stordoff

I've been playing the Japanese version of this for a while, it's not bad! Works way better than I expected.

One of the Japanese trailers gives a better idea of how it actually plays:

@cyrribrae: Trust me, I'm not saying EITHER approach is ideal (I too think Microsoft struck the best balance), but if you're promising deep dives on games this is closer to what I expect. Most of what Sony was showing didn't tell me anything new comparing to a normal trailer, there was just more of it. Here, I felt like I was learning new things the more it went on, even if it's taking five times longer than it should.

Nintendo somehow turned me, as a non-Smash fan, around on that by just showing _so much_ of it. At some point (around the time "Stages" showed up), I was just so delirious about Smash that I was just like "Screw it, man! Keep going!".

I think the biggest problem with showing that much Smash is that it just highlighted how little else they said. Even if they don't have anything else to show, they could at least spend a few more minutes on the games they _did_ show.

I will say though that _this_ is how you do a deep dive on a game, rather than what Sony did. I'd much rather have this, that tells me about the game, than just showing an extended trailer.

I think that's where it breaks down for me - it actively made me LESS interested in those three games. Death Stranding didn't give me ANY kind of coherent understanding of what might be going on AND didn't have gameplay to counter that; The Last of Us was made to look extremely combat-focused and what was shown of the story felt awkward (not the kiss-that was surprisingly well-done, but the facial animation around that felt a little off to me); Ghosts of Tsushima looked neat, but also like a combat system I do not want to slog through _regardless_ of how good the story is (I get that some people like it, but I have never been a fan of that system of combat).

I too love stories in games (I've just spend the last three hours writing about Steins;Gate), but you've got to sell it to me. You can't just just say "There's a story. It'll be good, trust me".

I almost think Microsoft saved Sony, in a weird way. If it wasn't for what was shown at Microsoft, I'd be thinking PlayStation is heading towards a very poor year.

And what was with this press conference? They were SO dominant the last few years -- basically kicking down doors and going "YO, PlayStation!" -- then this felt like they just stumbled on to stage.

The big difference is that the work is being made to Ubisoft's specs., and then Ubisoft are taking the parts they like and _selling_ it. With player creation tools, or even mod tools, that IS the game, and you are free to design what YOU want, put it out how YOU want (not waiting for a publisher to OK it/decide they want to sell it), and no-one else is directly profiting from it (imagine if Nintendo sold a level pack of community-created levels/made a Mario game based on crowd-sourced levels, rather than just letting them be shared).

It's also not displacing anyone, as you aren't going to be paying people to make that user-generated content or mods in most games. If Ubisoft can crowd-source 10% of their assets, that's 10% less they need to pay their artists to do.

That Tomb Raider footage really wasn't doing it for me - Lara Croft just mindlessly murdering fools didn't feel right. Yes you CAN kill people in those games, but to make combat the FOCUS seems weird.

Jeff has said he's never worked a job with drug tests, which presumably includes CBSi. I'd also hope HR would realise it's crazy to take action against popular and hard-working staff for weed.

I am worried about Fallout 76. It's 7am here, so this is a little rushed, and I might have missed a few details, but a lot of what they were saying was not jiving with me AT ALL.

First of all, for the first trailer, Dan said something about it looking like a Fallout game and there being a lot of narrative. That's not what I was getting from it - it looks like a great setting for a Fallout game, but I felt like they barely even hinted at narrative.

Fallout 76 is entirely online. At the moment, that's not a huge hurdle, but what happens 5, 10 years down the line? Does all this just go away? Further, whilst they said you CAN play it solo, has it been built with the assumption that you will be playing with other people, and so get a vastly diminished experience?

Furthermore, unless I missed it, I don't recall them saying anything about a new engine. With the state of Fallout 4, if it is just the old engine with multiplayer, that has the potential to be a mess. Now they did say it's a bigger world with more detail, so maybe they've been able to iron some of that out, but if it was a more substantial improvement I'd expect them to say something to that effect.

"Every person and character is real" - To me, that sounded like every human in the game is a player controlled character (and I saw nothing in the footage to contradict that), which if that is the case, how are you telling a story? This is backed up by statements like "Stories that you create and tell yourself" and "You decide the heroes, you decide the villeins". To me, that very much sounds like they have created a space where stories CAN happen, but it is on the players to make that happen - I don't see how you can tell any sort of traditional Fallout story in these constrains.

They also introduced the world as being four times the size of Fallout 4, but then said that you will be in a world with dozens, not hundreds, of other players. At that point, are you ever going to see anyone? That sounds like an incredibly sparsely populated world. Unless they are doing location-based server switching (Journey/Test Drive Unlimited), I don't see how it can happen unless you actively seek out other players, and that brings me back to my concerns about story - how can player-told stories unfold if the players you met are constantly changing, even within the same game session?

At that point, I started to wonder if it's something more like State of Decay - progression is not tied to death, small numbers of people in the same world, you can meet up and play with your friends, it's YOUR stories, not a fixed narrative. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not what I'm looking for from a Fallout game. I also made a (hopefully incredibly unkind) Sea of Thieves comparison - they've built a world, and are now saying go do some stuff, but are they giving me a reason to do it? If there's limited to no narrative, and you aren't building a fixed base, what is your goal?

No VATS - now time-manipulation is incredibly difficult to do well in multiplayer, and I'm assuming that because they didn't show it they didn't come up with a good solution, but that kinda sucks. It's mostly emblematic at this point -- you can play Fallout without it -- but it adds to my main concern: is this going to feel like a Fallout game, or is it going to feel like another game in a Fallout-esque world?

Further, pitching it as a game where, to an least some extent, can rebuild, yet some 200 years later society has only BARELY rebuild seems weird. Granted, you can easily explain that away by saying it didn't work/it's a different part of the country, but it still feels like a little bit of a disconnect from the rest of the series.

Nukes - what? What incentive is there to build a base if it can get nuked? Maybe it doesn't destroy your stuff, as they seemed so insistent that progress isn't lost on death, but then there's the flip side of that: what's the point of a nuke if it doesn't destroy stuff? I just don't see how they fit into the game beyond it sounds cool and it lets us build a coop puzzle solving mechanic.

I guess my overall problem is that I can see a lot of what they appear to have taken out to make this work, but not what they have replaced it with beyond more people in the world. Can I go on cool quests, even if they aren't from NPCs and it's more of a found story style? The story of what happened while we were in the vault is potentially interesting one. Can I build a rad base that is genuinely my own (which seems difficult if you are moving between servers), and not limited to some small scale (the workshop budget meter suggests no) and has features beyond defense? Can I acquire a GECK and make a genuine attempt at reforming even a small section of the wasteland? I felt like Bethesda didn't really give an answer to that.

There's also a couple of open questions, that doesn't necessarily need to be addressed, but I'm not sure how they'd play out. Presumably everyone starts at Vault 76 -- are people going to scatter from there, or congregate, making the world size somewhat meaningless? Also, if new players start at Vault 76, are you going to get in immediate trouble with people camping there?

I genuinely hope I'm wrong, and that Fallout 76 is awesome and the shot in the arm the series needed, but the more they said about it, the more sceptical I became.

Edit: Changed "meaningful" to "meaningless"

That's a bad reason to have her on there. If she has something to add (which she probably does) and fits with the show (going to seven would really be pushing it; six can be a bit much at times, and there's no one you would get rid of), sure, but "She is a woman, therefore she should be on it" is horribly reductive (and honestly I feel undersells what Abby DOES bring to the table as just being a different voice).