E3 2015: Sony

For the last couple of years Sony have shown that they mean business at E3. The old way was that they and Microsoft rolled out segment after segment of living room families and plans for media streaming services and we had to suffer through it to get to the good bits. Then all that went away and now they fiercely compete to show us the kind of conference we want to see. It’s hard to swallow Shawn Layden’s spiel about games being the cultural driving force of the world, but boy are Sony right that they can hype a crowd. There’s no point in me describing how beautifully shocking it was to see The Last Guardian. You could definitely see the Ico style in there and one of the prevailing themes of the demo was that feeling of being a tiny person in a world so much grander than yourself. In that way The Last Guardian drives home a sense of being a child wandering an unknown place, and yet despite your animal companion being so large and serving as a guide for you, you see it take on this fearful quality as well. In the demo both the kid/player and the animal were put in a frightening situation and could empathise with each other over it. How well the whole game comes off is obviously going to hinge pretty heavily around how emotive they can make that animal, but there’s so much there to work with if they get it right. I can only imagine what it must have been like building that game and not being able to tell anyone. I have real respect for everyone who managed to keep that from leaking, although the beauty of it is “The Last Guardian will be at E3 this year” is the kind of rumour you’d dismiss out of hand.

Horizon challenges traditional expectations for the post-apocalypse.

Like Microsoft, Sony went with a strong one-two punch of old and new for their first couple of games. We went from The Last Guardian straight into a new IP that completely captured my imagination. I’ve seen a lot of configurations of the man vs. machine/machine vs. nature/man vs. nature story but never anything quite like Horizon: Zero Dawn. The humans in Horizon don’t seem to have a proper context for what machines are or the evolution of technology and so see them as indistinguishable from nature, and in a big way they are. It was changing my perception for what a certain kind of story can be and the ending boss fight came off well. The huge chunks of machinery flying off of the monster just looked good, as did the gun used to tether it to the ground. Hitman, I have a tentative interest in. There’s obvious worth in the idea of rolling out your missions episodically and responding to player feedback to help improve your content with each successive episode release, but at the same time you’re purchasing a product where the quality is one big question mark until you have all the pieces. This was a potential problem with the Telltale Games, but generally I think they pull it off better than most, while pre-orders and the quality of games out of the gate have become an increasingly thorny aspects of AAA games.

Next up was No Man’s Sky with Sean Murray looking to tackle the very question that has plagued the game: What is the gameplay like? Murray did his best with the allotted time, but the three minutes he was given was simply not enough to explore a game that elaborate. It’s understandable why he ended up with such a tight presentation window, there was a lot for Sony to get through and this isn’t No Man’s Sky’s first appearance at a show, but it meant all we really got to see was a little spaceship shooting and some environmental destruction. We’d be in a better place now if it had been clearer in earlier showings of the game exactly what the crux of all these systems was. None the less, jumping to a random location in a procedurally generated world is probably the bravest thing I saw any person demoing do this year. Knowing that we were seeing the planet for the first time alongside Murray made for an authentic sense of discovery which is what No Man’s Sky is all about evoking.

Keyti, the E3 planet.

No Man’s Sky actually ended up as one of a series of games that were full of cool elements but where it was never entirely clear what the systems behind them comprised. Dreams was the second game in that chain. While I question the appropriateness of the Playstation controller as a motion control paintbrush and I don’t think it’s clear how anything in the program was animated, the fact that everything we saw in that bizarre, creative world was born in-game speaks to there being at least something special inside that product. We may never know what Firewatch is, but there’s something about the slower tone of that game and the more humble subject matter that I like. Again, I really loved seeing time put aside for smaller and independent artists. You saw that come back around again later with the feverishly fun montage of PS4 games from Devolver Digital.

For all my worries about Assassin’s Creed, I will give it props for being another game with a female protagonist. With Evie having her own set of weapons that define her fighting style I suspect Ubisoft are trying to do for her what Rocksteady did for characters like Catwoman and Robin in their games. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII remake trailer was of course a big hit, but I’m also of the opinion that FF7 may look better in peoples’ heads than it will when it’s right in front of them again. Some of the content in that game would certainly have to be revised to meet modern standards. The announcement of the Shenmue III Kickstarter, I felt a little odd about. There’s a reason you don’t often hear about Kickstarters at press conferences and that’s because if a console manufacturer or major publisher has an interest in backing a game then crowdfunding isn’t necessary. There have been multiple Kickstarter successes built primarily on external funding and I don’t think it’s often clear to people in these cases that they’re actually filling in a small portion of the budget and possibly participating in an experiment in fan interest when they put down their cash. That’s not a reflection of the quality of the final products of these Kickstarters in any way and it’s uplifting to know that all those people who wanted a Shenmue II sequel are getting it, but I don’t think that everyone who contributed towards that 2 million was given the facts of what they were contributing towards.

Off to the diner for a nice, tall glass of fear gas.

Arkham Knight had a very cinematically strong trailer. I would have mourned the lack of gameplay, but after showing the Batmobile last year and giving us the pre-E3 gameplay trailer it felt appropriate. I wonder if that missing person poster for “Henry Adams” will come to mean anything. Black Ops III was a little intense for me. To their credit the UI appears to have been changed up a significant amount for CoD, but it was also a hard to get a hold on what was going on at all times during that combat demo. Perhaps it was just my tiredness, but I felt like it moved a little too fast for you to get a bearing on who was attacking who. Really, nothing else could have wrapped things up for Sony apart from Uncharted 4 and when the demo functioned properly I felt such relief for the team behind it. For a second it looked liked the final game of the show might have to be fully abandoned which would have been a full-on disaster. The highly destructible environments of Uncharted 4 look like great fun and the location looked so densely detailed. Once again Sony’s effort to please their fans has really paid off.