E3 Wrap: Monday

I might not be lucky enough to be over in Los Angeles like some of the Stevivor team, but I’m still sweating every little bit of E3 information and will be wrapping up the days news and events throughout the week. For what we are calling ‘day negative one’ there was plenty for gamers to get excited about as we saw in game footage of Fallout 4 and Doom while Nintendo and Platinum had some surprises in store.

The pre-E3 press tour began today with the Bethesda press conference, but they didn’t have day negative one to themselves. Nintendo snuck some announcements in here and there with their Smash Bros. Direct and the Nintendo World Championships while some interesting leaks headed by Platinum Games provided a taste of what is to come.

I doubt many expected much from the Smash Bros. Direct but Nintendo took a cheeky approach to their early E3 events that, if it continues through the entire show, will make all of their programming must see. While more amiibos was a given (and every character in Smash Bros. will eventually get one) the two big announcements were being able to control the Wii U using a 3DS, functionality that sounds interesting but I’m struggling to think of real uses for, and Street Fighter’s Ryu, perhaps the most iconic fighting game character of all time, available now as Smash Bros. DLC.

The Ryu announcement confirms that while Capcom are in bed with Sony for Street Fighter V they are by no means resigned to Street Fighter becoming a Sony exclusive franchise. Smash Bros. continues to grow its reputation for interesting cameo appearances, is it too much to hope for Snake to come back around the release of Metal Gear Solid V? How would Nintendo feel about their games becoming a marketing platform for PS4 and Xbox One releases like that?

Nintendo also snuck a few more announcements out there during the Nintendo World Championships, notably a Wii U Virtual Console release of the first Mother game, retitled Earthbound: Beginnings. A long requested debut for the game in the West, Beginnings will be available from tomorrow and feels like a gift from Nintendo to the fans after years of requests and hounding. Every now and then Nintendo show the potential of the Virtual Console, only to ignore it for another 12 months. What is stopping them putting the Wii and Gamecube back catalogues out there, or at least getting the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console stores to parity?

Nintendo’s new game announcement is Blastball, a multiplayer futuresport for the 3DS crossing mech shooting and soccer. We’ll find out more over the E3 week but Nintendo have done a good job of their arcade sports titles in the past and this could be very interesting even if the initial footage looks a little sparse and simplistic.

Bethesda stole the day with one of the more impressive E3 press shows I’ve seen. Bethesda perfected the pacing of their show, limiting the time spent focusing on Elder Scrolls Online and Battlecry while giving their big announcements the time they deserve. They had a surprise ‘available now’ debut, plenty of gameplay footage and announced an unfortunately “leaked hours before” new title in Dishonored 2.

Fallout 4 stole the show with a well chosen reel of gameplay footage showing off combat, dialogue options and your trusty canine companion. Fans of the series will already be dissecting the footage on forums and Youtube so I won’t give my own hot take other than saying I was suitably impressed. Where the trailer footage will come from is their second sizzle reel showing off an action packed third person shooter full of gratuitous explosions and what looked to be rock solid shooter mechanics. Both reels sandwiched the announcement of Fallout Shelter, a currently iOS exclusive free-to-play base builder available now. That was the highlight for me, but I’m a sucker for ‘get it now!’ announcements. Others will find the frankly excessive pre-order bonuses the most enticing news of the Bethesda showcase, Twitter was already on fire with pics of pre-order receipts. Bethesda played this perfectly, it is hard to imagine a better way to debut a game than this and for a rookie E3 showcase this was an impressive display.

Dishonored 2 had a short cinematic trailer that would have had a lot of impact as a debut but without gameplay footage the announcement fell a little flat for me. Battlecry I didn’t think looked particularly impressive but free-to-play shooters are so far out of my wheelhouse it could have been the greatest looking game ever and I’d still pass. Elder Scrolls Online we were reminded exists but it still sits in a weird limbo of full priced game with free-to-play elements. A card battler based around Elder Scrolls doesn’t interest me and it seems like Bethesda hasn’t learned their lesson about taking on Blizzard at what they do best, first they challenge World of Warcraft, now they want in on Hearthstone’s territory. Dishonored Definitive Edition was given the ten seconds it deserves.

That leaves Doom. The first thing I noticed is the horrible lack of colour. Doom wasn’t exactly rainbows and happyland but enemies had distinct colours, everything wasn’t just brown like this remake. The iconic nature of those old Doom enemies seems to have been lost in this remake full of brown meatbags that barely flinched until they were blasted into viscera by weapons that didn’t have the punch I would expect. It looked more Doom 3 than the older games, though the open Hell arena had a great pace to the combat that has a lot of potential.

It remains to be seen how much space and speed this new Doom has, but I don’t want another romp through corridors even if I do get execution moves, beautiful, grisly chainsaw effects and gruesome replacements for the Red Key. I still have hope for Doom but this was a bucket of cold water on my hope for id to do something different by doing what they did in 1994 once again. The modding tools look incredible so chances are the game I want will be provided, just not by id themselves. Seriously, if those tools work half as well as demonstrated then we are going to see some amazing things come from Doom.

One final note on Bethesda.net, which was slipped in quietly to little fanfare. I can appreciate Bethesda wanting a bit more control over their audience, they aren’t the first to layer yet another service on top of their games, and like most good businesses they will be trying to cut out costs, of which Steam and Valve would be one of their biggest with the 30% take of every sale. Add to this their ambitions for paid mods that Valve managed to completely bork in their first attempt and a Bethesda store/social network/DLC platform makes a lot of sense for them. For gamers, it is just another layer of hassle. If it can be done well then the best case scenario is gamers view it as an inconvenience rather than a burden. To date it hasn’t been done well, uPlay, Rockstar Social, Origin, the list goes on. Valve got in first and are still the best despite their continual mis-steps, gamers don’t want anything more than that. The Valve 30% is just something you have to deal with, like taxes or Youtube commenters.

The rest of the day focused on yet more leaks, stealing a few more surprises from the upcoming stage shows. Dishonored 2 wasn’t much of a surprise nor was Gears of War though it is a shame Microsoft looks to be remastering all three Gears titles separately rather than putting them together in a package, but that is not yet confirmed. It may be we don’t see further Gears of War games remastered at all, as Gears of War 3 multiplayer options are being ported in this remaster as well as some of the PC exclusive content. Could the Xbox One game be ported from the PC base rather than the Xbox 360 code? That was the strategy used for Halo: CE multiplayer in the Master Chief Collection so it wouldn’t surprise us.

Platinum Games working on a Transformers game, titled Transformers: Devastation, is the most surprising leak so far and it should have fans excited. It appears to be based on the original animated series, complete with original voice actors, as well as bringing the traditional Platinum combat expertise that promises a deep fighting engine. I don’t have much nostalgia for Transformers but I will play anything Platinum releases based on their track record alone. We also got a possible tease of Dark Souls 3 with some leaked screenshots, chances are something that big ends up on one of the big shows tomorrow, Sony if I had to guess.

Finally I wanted to quickly say just how ridiculous it is that Starbreeze have thrown their hat into the VR ring with their own headset. Good luck to them, I just hope that we end up with universal VR compatibility for PC otherwise we will be seeing companies and VR tech fall like the days of the 32 bit consoles. Microsoft look to have jumped on the Oculus bandwagon, shipping their controller with the hardware is the first step but Microsoft will have ambitions of seeing the Oculus and Xbox One working together as a counter to Sony and Morpheus. Valve have their own plans and hold scary power over the market, the VR battlefield could end up a bloody one. Still, for now using shotgun peripherals to play the version of Dactyl Nightmare we always dreamed of makes for a fun story, if not a feasible future product.

Tomorrow

The biggest day for news and hot takes, tomorrow will see the Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony press conferences. I’d bet that despite the leaks there are a few surprises left on all fronts, and Microsoft will need a big showing if they hope to turn the tide this generation. Expect them to pull out all the stops while Sony will undoubtedly be very confident following their PS4 success and will use the opportunity to take their pot shots at the competition. EA and Ubisoft have some exciting games to show and plenty of room for announcements on top, plus both are well known for those embarrassing E3 moments we love and were starved of today. You can watch the press conferences right here at Stevivor, as well as checking out our E3 hub for all of the news as it breaks from the show floor. Get some rest, you’ll need it.