I had expected that preparing to see the Bethesda press conference unfold this year, the thing that would be going through my head was a question over whether or not they could adequately fill their allotted time, I hadn’t expected to instead still find myself reeling from the final game at Nintendo’s World Championship before. When Super Mario Maker was shown last year functionality appeared to be limited and more was heard about what you can’t do than what you can do, but last night that was turned on its head. Mario Maker wasn’t shown in a context with a lot of spin and meticulously scripted marketing talk, instead it was just allowed to speak for itself in a way that no level of hype ever could have. Considering Nintendo’s ruthless dedication to polish and control of their brand image, it’s respectable that they’d release something like this which lends their game to being repackaged with amateur design and moved out from under their control. The mechanics of Mario were still all there but it was immediately obvious the potential Mario Maker provided for entirely different design styles. What we saw in it was nothing like anything we’ve seen from official Mario before. It feels more like a response to all the Super Mario World ROM hacks out there than it does a sequel to the recent Mario games and I love that. I guess it would be good practise to actually discuss the Bethesda press conference in this Bethesda write-up though, huh?

When the show script called for statements about revelling in “Blood and guts and explosions” and the crowd seemed to be more excited by the sight of brutal dismemberment in games than anything else, I was worried we were in for “One of those shows”, but Bethesda ultimately came out of the gate strong. I’m lukewarm on the new Doom but it was at the very least inoffensive. It felt like this was one of those many moments we’re going to see in E3 where it was hard to get a feel for just what the flow of the game was like from the demo footage. Certainly, there was a slower pace there than anything in the original Doom and it’s hard to feel that between it, Halo, Dead Space, Alien: Isolation and a bunch of other games that the “Alien” aesthetic in video games hasn’t been pretty well exhausted. Still, this is another game with a potentially robust level editor and the sound design left nothing lacking.

Battlecry wasn’t shown to quite the same fanfare, and for good reason. The design ethos of the game seemed to be that with a wealth of squad-based competitive multiplayer games in the shooter space, there may be a gap in the market for the kind of title that leans more towards hack-and-slash combat. Given what makes hack-and-slash work, concepts like being able to stun and juggle opponents, or take on large numbers of enemies at the same time, it’s natural to turn a sceptical eye to Battlecry, but I’m not willing to count out the basic potential of a hack-and-slash multiplayer game just yet. The real problem was that when the melee combat was the big and perhaps only differentiator between Battlecry and its competitors, it looked so janky. Even worse was Bethesda’s announcement of The Elder Scrolls: Legends. With all the insulting microtransactions, derivative design, and energy meters that have come to dominate the mobile gaming space, you have to try pretty hard to get people not to tune out when you start speaking about phones and tablets, and Bethesda didn’t put in nearly enough effort on this one. The obvious question was what was going to set this game apart from the already smartly designed, highly successful Hearthstone. It wasn’t even that Bethesda answered this question poorly, they seemed oblivious to the idea that they’d need to answer it at all. All we were left with was that they were making a fantasy TCG because that’s what’s in right now and that they have about six pieces of concept art to go along with it.

One of the unusual things about the drab showing of Legends was that they also showed off a mobile game which purposefully subverted so much of what’s gone wrong in the genre and were eager to show players that by putting it right in their hands. If you’d have told me an F2P Fallout vault builder would have been one of the highlights of the Bethesda conference, I’d have made sure to quickly move away from you as fast as possible, but in what very much looked to be a This War of Mine Lite, it seems Bethesda have found a way to promote Fallout 4 and put out a free mobile release without anything seeming tacky or incomplete. Details were understandably light on a new Dishonored but like many others I give Arkane a big thumbs up for their choice of a female lead. And then there was the big one.

The showing of Fallout 4 was not perfect. Not because of anything vital about the game being completely neglected, but because of a number of smaller things. The inclusion of crafting mechanics, base-building systems, and tower defence gameplay spoke to a modern flavour of feature creep, an insistence that games must arbitrarily be everything at once. We were told with both Fallout 4 and Doom that these were games where we could literally do anything. But you can’t do literally anything in a game and you almost always spread yourself too thin when you try to make a game where you can. They were quick to mention these were optional side-activities, but it’s hard to imagine this won’t pull resources from the main development in some way. That shooting also may not be as fixed as we want it to be and the actually rather interesting pre-apocalypse world from the game’s opening disappeared in a flash. Still, the new guns look killer and from what we saw the game has a good sense of character. That character looks to be owed in no small part this time round to a properly voiced protagonist and more intelligent dialogue menus. For as captivating as the worlds of Fallout 3 and New Vegas were, those worlds were often shown to us through a dirty lens and actually speaking to other characters was often an awkward and slightly inhuman experience. That feels like the thing that Bethesda has most strived to fix with 4. I can’t talk about the showing of Fallout 4 without talking about Todd Howard either. More charismatic and likeable than most E3 presenters, his pitch worked because it felt like you were being talked to by someone with natural enthusiasm who liked what he was presenting. I understand that producing someone of quite that personality with that closeness to a game is often just about impossible for companies, but I think there was something to be learned here. And that was Day… Minus One? Roll on Day Zero.