In all honesty, I might not bother next time. I have a love/hate thing when it comes to E3 anyway. I mean, I've never visited the show... but I find the online coverage - the pre-show presentations - overwhelming enough as it is.
And not just overwhelming... but underwhelming. When I see all the new games rolled out in a production line, for me it just highlights the weaknesses in the approach of where the industry is at currently.
Here are six reasons in particular why this year's E3 left me feeling disenchanted.
Nintendo's interminable big announcement mostly focused on the fact that Ridley's going to be in it. Who's Ridley? The big alien boss from Metroid. Right... and? That sound you hear is my shoulders shrugging so hard that I almost dislocated my arms.
I get that Smash Bros. fans have been asking for years that Ridley be a playable character, but is that really the element Nintendo should be pushing as Ultimate's USP? Judging from the mindless cacophony of online whooping... maybe it is.
Still, given that the game is essentially a special edition of Wii U Smash Bros., it's literally "Malibu Stacy - NOW WITH NEW HAT!!!!!"
Also: if this is Nintendo's sole big Switch release for the remainder of the year... sod them.
It doesn't help that we basically only get games set in forests, post-apocalyptic cities, or shiny sci-fi super-bases. I'm so bored of climbing up mountains, watching sunsets, and getting lost in the woods. I'm desperate for games to employ some of the creative thinking you see from Hollywood. Genre has seemingly been replaced by off-the-peg locations, into which they plug no small amount of chaos.
It's notable that the only big, big game which has stood out to me thus far is Kojima's Death Stranding - because it uses a clear, less-is-more, approach that allows the production design to really come to the fore. The atmosphere showcased in its trailer is entirely different to everything else.
I dunno. It made me feel a bit sad, and - if I'm honest - slightly ashamed of the industry that we're still in a place where gore and brutality is seen as a key selling point of the experiences on offer.
It really jumps out when the games are all rolled out side-by-side, as they tend to be at E3, and they go from one balletic gore sequence or grunty, real-life-ish, murder to the next. Games could be so much more.
Nevertheless, a lot of games were represented purely by cinematic sequences. Some of them were very good - Beyond Good & Evil 2, for instance - but a lot of them were the same old po-faced, darkly-lit, gravitas (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, say).
It doesn't matter how good your cut-scenes are, games are an interactive medium. We play with them - we don't sit back and simply watch them. It baffles me that so many titles are still being hyped on the strength of their cinematic alone. And how depressing that the cinematics tend to showcase such shallow, terrible writing - all striving for a sense of heavy, world-ending, portent... or - in a few notably wince-inducing instances - going for wacky.
Even in 2018, games still struggle to feature mature storytelling, and they really fail to do comedy.
That said, the one game which really stood out to me amid Microsoft's barrage (because it was one of the few non-franchise titles they actually dedicated some time to) was Tunic - an isometric, Zelda-like RPG. It's telling that it's the work of one person.
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