6 REASONS WHY E3 2018 LEFT ME COLD

13/6/2018

Every year when I do a series of E3 round-up articles - whether it's tongue-in-cheek or sincere - it gets less hits than if I just put a list of a old things for you to remember.

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.

SUPER SMASH BROS. ULTIMATE

So, there's a new Smash Bros. - Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - on the way, which includes every character who has ever appeared in the series, including all the ones not owned by Nintendo. I've never gotten into Smash Bros., despite trying my best - it feels like a chaotic, random, mess, the outcome of battles being dependent on the luck of the button-mash more than anything else.

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.

WHY DO MOST TRIPLE-A GAMES LOOK ALIKE?

It doesn't matter whether they're set in medieval times, or a fantasy realm, or outer space, or the present day... games have become sort of homogenised. I dunno if they're all using the same lighting and specular effects, but this hyper-realism is making games blend into one, big, amorphous mass for me.

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 DON'T LIKE HOW THE INDUSTRY REVELS IN VIOLENCE

This really leapt out at me this year - particularly when it came to the Microsoft and Sony panels. There was a lot of blood on show, a lot of death, a lot of particularly brutal and gratuitous violence. Yeah, we get violent TV shows and movies, but do they ever bother showing violence in such detail in trailers?

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.

CUT-SCENES... SO MANY CUT-SCENES...

Admittedly, there was a clear, concerted move towards showing more actual gameplay at the big press conferences (almost too much gameplay at times; some Sony demos went on for ten minutes, and the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate one seemed to last about a week).

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.

INDIE GAME OVERLOAD

Microsoft seemed so keen to brag that it was showcasing 50 new games at E3 that it pumped out half of them in a bewildering montage. Rather than get me excited, it just made me miserable that so many indie games - most of which looked far more original and interesting than the big tentpole releases - were being given such short shrift.

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.

WE'RE ALL SO ENTITLED

And that includes me. We live in a time of unprecedented choice and unprecedented quality. There has never been a better time to be into video games. There's something for everyone - from small, quirky, innovative titles, to the hugest blockbusters. Enormous teams work for years on these massive, expensive, immersive experiences... and yet, still all we ever do is complain. We're the worst.

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28 Comments

Col. Asdasd

13/6/2018 10:09:17 am

Agreed. Dull dull dull. I'm so tired of moviegames, and *so* tired of apocolyptica that I'm almost wishing for the end of civilisation so we can all be done with this sameish grey porridge of media about the end of civilisation.

Mystifyingly I don't think Smash is the only big game Nintendo are releasing this year, but they just decided to use all their e3 time to make it *look* that way by giving it as big of a push as they possibly could. Last year they gave out a roadmap for the year's coming releases towards the end of e3.

Chris

13/6/2018 12:05:55 pm

Fire Emblem: Three Houses(?) is coming for Switch at some point. Literally the only announcement I've seen this E3 that I have any interest in.

Gordon Ramsey's furrowed brow

14/6/2018 09:03:51 am

Charles Duell, commissioner of the US Patents office famously said in 1899 that "everything that can be invented has been", and although the man was clearly insane, that line keeps coming back to me every time something like E3 comes along.

I cannot remember that last time I seen something announced at E3 that made me want to run out to the shops (f#ck you Amazon) and buy it.

And it was probably an indie title.

Even Nintendo have lost it - a f'king glorified special edition is their headline game?

Lost for words....

Zombiebrian

13/6/2018 10:46:17 am

I didnt enjoy e3 if im honest i was shocked by the sheer lack of new ideas to get excited about it like they say exciting new rpg i see gta set in the future or assasins creed during the mongol invasion. I was especially saddened by nintendo's over-reliance on smash and other than mario tennis i wonder what im gonna buy for it from now till xmas.

MENTALIST

13/6/2018 11:23:51 am

From what I've seen, that Tunic game is probably the one I'm most excited about.

Although, I've had Oceanhorn for years, and I've barely bothered playing that.

13/6/2018 11:32:13 am

Your last point - We're all so entitled. As I get older everybody around me is getting more and more negative about everything - it makes me want to be positive just to brighten the place up - even if I agree with them.

As such:
- Remedy's new game looks great. It looks very much like all of their previous games, Max Payne, Alan Wake etc. But I liked them, so yay!
- A new Just Cause - looks familair but bigger better more. And tornados! Yay!
- Cyberpunk 2077 looks like a huge ambitious thing and so does Beyond Good and Evil 2. Yay!
- Lots more of the console exclusives are also coming to PC these days. Yay!
- Lots of interesting PC games announced like Sable and Satisfactory. Yay!

Spiney O’Sullivan

13/6/2018 10:47:17 pm

Indeed, the misery around here needs some lifting. Here’s a list of things I liked seeing this E3:

Smash Bros Ultimate - One of the best multiplayer games ever is going to be playable anywhere (this time on a single system). And with EVERY. CHARACTER. EVER. The worst part of a fighting game sequel is the chance of losing your old favourites, but Sakurai simply said no to that and created probably the hardest job of balancing that any studio will ever attempt. This is the one game (other than Mario Kart 8) I’d have been okay with just getting a WiiU port of, and they went above and beyond. I’m even dropping my usual snarky reminder that Nintendo isn’t actually Santa Claus just this once.

Spider-Man - It’s Spider-Man.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - It’s Assassin’s Creed in Sparta. Yes, it’s another AC game, but I like them.

Ghost of Tsushima - It’s Assassin’s Creed in feudal Japan, and it’s beautiful.

Life is Strange 2’s weird precursor The Adventures of Captain Spirit - if you’re worried about games not doing anything beyond ultraviolence, here’s a game about an imaginative child growing up in backwoods Oregon with a bereaved father who appears to be developing a slight drinking problem while still trying to support his son’s dreams. It’s probably going to hit your feelings right in the groin, and set up the next Life is Strange, which -providing the ending I chose is canon- is another reason to be happy.

Doom Eternal announced - 2016 was the best FPS in years, and violence against the denizens of hell doesn’t count as the bad kind of violence.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Lara is back in South America, which always feels to me like the franchise’s spiritual home.

Nina Struthers returns - The best presenter at E3 ever. And now she’s unstoppable and possibly immortal.

Neptunium

13/6/2018 12:47:00 pm

My perspective is that the industry has done itself a disservice by trying to compress a years full of hype into a single event. Maybe it was relevant back in the day of magazines to get writers hyped up and prepared for their forthcoming 12 months of copy, but today it makes little sense to announce your game during an event where it'll risk getting buried beneath a thousand other releases, or just get a lesser amount of hype than it deserves.

I think the Nintendo direct approach is better - a couple of Bad Influence style data blasts over the whole year at seemingly random intervals. Or just do the classic apple bombshell press conference "Here's an great game we've created, it'll be in stores next week!"

13/6/2018 01:18:24 pm

Hell, it took the industry a long time to learn not to compress a year's worth of releases into one month. And all they really learned was to split them between November and February!

I think you're right - there's really nothing to be gained in the digital era from centralising and compressing into a few days of white noise. Maybe in a few years they'll catch on.

Taucher

13/6/2018 01:36:00 pm

E3 has always passed me by. I've seen the odd report about it but not taken much notice. This year it occurred to me for the first time that I could actually watch some presentations so I did.

My overwhelming feeling was embarrassment. For everyone involved, including the sycophantic audiences.

And I agree with the point about violence; one presentation I saw was the Nina Struthers (never heard of the company and cant remember its name)one where she gets machine gunned to death at the end. Massive cringefest for me but the internet disagrees. She and the company are geniuses apparantly.

I love videogames but I am so out of sync with what is happening and what is good...

The Internet

13/6/2018 05:38:31 pm

I disagree. Nina Struthers is the best thing about E3 and whoever plays her is legitimately brilliant at giving life to that character in all her awful glory.

13/6/2018 09:45:32 pm

The Internet has found me - I thought this is a safe space.

I do agree with you, The Internet, that the lady who plays Nina Struthers is very good.

Leman

13/6/2018 04:11:54 pm

I'm not even going to pretend that the Indie showcase was anymore standout and unique than the Triple A stuff. They just looked like a load of indie games, just like all of the Triple A stuff blended together. Its great that a single person can create a game and have people interested in it enough that it makes it onto the stage at a major platform holders conference but fuck me I can't even remember a single title and its not because they were just flashed up and then moved on from. So many of them are disposable throw away titles that come from the same place and just more or less do the same thing. Twee, contrived bollocks because the other side is doing grim realistic depression.

How long are we going to keep on hoping that "Video games can be so much more" before its accepted that no, video games can not be so much more, this is it. What I noticed from alot of the E3 media carpet bombing (alongside the Valve content policy stuff) was that Video game journos have a really big ego problem. They all seem to hold video games as a higher form than any other entertainment medium. That even store fronts should strive to be "better" than anything else in reality. Its laughable how much everyone seems to enjoy the smell of their own farts.

Spiney O'Sullivan

13/6/2018 05:33:37 pm

I really like the idea of indie games, but I do find a lot of them only to be interesting on the level of being an individual achievement. So many of them are annoying samey to the point that I'm becoming increasingly convinced that "retro sprite graphics Metroidvania" is now the indie equivalent of AAA's "open-world zombie apocalypse survival with-RPG-elements battle royale Souls-lite with lootboxes".

Also I'd argue that video games often have been so much more than gory shooty action, as seen with titles like Gone Home, Life is Strange (an interesting continuance of which was shown at this E3), The Stanley Parable, Portal, and the whole point-and-click genre going all the way back by decades. I guess you could even count visual novels if you really wanted as offering other experiences. These "more than" games are out there. HOWEVER: wrecking things is unavoidably a part of gaming's DNA and I was really glad to hear about Doom Eternal because I hadn't had so much fun with an FPS in years before Doom 2016.

Jim

13/6/2018 06:04:19 pm

With regards to all games looking alike, each studio used to create its engine, with various methods of rendering graphics, so you would get a lot of variety . Now the whole pipeline is unified for anything vaguely realistic, using something called physics based rendering which mimics accurate reflections and material behaviour, and gives you preset values for these.

This means artists can just pick materials for each surface rather than colours. So you pick steel, wood, plastic etc rather than red green blue. Since these values are already accurate, there isn't much reason to deviate from them much.

It's incredibly powerful and fast pipeline, but it does mean stuff all looks the same. The reason you see it in mainly aaa games is because it still takes vast amounts of production to produce realistic games art compared to stylised stuff, so indie devs avoid it as they would likely go bust before their games were finished

Mrtankthreat

13/6/2018 06:32:19 pm

"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."

So much this. I probably watch people play video games more than actually play myself these days but even then I want to watch them play the game. If I'm watching someone play a game on YouTube I will fast forward the cut scenes. It's the gameplay I'm interested in even if I'm not playing it myself.

Konstantinos

13/6/2018 06:52:04 pm

I agree with your points but the violence one I can teally relate to as I have been having similar thoughts lately. The trailer that reminded me of this lately actually came before E3, it was the Battlefield 5 one. Something about the chaos shown combined with the realism of the visuals made me a bit sick to my stomach (ok, figuratively at least).

I felt like the ending shot of a guy getting smashed in the face (twice) was supposed to make me cheer or something but instead it made me sad. And now that you mention it ashamed too...

Robobob

13/6/2018 06:53:53 pm

Ridley's a rubbish name for a big alien boss.

It's only one or two notches above getting to the end of Doom and finding out the final boss is called "Keith". EVIL KEITH.

ScottC

13/6/2018 11:06:38 pm

Is that so dissimilar to Wolfenstein with a final boss is called "Adolf"? Mind you, if the Nazi's would had won the war, the alternative-future history would have created a game called something like "Tower of London", where you faced off against a cigar-smoking "Winston" as the final boss.

Mike

13/6/2018 07:04:39 pm

Agreed, Smash Brothers is shiiiite. I generally only buy three games for every Nintendo system I buy, a Zelda Mario and a Mario kart. After that I’ve lost interest and it’s hacky hacky time.

Gary Lucid (from footballers wives)

13/6/2018 10:58:59 pm

My genre inspiring game idea.
Set in Asda Great Bridge (its in the midlands, by Walsall and West Bromwich) you play the role of the parent of three autistic children and you have to plot the route from the entrance, to the checkout whilst ensuring that
A) You get all the groceries required
B) Your children don't steal any 'surprise eggs'
C) None of your three 'darlings' don't have a massive autistic meltdown in the middle of the shop. This is gauged by the meltdownometer.
D) You have to keep the 'parental judgement' bar below the level of 'and they call themselves parents' the other levels being -
They are lovely kids
WHAT ARE THOSE PARENTS DOING
Next time I'm going to Sainsburys and
If they were my kids I've give them a slap.

The prize upon completion of the allotted tasks in the allotted time limit is to do it again the following week but this time each child has been up since 4 am with 'croup'

A game based on my life and everyone's a winner with game of life.
Except people with severe congenital conditions. At best they're breaking even.

James Walker link

13/6/2018 11:45:08 pm

I dunno if it's because I'm getting old but I reckon games, music, movies and TV are all shit these days.

Bryan Langley link

14/6/2018 12:19:49 am

You know what I like? I know it was an easy strategy for Nintendo but the fact Fortnite and the Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion were shown and released immediately was quite refreshing.

Yes, yes, I know SEGA did a terrible job of the very same thing with the Saturn, but it's certainly nice to get things quickly rather than being faced with 2019 or 2020 as release dates.

Coulio

14/6/2018 11:11:18 am

I guarantee all the fogeyish griping here is from people that haven't even tried Souls as they are scared of the difficulty. You can be treated like an adult or not, these are the options

14/6/2018 08:42:40 pm

But the reality is that independent adults do not have the time to, or want to repeat things over and over again after dying repeatedly. That is the reserve of children and the unemployed.

Random Reviewer

18/6/2018 06:43:46 pm

Well said Scott C!

PS1Snake

14/6/2018 11:16:50 pm

The violence was awful, and it [TLoU2] is supposed to be one of Sony's flagship titles.
The devil worshippers cheering it on only made it more disturbing.

oishiiniku

15/6/2018 07:59:57 am

It's such a shame how homogenized AAA games have become. I think that the crux of the matter is that games are so expensive to produce now that nobody wants to take a risk on something that is 'dangerously' different. So you get a glut of games that all double-down on the same mechanics, setting, art style etc.

The ultra-violence of many of these games is something that troubles me more and more, too. I think it's a result of a lot of recent popular games being violent, which gets mistaken for violence being responsible for that popularity. I also think that gaming is stuck in a phase of adolescence, desperate to be taken seriously by other art forms (ie. films) and thinking that gritty, gratuitous violence and bleak, solemn settings = legitimacy and gravitas.

I'm more and more grateful for the indie space since that's where most of the imaginative, different games are being produced, but very few of those developers have the budget or experience to fully deliver on the promise of their ideas. I hope in future that we will see a growth somewhere in the middle of single dev studio and AAA where small-medium sized teams are creating memorable, unique games with the polish and craft to rival the big franchise releases.

Also, you know you are getting old when you gaze longingly at the list of games that were shown at E3 twenty years ago:

https://www.giantbomb.com/e3-1998/3015-3420/

6 REASONS WHY E3 2018 LEFT ME COLD

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