I was so annoyed that the opening and closing speeches of Microsoft's conference made all these pretentious declarations about the games on display which were not accurate to the trailers and demos we saw, but Bethesda provides an example of how to use such moments to give your audience something more concrete to grab on to. They didn't bookend their press conference with abstract and unrealistic ideas about AAA video games as art. Up top, they talked about critically acclaimed games they shipped over the past year, and when they were concluding their conference, they recapped the games we saw. This was a more down-to-earth press conference and one that packed in more announcements than we've seen from them over the past few years. In their first briefing back in 2015, the company gave us a taste of Doom, Dishonored 2, and Fallout 4, but any publisher smaller than an EA or Ubisoft isn't going to have big-hitters releasing every single year, and it increasingly felt like Bethesda's briefings were just there to keep the seat warm until they were close to cranking out a new Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or Doom, but this year they were. In 2017, they couldn't even get the director of Bethesda Game Studios to show up for the Bethesda press conference, but this time he seemed more confident in the company's line-up than he's ever been.

Before we get into the thick of it, there does seem to be some big financially-motivated evil each of the first three presenters of E3 have perpetrated which is relevant to their conference, and we need to talk about Bethesda's. In late 2016, Bethesda stopped sending out review copies of their games to anyone but a small number of public-facing streamers who they rely on to be consistently enthused about those games. That means that there is no online press on the quality of their titles before they release them except that press which promotes a biased pro-Bethesda view. This helps motivate uninformed purchasing decisions from which they profit. Jim Sterling even recently told the bizarre story of how, upon giving Rage a very reasonable 7/10, he received an email from Bethesda arguing that that review score should be higher. We must view the publisher's E3 press conference within the context of these actions: It is part of a larger media machine in which Bethesda tightly control the perception of their products at the expense of the consumer, and unlike EA with the lootboxes, they're not going to apologise for this.

That in mind, and with some surprise that I'm saying this for an E3 article: What a fun ride that Andrew WK performance was. It feels like what Ubisoft was trying to do with their song and dance acts for so many years, but WK's performance worked where Ubisoft's often haven't because he's a solid performer outside the trappings of the show and because his song matched the attitude of the violent, rousing action games on display. I do hope Rage 2 can be the Doomesque shooter we want it to be because the gun handling of id's 2016 twitch FPS could beautifully complement some enticing RPG mechanics. I'm happily shocked to find there is Prey DLC as there had been no multiplayer component in the base game and no initial plans for downloadable content. Multiplayer horror has been a criminally underexplored territory, but that's where Arkane is going in Prey: Typhon Hunter. Fallout 76 was one of my most anticipated games of the expo and Bethesda are making some smart decisions with it. Allowing players to launch nukes on custom targets in maps lets us see just the choking, devastating power of nuclear weaponry on the landscape, and while many of E3's killer titles are slated for 2019, Fallout 76 is a game that the company are bringing out this year. That gives them an edge and encourages us to hang onto the thought of this game for a little longer. And while "fuck Nazis" may be an easy thing to say when you're repping a Wolfenstein game, it's also the right thing to say. Fuck Nazis.

I do have misgivings about some of what they showed though. For example, Prey's Mooncrash DLC is $20/£13, and that'll be a hard price to justify, and wasn't a lot of Prey's astounding quality down to carefully-considered level design choices that they couldn't replicate through procedural generation? I also worry Typhon Hunter may be a cut-and-paste replication of the Source Engine's Prop Hunt. Bethesda's Elder Scrolls advert made with the co-operation of Amazon is pretty scummy when you look at Amazon's history of tax-dodging and mistreating employees. It's sad that Keegan-Michael Key of all people agreed to that. Bethesda announcing that they have an unparalleled virtual TCG but that they also need to do a full visual overhaul of it is self-contradictory. I'm also not sure I'll ever understand the interest in action games on mobile systems. It's a flavour of game that requires precision control on hardware that can never provide it.

I don't trust Bethesda with a multiplayer game like Fallout 76 where multiple clients have to remain technically functional when they had enough trouble getting individual clients to be that, although the beta seems like a keen attempt to assuage those concerns. It is, however, clear that the game can't have users running mods if it's going to be online which is a significant loss when Fallout's community valued mods to an extent that few others do. Player-created supplements to the Fallout games helped improve performance and visual quality when Bethesda's work in those areas was often subpar. And with Fallout and a number of other games, there was a tonal dissonance between the marketing and the games in motion.

The trailers tell us that Rage 2 is a kind of Mad Max-themed paint party, but when played, Rage 2's music and environment gave it a much more severe tone, just with some coloured lighting around the edges. Prey's action horror was confusingly mashed up with Dead or Alive's poppy, romantic You Spin Me Round, and maybe that was meant to be ironic, but if it was, what feature of Prey was that irony playing off of? And then there's the concept of the multiplayer Fallout game which may be an oxymoron. I'm not sure it's my kind of game, but I think there's an experience in Fallout 76 that most players are going to dig, it's just probably not the experience we know as Fallout.

Fallout's atmosphere is down to a sense of isolation that would evaporate the moment you had a few friends at your side. There's no reason its shoot-and-loot gameplay couldn't integrate with a multiplayer component, but it's harder to see what the function of its wasteland would be if not to create a feeling of emptiness which reminds you this is the post-apocalypse. However, this may be why Fallout 76 opts for a less barren setting this time. Contrary to how the timeline has worked thus far, this Fallout adventure is set before all other Fallout games, and yet it looks like there's been more time to rebuild and regrow than there had been hundreds of years later in the canon. Bethesda will also likely be pruning another essential aspect of the series: The story. Going in, I wondered how the writers were going to tell a tale about West Virginia when all the Fallout games from 3 onwards are about exploring the history of their setting. West Virginia's history is in no small part the history of slavery and the fight for abolition, but that struggle was already realised in Fallout 4. It makes more sense if Bethesda doesn't have to dramatise that period of the state's history because there's no plot to the game.

The developer insists that the people in Fallout are now "real" because players are controlling them, but that also suggests a switch away from NPCs which were how Fallout told a story. This adds up in that in a multiplayer game we don't want our allies standing around talking to NPCs for twenty minutes while we do nothing, we want to spend more time with our group. But I'm not sure I buy the company's logic on this one. If you want to make a game about co-operation with other players rather than an explicit narrative, that's cool, but using players to control characters often strips them of humanising dialogue and has them breaking the fourth wall. I think what truly makes a character feel "real" is professional writing and animation. I wish Bethesda were talking as much about what they were doing away with for the series as they are talking about what they're bringing to it, otherwise, we're going to have a lot of disappointed Fallout fans. That is, unless they've gone off the deep end and think they can make a story-based multiplayer game, but the impossibility of that is what the Anthem devs were addressing on Saturday night.

My feelings towards the Bethesda press conference probably have a lot to do with my expectations being lowered both by Microsoft's showing this year and by Bethesda's last year, but this was a solid performance from them. They had games, and they felt confident about the content of those games. If they could push it a little further, maybe they could even crack through that marketing spin and talk accurately about the tone of these games. But then, they are out to control that messaging carefully. Thanks for reading.