For me, the big question last year was whether Bethesda could adequately fill an hour long time slot when there were only so many new games they’d be able to yank out from behind the curtains. To no one’s particular shock, they stretched, but they did okay. Still, their greatest challenge seemed ahead of them. Sure, they’d been able to provide a mean sixty minutes of new titles last year, but since then they’ve released a new Fallout, a new Fallout companion game, and a new Doom. They’d have to have whipped up a sizable crop of new games in only the last twelve months to be able to keep up the same pace. The odd twist is that we thought we knew a lot of what they were likely to show going in. This E3 is in general leaky, but Bethesda felt especially so. The best way I can put this is that there is an article in the International Business Times recapping the E3 leaks, and most of the sections have titles like “Watch Dogs 2” and “Injustice 2”, and then there’s a section that’s just called “A Busy E3 for Bethesda” which covers about four different games. The “leaked” Evil Within sequel and Wolfenstein 2 didn’t show their faces however. It’s easy to treat reports of supposed leaks as gospel, and lately many of us have been, but we shouldn’t gloss over this important reminder that they’re not.

When you think about it, once we saw Quake Champions rolled out we knew there couldn’t be a Wolfenstein 2 shown there. The new Doom just released and this Quake game represented another retro shooter remake, a third one would have just been overload. In fact, this is probably one reason that the new Quake is going to be a class-based shooter. It’s likely to be getting sandwiched between a Wolfenstein and a Doom, and if it was just another fast-paced run-and-gun without any kind of significantly new take on that formula, Bethesda would risk their audience getting bored of old-school shooter reboots. I’m also a little surprised more people aren’t weirded out by the tease of “The New Colossus” as the name for the next Wolfenstein. That is of course the name of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, and while the series has referenced it before, it’s still weird to think of Wolfenstein and social justice poetry in the same space.

The other big new shootgame is the Prey reboot. It was presented as a kind of psychological space thriller, but whenever I see a gun thrown into hands of a protagonist, I become sceptical about how well it can fulfil a role like that. The emotionally provocative parts of that game looked a lot like SOMA or Alien: Isolation, but both of those games achieve the atmospheres they do, and SOMA explores the themes it does, by disempowering the player and ensuring that hours of time isn’t lost to gun fights. Speaking of firearms, there’s a worrying social context for this expo that I think we can only put off talking about for so long. Our starting day for E3 2016 was also the same day that the largest gun massacre in U.S. history occurred. This makes the presence of gory, hyperviolent shooting action at this E3 more than a little uncomfortable. Not just because it apes the horrific events of Sunday in a way that’s meant to be light and fun, but also because video games as a whole have made some worrying statements about guns.

There’s nothing wrong with a little firearms-based empowerment fantasy, but games almost always glorify this weaponry, showing it as a positive, righteous, and effective tool of problem-solving, while rarely reflecting the very real damage it does. That wouldn’t be as worrying as it is, except most video games are doing this in a country where guns are already highly glorified, but kill as many as 10,000 people per year. Our industry makes light of something that regularly ends or ruins the lives of average people, and right now it’s easy to feel quite how trivialising a force that can be. I suppose there’s at least a silver lining in knowing companies are making some effort to modify their shows in the wake of the recent tragedy.

In various games we know that although the violent gun action is something to centre play around, it’s not even what’s particularly good about the game. That’s certainly true of Fallout which is really more of a narrative and exploration experience. The series’ outdoor sections provide cynical but picturesque landscapes, while a lot of its indoor locations have a strong urbex element to them. I really like exploring abandoned places in games, but it’s also easy for a game to throw the same kinds of abandoned locations at you repeatedly. A theme park seems like a unique and effective new environment to explore and in general exploration-based franchises are great candidates for VR.

The remastered Skyrim looks like a remastered Skyrim and that Dark Brotherhood game looks like one of the least self-aware titles we’ve seen at the show so far. It’s some goofy shit. Then there was “Legends”, the Elder Scrolls competitive card game. It was difficult to find something to like about it. There’s already a goofy TCG video game (Hearthstone) and a more serious TCG video game (Gwent) hanging around, not to mention competition from physical competitive card games like Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner. That doesn’t mean that Legends couldn’t be a fun alternative to these games, it purports to be doing unique things with lanes and upgrades, but if that’s the hook you’re hanging your game on then you need to show how those dynamics affect the game upfront. TCGs are a highly contested space where attention must be grabbed quickly.

Obviously, the crowning jewel of the briefing was Dishonored 2. I wish I liked Dishonored more than I do, but I can still appreciate the incredible level of craft in what they showed. I’m plain bad at stealth play and can find the aesthetic experience of stalking through Dishonored’s grimy streets a little dry, but its world feels inspired, and its monsters and powers beguiling in their slightly twisted nature. Arkane seem to be a studio who think particularly hard about how culture shapes their settings and it’s cool to see someone creating a Victorian era game that isn’t predictably set in London.

Much like other great stealth games, Dishonored provides empowerment not just through letting you outsmarting enemies, but also through the creativity it allows you to express in overcoming them. A game like this is always going to lean heavily on the toys it gives you and Arkane are thinking outside the box here, perhaps somewhat encouraged by their visionary world of mysterious magic, whereas the present day high-tech theme of many other stealth games encourages devs to fall back on overly familiar tropes like night vision goggles and silenced pistols. Note that while the framing of the “Far Reach” or grapple hook in the game encourages us to think of it as a single mechanic, it’s actually two new mechanics: The ability to move quickly to vantage points and the ability to pull enemies towards you. In Dishonored 1, even when combat was brutal and gory it still carried a certain elegance, both because of the way you could bound from enemy to enemy and because of the role intelligent thinking played in defeating them. These new mechanics look to emphasise that. When I said EA should have had a more substantial focus on at least one game that wasn’t an annual franchise, the way Bethesda treated Dishonored 2 is a great example of what I meant. Thanks for reading.