Best of E3 2018
Arbitrary list of games that made an impression on me at this year's E3. Games that made me sit up, take notice, and feeling excitement/anticipation.
These are not the games I think I'll most enjoy (realistically or optimistically), but merely the games that most jumped out at me during E3 (so being surprising is as important as being appealing).
E3 2018 was fairly solid, but also unremarkable. No huge surprises in software or hardware, no hardware at all in fact, no shifts in direction for the industry--I'm not that into hardware, so this isn't bad, to me. No super-hype games, except Cyberpunk, but that wasn't so much a surprise as a confirmation of nebulous hype/hope/expectations. Other solid, exciting announcements: Doom Eternal, Dying Light 2, Control, but all of those look like more of what roughly already exists. No major announcements in my personal favorite franchises, no dream-team projects (e.g. Nier Automata).
On conferences, Nintendo's was just plain weak, which is perfectly within Nintendo's usual range from weak to pretty good; no games of interest to me. Ubisoft, also had no games of interest to me, but at least they made a spectacle, as they usually do. Devolver did their now-familiar schlocky satire, which feels more tired than fresh now; the games seemed like the usual, decent, schlocky stuff. EA was terrible, as always, with nothing of interest to me. The PC Gaming Show seemed pretty good, for what I saw of it--steadily getting better each year. Nothing all that remarkable to me, just some solid, mostly mid-budget PC games with, perhaps, the largest diversity of gaming experiences of any show.
Sony's conference structure sounded good on paper, but didn't really come together smoothly in practice, with 4 'pillar' games and some short trailers and teasers in between. TLOU2's gameplay looked impressive in its non-strictly-videogamey dynamics (a continuation of what TLOU1 did), but all of the story stuff looked like the usual hamfisted, pretentious, insufferable crap that Naughty Dog increasingly revolves around. Death Stranding looked good, but decidedly less weird, surprising, and non-gamey, with some actual gameplay (walking around an empty environment). Emotionally, it was disappointing to have the over-inflated hype bubble not further inflated, but, intellectually, I liked that it reigned in the nuts-factor because the game can't just ride on that forever, it has to step out of the hype-fueled dream zone and enter reality at some point, and this was the beginning of that. No idea if that game will be good, but I remain quite optimistic that it will at least be interesting; probably won't release for at least another 2 years though--it'll probably be a generation-capper, right before the PS5 releases. Ghost of Tsushima was interesting and weird because it had lots of Japanese details as seen through a western developer's sensibilities, which made it all just off kilter. It looks pretty good in theory, but being made by a western dev (Sucker Punch), I can't help but feel trepidation about it having peaks of serious appeal (e.g. rich gameplay depth, fun story moments, memorable music, anything that really stands out as awesome).
Microsoft probably had the best conference, in part due to just showing so many games. I'm not putting much weight on the fact that their actual exclusives were very few, conventional, and of no interest to me (Halo Infinite, Forza Horizons 4, Gears stuff). They acquired a bunch of studios and opened a new one in Santa Monica, which all sounds good, but none of those studios make anything that I like--which is good because it would inconvenience me for stuff I like to become Microsoft-exclusive. The highlight of all the conferences was Cyberpunk, which Microsoft ended on, which was a very effective closer.
Oh yeah, and there was Bethesda, which was decent, but light on games that looked particularly good to me. Fallout 76 looks, on one hand, like pure gameplay-driven drivel, but on the other, thank god there will be a minimum of Bethesda-created story material. It was particularly ironic to hear Todd Howard describe F76 as not an amusement park, when that's precisely what it and all of their other modern games are. The stuff I liked was Doom Eternal, which merely sounds like an incremental sequel (more stuff), but that could be a-okay, and Rage 2, which I'm cautiously optimistic will simply be a solid open world shooter, nothing more.
