Pre-show:
Abzu: Looks very pretty, hope that the controls hold up which is always a concern with underwater games.
Bound: Very beautiful, look forward to seeing more!
Hawken: This looks real bad, I have no idea why people like robots or F2P junkware shooters.
Pyre: Honestly, as someone who likes Supergiant, I don't think this trailered very well. The art style looked great but it's difficult to tell what the game is and the little arena combat parts felt... I dunno... kinda rinky-dink?
Eagle Flight: Spectacular, wish Ubisoft spent more time making fun looking demos instead of whatever the hell their big budget Uplay trash bar-fillers are.
Watch_Dogs 2: I mean, they clearly have an aesthetic and a core design vision for what the game is, there's no doubt about that.
Show:
God of War: I think the Norse setting is really nice and I like the new more open-world TPS style camera. I also liked the hints at exploration stuff, it's like they were inspired by Tomb Raider 2013 a bit. The combat looked quite rough in my opinion, but in keeping with the series. I've never much liked the series. I do like the family emphasis, it'll be nice to take a bit of the Whore-fucking-minigame edge off God of War. Have to say, I did not personally enjoy the knife in the neck scene, but at least they recognized that the violence can be in service of a theme instead of God of War 3's lol epic megaton ripped a dude's head off junk.
Days Gone: Sons of Anarchy meets the open-world zombie fan. I can dig it. The dialogue here was hardboiled and dumb but the presentation looked good. I think this will be different enough from The Last of Us to not feel like a retread but similar enough to leverage the former's success. The demo at the end was very taut. Fast zombies are a neat change. Shooting didn't feel great because you just kinda trim back the horde a bit. But generally I think this is promising.
The Last Guardian: Nice to see more of the game get fleshed out and while it's still clearly a holdover from a long time ago I think it's going to be fun to play. Hope they rounded off a bit of the clunkiness from last year. Kinda can't believe it's finally releasing.
Horizon: Demo went on too long (Sony always does this!) Combat looks really, really nice though. Looks like you have to take a hit and run approach to things. Character designs are great, and I loved the world map. This really is the most promising looking first-party game from Sony in a very long time.
Detroit: Become Human: Spectacular trailer for the game, really conveys the choice premise. Writing and voice acting a little clunky, really wish David Cage would have an English supervisor. But the premise showed in the scene was great and the variety of endings to the scene seemed excellent. Then the trailer portion of the trailer that showed the investigation portions seemed super interesting. David Cage is one of the only reasons I don't regret my PS3 purchase last generation, maybe he'll make me buy a PS4 this time around.
Resident Evil 7: I think this shows Capcom is willing to learn from PT's reveal and is the first Resident Evil game since maybe 1 or 2 that I feel like has really been on the cutting edge of horror. The visceral revulsion at that pot of stew was pretty powerful. The TV static thing was a bit cliche, but it at least seemed like they wanted to make a horror game. I'm looking forward to this.
Orchestra: Cool concept that played super well in the God of War and Crash segments, but Shawn Layden walked faster than his orchestra cues every time, and I think he thanked Bear McCreary as "Tim" during the thank you section? Finally, while I like Dvorak and Gustav Holst, it's a bit weird that they played game-specific music most of the time and then filled some segments with public domain classical music? Is this just about not wanting to pay too much to have the orchestra rehearse pieces for the whole evening?
PSVR: $399 is a pretty solid price and the final unit looks comfortable. I think this will definitely be more of a competitor than it seemed like this time last year.
- Impulse Gear: I am already bored from wobbly-shaky VR guns.
- Star Wars: This was basically a teaser for an FMV
- Batman: This was barely even a teaser for an FMV
- Final Fantasy XV: How bad is this game? A bunch of bad footage, the jarring clash between the cutesy chocobo techno and the open-world "realism", the bad tag about how the trailer features Afrojack, the stupid character wearing the VR helmet, Cidney's awful tits everywhere character design. The combat looks so bad, with the attack feedback of a 2002 MMO, and the vr component is a teleporting mode where you shoot a peashooter? This is the second worst demo of E3 so far, a distant second to the other Final Fantasy XV demo.
Call of Duty: Okay, I admit it, I got suckered into this. Maybe I missed that it was a CoD game, but the video itself looked cool. I liked it more before the shooting started, but the shooting looked very active and frenetic even if the feedback wasn't great. The outer space part looked excellent. I thought this was maybe a second team from Guerrilla or something. Then the logo fade to Call of Duty. I got rickrolled. I skipped the Modern Warfare Remastered trailer.
Crash Remastered: I am interested in playing the games, for sure, but they played this segment all wrong. The audience was SO excited, you could hear gasping at the start, and the Disneyland-style crash shadow for Shawn Layden was super cool... and then the announcement itself was comparatively a real deflating moment... and then they cut to a trailer for Skylanders, which no one in the audience cares about, and the trailer itself made no sense. "Hey! You can play as Crash!!!! Actually the main selling point of the game is that you don't use our pre-existing characters, you create your own!!!"
Lego Star Wars Whatever: I skipped this.
Kojima's Death Stranded: It's Hideo Kojima no doubt. I don't understand how it is "all running in real time" when they don't have an engine for the game yet. But the themes seem to involve male pregnancy and surgical experimentation, supernatural phenomena, death and resurrection--the floating people and the footprints in the sand felt pretty Christian--plague. What's the meaning of Reedus' dogtags? I can't believe I'm spending time thinking about Kojima nonsense. Also Kojima walked way faster than his light cues--seems like a waste to make such a fancy set and then flub it's main use.
Spiderman: I'm glad a dev studio that isn't crap is taking a swing at the property and that Sony wants to make it a marquee title rather than a generic movie license. I do think there are some challenges that make Spiderman difficult to sustain as a game -- I suspect that they will have to concoct scenarios where Spiderman can't web-sling in order to give the game some challenge and structure.
Overall I thought it was a better conference that most Sony conferences because it was much shorter. Even in years where Sony has had the best content, they've had unbearable conferences imho, so this was a welcome change. I think this was a bit of a down year compared to most, but overall I think it's still a solid lineup for 2016-2017 and the conference was a solid 7/10 or so.
