E3 2016: Sony

While every company this year was eager to keep off the topics detached from AAA gaming, it was Sony and Bethesda who were most dedicated to zeroing in on software. Ubisoft started off with a song and dance number and made an aside to talk about the Assassin’s Creed film, Microsoft did plenty of informing about consoles and Xbox Live, and EA were a little more concerned with celebrity appearances, but these two companies were about wall-to-wall play experiences. Of course Sony, able to use anything being published on Playstation as their ammunition, held the reigns of the conference most tightly packed with big games and VR experiences. This is the endgame of E3 transforming from a conversation with businesspeople to a conversation with consumers. Announcements about phone games and motion control toys were only ever so much for “us”. What could send the average console or PC player nodding off in their chair might make an investor take note and affirm their support of a company, but recent shifts would suggest it’s now more lucrative for publishers to just dedicate all their briefing time to wowing the people putting down money on discs and executables.

As positive as this has been, I also think we need to set a higher bar for companies at E3 than just showing games or even showing promising games. This view has been controversial, but I believe showing a game in some form means very little by default and that the meaning comes from informing potential players about the contents of that game. After all, what does it mean to see a demo or trailer if those demos or trailers don’t tell you what the title they’re featuring is actually about? For example, that Detroit: Being Human trailer held a lot of people's attention, but we’re left with a mental picture of that game which is 90% gaps. It’s cool that that Resident Evil VII demo exists, but it does little to illuminate the overall nature of Resident Evil VII, especially when the demo is its own standalone experience. The biggest casualty of this lack of definition was Sony’s final offering: Days Gone. I’ve spent so long puzzling how such an unremarkable game could have become their grand finale.

The idea of making an action title teeming with enemies follows intuitively from the expanded processing power of current gen machines, but if your concept is “Yet another zombie game” you desperately need to show players that you’re not just regurgitating existing game concepts. Even Dead Rising 4, which isn’t looking to break the mold on zombie-splattering action, knows it needs something more attractive to gamers than just “We can render thousands of zombies on our map simultaneously”. Days Gone set itself a couple of inches apart from the pack by giving us zombies moving in this twisting, snake-like formation, but the protagonist’s rifle just plinked away at them like a pea shooter, and the whole thing came off like more of a tech demo than a narrative or play experience. Maybe there’s a game in there that is doing something all the other zombie murder engines aren’t, but if so, it needs to be made immediately and thoroughly clear what that something is when the game is walking such a well-trodden path.

In part, the vagueness surrounding this entertainment is the natural outcome of its release being so far off. It’s an old problem of E3, but one that was this year best embodied by Sony: So much of that shiny new media won’t be running on a system anywhere near us for at least several months. Games like Days Gone, Detroit: Being Human, God of War, and Death Stranding don’t even have a date on them. Of course, that’s not to say there weren’t games shown at the Sony conference which were drawn up with more detail, and in the case of Death Stranding, I think the minimalist trailer approach gets some artistic license.

Sure, nothing about that cinematic tells you what gameplay genre the game occupies, nor does it convey any objective plot details, but it works as its own micro-sized short film. It has a weighty bleakness to it and you can unravel it to pull plenty of running threads out of what might immediately strike you as an impossibly tangled ambiguousness. There are themes of birth, humanity’s ruinous impact on nature, and as in P.T., separation from a child. It was one of the most impacting trailers of the expo, and if it’s accurate to the game it represents, it may cut to the core of its experience’s tone and themes in a way that plenty of teasers for other titles do not. Plus, highlighting your themes and motifs is an elegant way to give players some idea of what to expect from your story without spoiling plot specifics. I just don’t think the game itself can be as graceful as this trailer. Kojima is not the master of philosophical narrative he’s often lauded as being. Similarly, while Detroit: Being Human greatly attracts to me as a big budget cyberpunk game driven by investigation and dialogue, I know I’m one of many who think that David Cage is an auteur with little grasp on quality writing.

I actually feel compelled to write more about games like Days Gone and Detroit because of the ambiguity surrounding them and because of my scepticism of them. God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn were games that demoed well and went to reasonable lengths to explain what they were about. There are no missing vital details to speculate over and I have little discomfort about their quality to externalise. Incidentally, did you know about the grey ghost-like figure floating in the background of the God of War demo? It’s either some creepy foreshadowing or some improperly managed production assets kicking around.

While the arrival of more blockbuster games is all well and good, I can’t leave this conference behind without talking about the lack of independent games in the show. It’s something more of the press should have shone on a spotlight on, although it’s also a bad call to refer to this as just Sony’s mistake, something which a lot of people have been doing. The only reason we expect Sony to support the little guy is because they’ve done it so many times before. If it is the job of megacompanies to lend development aid to independent creators, then we should hold every publisher accountable for it, not just Sony. The console manufacturers can have more of an effect in this area than companies which are just publishers, meaning they have a greater responsibility, but everyone should be chipping in to help these artists. Maybe that’s something we can see more of next year. Thanks for reading.