gone looked fun but very derivative and lacking in character.
- Resident Evil in first person....am I the only person on the internet disappointed by this?? This isn't really a negative for Sony I guess as it's coming to everything.
? Death Stranding. Firstly - WTF. Secondly - this won't release until late 2018, no chance, so isn't even really news to get excited for or otherwise at this point.

[chase210]

Sony, lets see.

Horizon (Yay, this looks amazing)
Resident Evil (doesn't look like much of anything to me, I mean there wasn't much in that demo really)
Detroit (Looks nice, but David Cage)
Spider-Man (Yes yes all of this in my mouth)
God Of War (I like my god of war, but that demo didn't look that great)
Virtual Reality (I don't like or care about virtual reality, so the fact they took so long on this really annoyed me)
The Last Guardian (It looks alright. I mean it looks nice, but gameplay wise, its up in the air innit)
Call Of Duty (Looks a lot different. Hardly looks like call of duty at all, I might even venture. But I've already pre ordered it, so what the hell do I know)
Days Gone (Looks boring, that demo wasn't running well neither. Granted, its still in relatively early stages, but hopefully it looks better next time we see it)
Death Stranding (Thats a Kojima game all right. I'll wait for gameplay to judge)


There was actually a gravity rush 2 trailer, I don't know why they didn't bring it to the conference, cos it looks amazing.

[skidoosh]

Just got to the CoD VR stuff. When CoD 4 came on there's some dude screaming "Oh my gaad! Oh my gaad!". It was a good game, but I think some grips need to be gotten!

[skidoosh]

Hardly looks like call of duty at all

Couldn't agree more. I thought that was EVE!

[dezm0nd]

Played through that RE7 teaser. It's real good.

[dezm0nd]

[dezm0nd]

Here's the YT ... LINK... of the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOKpiyne8o0

[zen_anarchy]

I don't own an xbone but do feel the Microsoft conference edged it this year with a more impressive list of games whilst sony seemed to rely on either stuff we knew about or stuff so far in future its hard to get hyped.

Was seriously confused with Norman Reedus giving birth on a beach full of dead sea creatures to a baby with the powers of invisibility whilst five elder gods looked on. This seemed to be Kojima at his most pretentious.

Cool stuff for me was dead rising 4 and rares pirate game both seemed cool whilst god of war 4 looked meh and was simply playing up to the current Viking obsession and was not feeling the horizon zero dawn game footage.

so far not much has grabbed me at this years E3 i'm far more hyped for stuff coming in the next few months like the new Deus ex game.

[ratsoalbion]

Played through that RE7 teaser. It's real good.

That's nice to hear. Jeff Matulef was far from positive in his review.

[Todinho]

New Nioh demo coming in August! http://www.dualshockers.com/2016/06/14/ ... -released/
Also in case anyone was wondering what Death Stranding means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_stranding ,this goes pretty much in line with what Kojima had been teasing for awhile hopefully we will see this in 2018.
Lastly that Zelda footage looked really cool until they cutted to Pokemon...I mean c'mon do you really have to do a 30 minutes interview with a gameplay demo from a game I've essentially seen 1 million times already?

[Stanshall]

I don't own a Wii U but the Ghibli vibe of that poster/title screen has me more excited than anything other than the ludicrous title of Kojima's new game.

[dezm0nd]

Played through that RE7 teaser. It's real good.

That's nice to hear. Jeff Matulef was far from positive in his review.

There's a review of a teaser? Weird.

There's some hidden depth to it, has multiple if not that varied endings and for a teaser, it does a good job or giving you a tiny taste of what to expect.

[chase210]

Zelda looks fun. They spent a little too long on pokemon, but it looks great.

[Flabyo]

Zelda as a full blown open world rpg. Armour, stats, weapon degradation, crafting, cooking...

It's definitely different, and it looks like it could be great, but it *is* a large departure from the format (though I expect there will be dungeons and bosses along more familiar lines).

I'm pretty positive though, at the very least I might play more of it than I managed with Skyward Sword.

[Scrustle]

Watching the Zelda stream. It's really long. I think it's even got more than two hours left to go as of this writing. I think most of the important stuff has been shown now.

First impressions were good, but I was concerned about a few things. Gorgeous intro, great trailer with some brilliant music too. Art style is nice, and I like how open everything is. All the different weapon styles and armour you can get seem really cool too. Seems like you even have to dress for the weather, not just for stats, which is pretty cool. The magnet item for solving puzzles seemed really interesting and fun as well. Also quite unusual for a Zelda game. Despite all the puzzles, they rarely do physics puzzles.

I'm not 100% sure on the way they're doing RPG-like loot now though. I like the variety, but weapons degrade. In the demo they seem to degrade pretty quickly. I hope they don't give out so quickly in the final game, or that you can repair stuff you like. Initially I was also kind of worried since they seemed to show no dungeons and puzzles either. Thankfully, they showed a bit of that later on with the magnet item. While that item was cool, the little mini-dungeons they showed were a little concerning. What they showed were all fairly bland looking box rooms, in terms of art style at least. They were also really short, with them giving the impression that there would be loads of these mini-dungeons around. They did later say that these are just "shrines", and that the game will also have "dungeons" as a different thing, which are more like the usual Zelda thing. So I expect those are the ones which will be a more more unique and interesting in terms of visuals, and also a more substantial undertaking.

Overall I'm impressed. It's quite a drastic change for the series, but it seems to be doing it without taking away what made the old games good. I just wonder what the NX version is like. Looking at this Wii U version, I'm getting the impression that it's pushing the Wii U as far as it can go, and it seems it's pushing up against its limitations in a few graphical areas. I'd like to see if the NX version manages to iron out those issues, or maybe even do more.

[seansthomas]

I thought Zelda looked great, though some of the mechanics looked a bit undercooked. Can see Monolith Soft's involvement in it. Hope its just a great world to explore...

[Todinho]

Great interview with David Cage on Detroit,he seems much more humble now and I love the part where he kinda of admits his writing can turn into a mess I just cant hate the guy XD:

[seansthomas]

This preview of The Last Guardian seems to say that it's more of the same.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... 40-minutes

Beautiful art direction, great soul, emotionally engaging, awful camera, twitchy controls. As long as the first 3 are intact at release, I'll buy a PS4 for it.

[gallo_pinto]

I was able to watch the EA and Bethesda conferences on Sunday, but then we had city-wide internet outages on both Monday and Tuesday so I binge watched Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sony and Nintendo yesterday. This is my first time watching all of the press conferences and man, that's a fun way to spend a few days!

For me, the negatives were:
-Days Gone seemed like an odd choice to end the Sony conference. None of what they showed seemed new or interesting to me.
-I don't have a connection to Crash Bandicoot, but that seemed like kind of a mean bait-and-switch. A remaster and a Skylander can't be what fans were hoping for, right?
-Watch Dogs 2 does not look good to me at all. The gameplay seems like it could be fun, but the dialogue and tone of that game is actively pushing me away from liking it.
-I'd hoped that Playstation VR would make a strong case for itself, but it seems way more likely that it's going to go the way of Move, Vita and 3D games. I don't think Sony or any third party developers showed any faith in it at all.

Positives:
-Hot damn, Dishonored 2 looks fun.
-Horizon Zero Dawn showed a lot more its gameplay and it seems really cool.
-I can't wait to play the new Zelda. I don't know if the departures from the series will work, but I'm really excited to try it out.
-For Honor looked really cool! I'm sure the story won't be that good, but I thought the gameplay seemed great.
-I love that God of War is also getting a reimagining.
-I'm super interested in We Happy Few.