Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
So E3 2017 is upon us!
And with that comes the tradition we all know and love – staying up really late to have
adverts beamed into our eyeballs and collectively ignore the potentially damaging consumerist
nature of our medium.
Fun!
Nah, of course there’s more to it than that.
What we get from E3 are stories – real, collective experiences laughing at and celebrating
the weird, wild side of this industry.
If you’ve watched my previous videos on the nature of press conferences, you’ll
know that often the experience of watching the conference often takes precedence over
the games being shown for me.
The theatrics, the pacing, the characters on stage; the artifice of it all, essentially.
Even when an idea flops, it’s often at least interesting to watch and talk about.
The best thing a press conference can do is make you go “hmmm, interesting.”
It gets you thinking, gets you excited to see what comes next.
It creates positive speculation, which from a marketing perspective (which, let’s not
pretend, is the reason these companies want our eyes on their broadcasts) is the best
possible outcome.
Unfortunately, for a lot of the big players this time around, they showed us what happens
on the other end of the spectrum.
For all the talk of focusing on GAMERS and LOVE OF GAMES and WHY WE PLAY and GETTING
OUT OF THE WAY OF THE GAMES it’s strange how actually just showing games really doesn’t
make for a guaranteed grand slam of a conference.
It really is a matter of quality over quantity.
Microsoft, for example, came out with what felt like their most comprehensive line-up
of games yet, throwing trailer after trailer at us with machine gun-like frequency.
The problem is that for every Ashen or Sea of Thieves or that kinda surprisingly dope
looking Dragonball Z fighter, we got what felt like a billion Super Lucky’s Tales
which, just…
what?
Combined with the hardware fetishisation and meaningless tech stats that came with their
newly (and badly) named Xbox One X, it was an assembly line, and had about as much impact
on me.
On the other end of that, why did the trailer for Project Darwin suddenly give way to some
totally context-less man in a yellow shirt angrily screaming at us?
What the hell was that with the car that apparently got made because of gamers apparently?
Why do they keep bringing out cars at their press conferences?
Why did they think we’d care about any of that?
Well, it’s bad and a complete misreading of the room, sure, but moments like this are
the things I remember most vividly.
It’s far from the ideal marketing situation (I mean, the car had me asking the same question
the X did, namely “who is this for”), but from the perspective of someone watching
this stuff to be entertained, it’s still fun; still memorable.
Otherwise it just feels like a bunch of people in a room watching trailers which isn’t
anything you couldn’t just do on YouTube.
We need a little of that cringe at E3; just maybe not like this.
It’s not like you can get away with just theatrics, however.
Sony, even with a Shadow of the Colossus trailer that came out of seemingly nowhere and had
me audibly gasping, couldn’t keep me from thinking “man, most of these games look
a lot like The Last of Us, don’t they?”
It all just blurs together after a while.
For all the confidence and bluster that they show in their daft waterfall art and their
actors actually hanging from the ceiling to coincide with Bikey McDreamworksFace in Days
Gone walking through them in-game for some reason…
none of it made up for the absence of things like The Last of Us 2 or even a glimpse of
that new From Software title.
While in these cases it just felt a little monotonous, in certain cases this trailer-after-trailer
approach felt like it was numbing us for bad news, like it meant we’d be too tired to
care.
For example, Bethesda took some time out of their conference that really didn’t need
to be a conference (given that almost everything they talked about has already been released)
to slip in that “oh, yeah, paid mods are a thing again” before going right back into
the dreariness that is the Elder Scrolls card game or whatever.
Wait a minute, hold on, go back a bit!
Paid mods?!
Again?!
That’s something we want to know about!
I for one am absolutely for modders being compensated, but that was part of the problem
first time round – that they ended up getting absolutely screwed by Steam and Bethesda!
Why aren’t we taking more time to discuss the details of this?
How well are modders going to be paid?
How badly is this going to sting people?
I’m sure we’ll get details of this at some point, but to just slot it in and then
just move on turned what was previously just a pointless presentation into a potentially
insidious one.
Weirdly though, it turned out to be Ubisoft – the company with a reputation for churning
out the same design trends time and time again – that had me consistently hooked and surprised
throughout.
Their known quantities, their Assassin’s Creeds and Far Crys and the like, were given
comparatively little screen time compared to the weird, interesting things they’re
taking a chance on (with AC literally not getting its own screen in one intriguing case).
Beyond Good and Evil 2’s reveal was such a great way to end a conference; but that
Mario/Rabbids crossover turning out to be some kind of XCOM homage, or them delving
deeper into weird competitive experiences like Skull & Bones… those are genuinely
intriguing.
As it turns out, people appreciate risks being taken and having their expectations subverted.
Ubisoft may be known for the tropes they apply to seemingly every game they put out, but
I honestly don’t think they’ve gotten enough credit over the past year or so for
actually trying to break free of those constraints.
Certainly a cut above Aisha Tyler pitching memes with paid cosplayers at last year’s
presentation.
And that leads nicely into the real reason I thought this year’s showing worked so
well - because it felt genuine above all else.
Like I say, there’s always a level of artifice there, we’re always being advertised at.
Where Ubisoft differed was that they didn’t have a million different, charisma-vacuum
Twitch personalities shouting that at us, or a bunch of executives telling us about
how they got games, man, as was the case with EA’s rather disastrous (albeit memorable)
showing.
Instead, and as I talked about in my last E3 video, they realised that the world of
game development kinda has its own rockstars now; that what they lack in presentational
skill (which may lead to a few cringeworthy moments), they more than make up for in genuine
passion and a love of their craft.
That love is infectious and above all else, above the advertising and the trailers and
the cars and the weird cultish t-shirts and the bad shouty men, reminds us why we’re
really here – to celebrate the medium and the people behind it.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on the E3 press conferences.
This won’t be the only video I’ll be doing on the show because, lo and behold, I’m
actually at the show and I have a lot to say about it.
If you want to keep up to date on future videos, why not hit subscribe as well as checking
out the weekly podcast I do in the description.
If you really feel like going the extra mile, however, you can always support my Patreon
like these beautiful people currently on screen.
Your support absolutely makes this show possible and I cannot thank you enough for it.
Plus hey, if you pledge your support you can get some goodies along with it.
In particular I’d like to thank Julien McRoeth, Sebastian Fuchs, Brandon Robinson, Iago Foxo
Bouza, Justins Holderness, James Doering, Biggy Smith, Mark B. Writing, Peter, Artjom
Vitsjuk, Christian Konemann, Nico Bleackley, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.