E3 2017: The Rest

E3 has traditionally been a parade of the loudest, most highly engineered games and presentations possible because the only companies who could present at E3 were the few who were sitting on top of Everests of money. You couldn't compete unless you were the kind of industry lynchpin which manufactured the consoles themselves or controlled an empire of high-yield franchises. For many of the companies, the amount of promotion and business reputation they'd gain out of an E3 presentation would not outweigh the resources they'd have to put into one, and so they didn't try. The industry has diversified since then, and streaming as a form of entertainment has bloomed. It's allowed Nintendo to abandon the press conference format for a less intense but more prolonged display of their games and enabled smaller companies to put on marketing presentations that never would have been possible before. A more diverse industry where lower budget games are viable has created a more diverse E3 where lower budget presentations are viable. We're going to look at four different mini-briefings from E3 and four different approaches to putting on smaller shows at the expo.

Bethesda

Bethesda had the only show at E3 that felt wholly unnecessary. In previous years there was a lot of scepticism over whether the company needed to be on stage at all but this year their appearance was more certainly vestigial. With no new Skyrim, Fallout, Dishonored, or Doom to announce, this conference felt like it happened more because Bethesda was fulfilling an expectation of a briefing rather than because they had enough new information to hold one. The trailer for Wolfenstein II deserved an audience somewhere but could have been passed off to Microsoft or Sony and the Bethesda Land animations in between segments felt like they were there to pad the stream out to forty minutes. The animations were probably also used to give the conference a little more personality, as they couldn't get the charismatic Todd Howard back as their host this year. On the plus side, Bethesda leant away from the bro culture style of previous years and made sure the crowd weren't as raucously loud in the mix this time.

The PC Gaming Show

The PC Gaming Show was surprisingly good. Like Sony and Bethesda, they didn't have a lot of games to show, but they knew how to make the relative few games they did have matter. Developers were interviewed and allowed to speak on their creations which meant that you always had some idea of what it would be like to play the games they were showcasing. A personal highlight was seeing PLAYERUNKNOWN discuss updates to Battlegrounds. Despite the title being popularised in part by noisy esports personalities, PLAYERUNKNOWN was humble and calm. Even the sponsorship during the PC Gaming Show felt less intrusive this year, and in an odd twist, there was less tech fetishism involved during this show than there was in Microsoft's.

Devolver Digital

In the past, I've criticised EA and Ubisoft for a reliance on theatrics instead of games content in their shows which puts me in an awkward position because Devolver's presentation was almost all theatrics and I loved it. There is a difference though: Devolver's approach wouldn't have been appropriate for a press conference we were expecting a lot of announcements from and so they weren't interrupting anything. Devolver were also making a statement with their conference beyond "Aren't our products good?" and were providing an anarchically-infused entertainment that the other companies wouldn't dare touch. The brand-bolstering entertainment at E3 can often only be so "cool" because it has to remain clean and safe in its message.

Let's be real: Devs and publishers can be frighteningly forceful in trying to convince us that their products are worth buying, violence in games can be random and meaningless, crowds can seem too easily won over, and companies can be too patronising or pandering. Devolver Digital made a brave criticism of all of these realities in their surreal short. The presenter was angry and disrespectful towards the crowd, and the crowd reactions were often out of step with what was happening on stage. A dazed young man was used as an audience surrogate and was maimed, and then mindlessly pacified with a computer game. Devolver Digital was as much of a protest of the consumerism of E3 as you could hope for from anyone trying to sell their games.

Nintendo

Last year Nintendo didn't have a press briefing at all, and it left fans wanting a summary of Nintendo's E3 offerings only being able to turn to outlets that could compress down the publisher's three days of live streams into an easy-to-swallow package. People couldn't get a quick idea of the coming Nintendo software from the company themselves, and Nintendo had no control over the messaging of the summaries. Maybe that's why they decided to reinstitute a briefing this year.

There was one game shown during the briefing that I want to talk about above all others. The Mario series is very surreal when you stop and think about it, but as a classic video game franchise, all its eccentricities are normalised now. Of course a man in overalls is becoming enormous from touching a mushroom so he can jump on a turtle. Super Mario Odyssey is here to make Mario surreal again. Mario is a cordyceps-like brain parasite now and is travelling to such intuitively wrong locales as a prehistoric Earth, a Nightmare Before Christmas hillscape, and a cross between New York and the city from Sonic Adventure. The only criticism I'd give is that the detailed look of the new Mario worlds betrays the more charming, simplistic aesthetic of the older games.

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This rounds out my articles for E3 2017, and for as many criticisms as I have of the show, it's been hugely enjoyable to follow and comment on once again. If you've followed along with me, thanks for reading.