EA was completely uninteresting to me, I did not see Bethesda and I find the Ubisoft conference very hard to grade, so I'll stick to just the 'main three'. I'll also copy some stuff from a post I made in an earlier locked thread.
Microsoft - ★★☆☆☆
Microsoft held a decent conference, but did not blow me away. Gears 4 looked too much like what we already know. E3 is also not the place to spend any significant amount of time on Minecraft. Highlights were Sea of Thieves and We Happy Few. Dead Rising 4 looks like something I'd very much enjoy, as does Forza ( despite being
another Forza game ). The structure of the conference itself was very traditional, which was fine. I did not feel the Scorpio 'reveal' at all; they had nothing to show, only a promise and some numbers that did not mean much to me. It felt especially weird after starting out by announcing the S; I would've picked that up, but now with official acknowledgement of Scorpio during the press conference I feel like I should wait for that instead. I believe this was also the conference where the camera too often cut away from the games / trailers to wide shots, and that pulls it down from three-star to just two stars.
Sony - ★★★★☆
Sony did extremely well. The orchestra! Almost every single game reveal was expertly handled. Kratos coming out of the shadows. VII. Norman Reedus. Insomniac Spiderman. I loved seeing them take God of War - a franchise I never cared for - in a new direction. I was happy to see Kojima back on stage, excited to show us his bizarre new vision for his project. They showed confidence in VR. The Infinite Warfare gameplay managed to turn me around from negativity to genuine interest. Seeing more of Horizon and Detroit was great. They gave a release date and a great trailer for The Last Guardian. So much good stuff. The only low points for me were Days Gone and Crash. Days Gone just did not grab me. The zombie tech looked amazing, but the way they chose to demo the game - by shooting them a whole bunch - was uninteresting and I feel some of the animation work was kind of rough. Definitely not the game to end your show on. I would've preferred if the demo had been put right behind the trailer and the conference instead had ended on Spiderman. The Crash bit was underwhelming as expected. I'm kind of indifferent towards it. Those two 'low points' keep Sony from reaching perfection. I also feel like there were some titles / trailers missing from the conference, most notably Gravity Rush 2 and Rigs from the VR bit. I also missed the usual indie spotlight montage.
As for their format in general; I absolutely loved it. I would love for them to do this again next year and for others to take a few things from this too. The Orchestra was amazing and the whole thing was just classy.
I know some people enjoy developers talking about the game, but I think this no-talk approach worked great for Sony. I don't need someone to come on stage to tell me how the new God of War will focus on Kratos trying to be more human again and caring for a boy; I can already see that in what they showed us. I don't need Hermen Hulst to talk us through the Horizon demo pointing out how he's going to make a fire bomb or how you can ride certain bots; I can see that in the gameplay. I don't need a Sony Bend guy to tell us during the Days Gone demo how they got bazillions of zombies on screen and how that creates tense survival action; I can see that in the demo you showed me. I don't need someone to come onto the stage to tell us how they're so super excited to bring Spiderman to PS4; I saw the trailer, I'm excited too!
Developers talking can be great, but I feel it is the correct choice to save that for the days after the conference, when the press gets their hands on stuff and can talk with those devs in person. This conference let the games speak for themselves and I feel like that represents a great deal of respect towards the audience and the games themselves. This is not to say that the usual style of press conference is no longer viable or bad - Microsoft was decent too -, but I feel like with this format, Sony definitely raised the bar.
Nintendo - ★★☆☆☆
I feel like I am much less excited for the new Zelda than I should be due to the way Nintendo decided to present that game. A long stream with several breaks in it just did not work for me. While I like a lot of the impressions I am hearing, them starting out the stream with basically just fucking around a bunch did not work for me. That's something you do
after you have given us an introduction / impression. It was fun to see some of the new things they added, but this was not the best way to communicate them. It was a lot of "Oh you can do this now I guess. Let's do something else now."; it felt too 'loose', too unfocused, too much like messing around for the sake of messing around, and because of the length and the breaks I just lost interest and actually shut of the stream at some point. It also was not a great idea to have us sit through an overly long POKéMON section that gave us a comparably tiny amount of new information. The POKéMON bit could've been shrunk down into a five minute trailer and we would've lost nothing.
Back to Zelda; if you are showing off a game for the first time at E3, that first impression should tell me what the game is about at its core very quickly, and the Zelda stream failed to do that for me. I would've personally preferred if they had just released / showed several 'vignettes'; short, focused videos each showing off a new aspect of the game. A short video where we hunt something down. A short video where we gather ingredients and cook something. A short video about fighting some enemies in their little encampment showing of some combat. Etc. They could've made 20+ of those and made them available to us over the course of the entire E3 week
in addition to doing a comprehensive sit-down with the developers.
Now, just to reiterate; I am still excited for Zelda and like almost everything I've seen and heard from it, it's just that I do not like the way they chose to reveal it. I have now seen a bit more than what I initially saw and heard a lot of great positive impressions, and as a result my excitement is definitely rising. I love that they've gone back to full-on exploration and love a lot of the little things they added. Can't wait to get my hands on it. Despite that, I still think doing things exclusively through the ( long ) Treehouse stream was not the best way to show us the game for the first time; I would've preferred something more focused. Two stars.
. Halo Wars 2 seems pretty fun, never tried out the original but definitely willing to give the sequel a try. Scalebound seems like a fun co-op game, but I'm not sure if I'm entirely sold on it. Sea of Thieves and Dead Rising don't interest me as much though. (not big on pirate games and I'm starting to get tired of Zombies)