Microsoft E3 2015 Recap

There was actually something genuinely surprising about the Microsoft press event yesterday, but it’s probably not what you think: there wasn’t even a sliver of a presence for Call of Duty. That showing has been happening like clockwork for the past forever and it wasn’t there this year.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad or even how I feel about it, but it’s certainly remarkable. But there was plenty of other news for the Redmond company and their little gaming machine that could (and then did and became a beast of an ecosystem for entertainment).

You can also watch the entire presentation if you’d rather do that.

Halo 5: Guardians

There was a substantial co-op demonstration that happened. And that just about sums that up. At this point I’m pretty sure you know if you’re going to buy a new Halo game or not, let alone get excited for hearing 343 Industries studio head Bonnie Ross talk about the brand new engine that runs single and multiplayer at 60 fps.

Warzone, however, sounds pretty fun. It’s a new 24-player mode where you’ll face off against both AI and player-controlled enemies via drop-in, drop-out co-op. The maps are massive at four times bigger than you’re used to. Josh Holmes of 343 appropriately called it “ambitious.”

Backwards Compatibility

This is an ostensibly big move. This will open up an entire generation’s worth of games up to Xbox One owners for free (so far it’s just a smattering of titles) and will definitely set the system apart from the PlayStation 4 feature set, something they’re keenly aware of.

“We won’t charge you to play the games you already own,” said head of platform engineering Mike Ybarra, an obvious jab at the fact that PlayStation 4’s backwards compatibility works only so much that you can stream old games via PlayStation Now. Ybarra says it won’t take any extra development from studios and players just need the original disc to download a new digital version. It’ll be available to everyone this holiday season.

Fallout 4

Here’s so more Fallout 4 footage, including stuff we didn’t get to see yesterday during Bethesda’s event. I mean, it all follows the same path of content, but it’s bonus gameplay at some parts.

Game director Todd Howard also announced that PC mods will work for the Xbox One version of the game, but not right at launch; that will get added somewhere in 2016. And they’ll hopefully bring that same compatibility to the PlayStation 4 version.

Forza Motorsport 6

We already know there’s a new Forza game. Even if you didn’t know that, it seems like you could have assumed that anyways. Turn 10 Studios’ Dan Greenawalt says there will be over 450 cars and 24-player multiplayer. That’s kind of all the excitement I can muster for this.

Tacoma

Even if Tacoma just ended up being Gone Home in space, I’d still be cool with that. But developers Fullbright has earned more respect than that. It’s very obviously going to be about a singular experience and story-driven, but rehashing the same ground is (hopefully) beyond them.

Co-founder Steve Gaynor announced that their upcoming game will come to Xbox One and PC first before hitting Linux and Mac.

The Long Dark

Billed as “the first survival game on Xbox One,” The Long Dark is very obviously a survival game. You’re out all alone in a frozen wilderness and have to face the cold and wolves and whatnot.

The bigger tidbit coinciding with this is that Microsoft now offers Xbox One Game Preview, their own Early Access. The Long Dark isn’t out now, but you can play it on Game Preview right now. (Game Preview is not be confused with the Xbox One Preview program, although it exists within that and, yeah, you get it.)

Ion

Dean Hall, creator of DayZ, announced his new project Ion. It will also be available on Game Preview first and will attempt to realize Hall’s vision of “a game that wasn’t a game.” The press release describes the game as “an emergent narrative massively-multiplayer online game in which players build, live and inevitably die in huge floating galactic constructions.”

It aims to feature fully simulated environments involving power grids and heating and a bunch of other things to maintain space living. It seems pretty neat, though it may cross that line into too ambitious real quick.

Sea of Thieves

Rare is making a new game! What more do you need to know? Hopefully not much more because they didn’t give us much more.

Rare Replay

Coming August 4 to the Xbox One, the Rare Replay collection will feature just about every game you’d want to play from Rare’s history. This includes some serious bangers like Battletoads, Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie, Viva Piñata, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and Blast Corps. If this doesn’t excite you then you must be dead inside.

Gears of War Ultimate Edition

This remastered version of the original Gears of War will come to Xbox One on August 25. It’ll have updated graphics (which Kotaku has a nice comparison of), integrated Gears of War 3 gameplay features, and the additional content previously exclusive to the PC version from 2007.

Gears of War 4

I dunno. Are you guys excited for a new Gears of War? I’m interested, I guess, but not necessarily looking forward to it. It’ll be the first one not developed by Epic Games. Maybe there will be a fresh take on some of the old staples of the series we’ve grown accustomed to? Gears of War 4 will hit during holidays 2016.

HoloLens

This is a pretty impressive demo for Minecraft with HoloLens, Microsoft’s 3D head-mounted display technology. In it, one player is on a Surface tablet playing the game while the other assumes a more godlike role through HoloLens, able to peer into the entire world and manipulate it from on high.

But it’s also very much unbelievable and in a not great way. Do you remember what we were promised with Kinect? Yeah. And having worked with this sort of tech before, I’m all the more wary. Still cool, though.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

There was also a trailer that came out, but that’s pretty much inconsequential compared to the gameplay demo they threw down. It’s coming across as even more Nathan Drake than before, but it still looks great. Drake’s defining characteristic is that he’s lucky as shit and knows it. Lara didn’t have that.

In 2013’s Tomb Raider, Lara started with getting impaled and it somehow went downhill from there. But this demo shows Lara dodging bullet after bullet and that’s kind of Drake’s thing. I’m not complaining, mind you, but it seems worth mentioning.

And that’s it! Actually, there was a lot more like the above promo for the new Xbox One interface, the Xbox Elite controller (which will cost a whopping $150), and a bunch of other games, but these were kind of the big hitters. It’s fantastic that Microsoft focused so hard on games this year. It felt refreshing.

It’s also worth mentioning that there was a distinct lack of Kinect talk, and with the lack of Kinect in the new Xbox One bundles, it calls to question if Kinect is being swept under the rug. I don’t necessarily buy it, but Ben Kuchera raises some good points over at Polygon.

Bethesda Showcase E3 2015 Recap

Todd Howard is one hell of a guy. That was the big takeaway from Bethesda’s first ever E3 press conference. Or at least I think it was. It’s hard to tell.

Just kidding! There was so much news out of the company’s taut event that’s almost unbelievable. They should do one every year if it wouldn’t grind them into an Activision-type depression situation. But we got some poorly concealed secrets, some inevitabilities, and some honest-to-god surprises, the rarest breed of the video game industry.

Anyways, let’s get to cappin’! (Or you can just watch the entire thing archived over on Bethesda’s Twitch page.)

Doom

We finally have a launch date window for Doom as well as a set of predictable platforms. You can expect the series reboot to land on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC come next spring.

Oh, and for those of you that weren’t at QuakeCon last year (which should be all but 9,000 of you), they showed off the same demo with some slight changes. The differences aren’t especially remarkable unless you care heavily about updated sound effects. There is the nice bonus, however, of a multiplayer demo.

Dishonored 2

Without a doubt the worst kept secret of the show after a rehearsal snafu, Dishonored 2 from Arkane Studios is now official. The sequel to 2012’s Dishonored will also come to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC somewhere around spring of next year. (The release was given a range in the post-show interview with Arkane’s Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith.)

The game will feature two playable characters in Corvo Attano and Emily Kaldwin. Corvo returns from the first game where he was the main protagonist while Emily also returns but all grown up from the young princess she was in the original. She will feature a completely different set of skills and animations, highlighting the differences between her and Corvo’s training and tactics.

You won’t be able to switch between the two after you’ve chosen but you will have the same amount of freedom and gameplay latitude as from the first Dishonored. “You can play the entire game without killing anyone,” said Smith, as the characters return to the same world but a different city.

BattleCry

If you forgot about BattleCry, you’re forgiven. Not that it made a bad showing at last year’s E3 (on the contrary, I actually quite liked that demo), but it feels that at times Bethesda also forgot about the online multiplayer free-to-play brawler.

Good thing BattleCry Studios got their time during the event, announcing that they and the game do still exist and that the beta will take place sometime this year. Signups for the beta, in fact, are now open, and if you sign up before June 18, you’ll get priority access and an in-game reward.

Doom Snapmap

This is actually super exciting. Most of the other announcements were pretty exciting, sure, but this was both totally unexpected and immensely impactful. Rather than having a bunch of modders work their tails off to suss out how the pipes run under the foundation, Doom Snapmap will provide them both the tools and the schematics to understand and build on top of it all.

You’ll be able to not only create maps but also futz with the actual game logic, forcing enemies to react to your position and actions and whatnot, creating entire games or game modes. And then you’ll be able to share it and play it instantly with other UGC explorers. We’ve seen Doom in LittleBigPlanet. How long until we see LittleBigPlanet in Doom?

The Elder Scrolls: Legends

This definitely elicited the most snark on Twitter when it was announced. Everyone had the same reaction, falling somewhere along the lines of “I guess Bethesda wants a slice of that big ol’ Hearthstone pie.” While I don’t think that’s a pie up for carving so much as it is Blizzard making a quality game, I also don’t think this is as dumb of an idea as people are making it out to be.

It’s a free-to-play strategy card game that follows in the steps of the aforementioned Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering. It’ll be coming to PC and iPad later this year and, well, that’s kind of all we know about it so far. I guess that and the teaser trailer is, like, super cheesy.

Dishonored Definitive Edition

Coming this fall to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Dishonored Definitive Edition will be a new-gen rerelease of the original Dishonored packaged up with all the DLC including the trials-based Dunwall City Trials and the story-building The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches.

Fallout Shelter

This was a huge—huge—surprise. Not only did no one expect this announcement but no one really thought it would actually be available right after the event. It’s a great one-two combo that more publishers should consider doing with their press conferences.

Anyways, Fallout Shelter is a Tiny Tower-esque game for iOS that puts you in the shoes of a vault overseer. As overseer, your responsibilities include expanding your vault, defending your vault, and making sure your vault is self-sustaining with power, food, water, and dwellers. It is free-to-play, but from the few hours I’ve put into it, it’s not the in-your-face variety and more of the if-you-want-it kind.

Fallout 4

The Fallout 4 segment was—in a word—massive. With game director Todd Howard on the stage and guiding the expansive set of demos, it felt impressive and not at the all befuddled or meandering. We got a release date, the setting(s), and answers to so many more questions that we didn’t even know we were supposed to ask.

Coming November 10 of this year, Fallout 4 will put you in both pre-explosion and post-fucked time periods. And right off the bat, the demo clarifies the question we’ve all had on our minds regarding character creation: still 100% at the mercy of your imagination with its face sculpting system reminiscent of an Italian plumber.

But there’s more. Oh my god there’s so much more. There will be a full settlement component involved where you can collect scraps to build up forts and bases and entire communities, hooking up lights and defenses to power generators and defending inhabitants from raiders. It’s insanely comprehensive.

Just as comprehensive, in fact, as the equipment crafting system. All the junk you can pick up like lamps and stuff can be broken down for screws and lenses, materials usable for crafting wholly new weapons off of the 50 base types, or even modify your own power armor.

Howard also exemplified his perfectly succinct self-awareness within the industry when he introduced the collector’s edition of Fallout 4. Called the Pip-Boy Edition, it will come with an actual Pip-Boy that you can wear on your wrist while you play. “As far as stupid gimmicks go, this is the best fucking one I’ve ever seen.”

But bonus: there’s an app you can install on to your phone and put it into the Pip-Boy so you can use it just like you would in the game. That means you can manage your inventory and change your gear and whatnot. Costing $119.99 USD (£99.99 UK / €129.99), it also comes with a display stand and Capsule Case. While not necessary for the app to work, it does seem kind of cool.

And that’s that! Pretty busy day for E3 when Day Zero hasn’t even started yet. Do you remember when that wasn’t even a thing? How far we’ve come, huh. And by that I mean god dammit I miss at least pretending there was time to sleep and eat during this show.

How Fallout 4 Can Win

“Win what?” That’s probably you asking a strangely rhetorical question to no one in particular as 1) you’re most likely all alone right now and 2) you can safely assume that I’ll be answering that question posthaste. Or as close as possible as I do have a tendency to go on.

As you know, Fallout 4 was made official last week. Over the course of 24 hours and several mini announcements, we got a trailer, a website, and someone who sounds like Troy Baker perhaps offering the first voice protagonist of the series—a rarity for Bethesda in general, actually. And then the Internet went wild.

Turns out that Fallout 4 wouldn’t technically have the first voiced protagonist. And then some savvy sleuths figured out exactly where Vault 111 is located in Boston. Oh yeah, they all took a stab and placed the game in Boston based on the landmarks. But oh wait, does the Troy Baker-esque VO mean we won’t have the robust character creation options we’ve come to expect? Nope, maybe not.

I tended to shove all that aside. There was a bigger question that loomed over the announcement, one posed by another game that was recently released: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Not to say that they’re the same game, but they do have similarities and scratch a lot of the same gaming itches.

They’re both huge, sprawling open-world action RPGs with deep lore and worldbuilding, for instance, something Bethesda has prided itself on for over a decade now. But with Wild Hunt out now to great critical and commercial acclaim while Fallout 4 sits in development for at least another year, how can the storied studio set the story straight that they are indeed still the visionaries of yesteryear?

I’ve had a week to stew on the matter and I do believe I’m done percolating. After putting in considerable time into Wild Hunt (still haven’t beat it) and going back to explore some of Bethesda’s more recent offerings in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3, there’s really only one conclusion to come to.

Personal consequence. Not to mean the consequences of playing need to be more directed towards the player such as in moment-to-moment gameplay but rather that the fallout (ha!) of choices and actions need to be more personal and more impactful.

Bethesda does a great job with worldbuilding. There’s not question about that. However, they’re not so great at making it matter after the fact. It all comes across as an immensely static diorama in which more things are set, not that the people and the world react as one to the outcome of your story.

Consider the mission early in Fallout 3 where you find yourself in Megaton with the option to either facilitate its destruction or disarm its decidedly more crumbly fate. And aside from the big explosion that happened after I said, “Fuck this town,” I don’t remember much of anything of what happened.

Sure, it did make a huge mark on the land in a literal way. That town is, like, super gone. And former Megaton citizens are likely to recognize and attack you. It certainly does change the way you handle that part of the world.

But that’s just it. It’s only that part of the world. For all the negative karma you get for blowing that dingy hole up with a nuke, you can actually come back from it and end up a half decent fellow. And so long as you don’t go wandering around that freshly irradiated crater, you tend to forget you even did it. It feels massively inconsequential despite being massively terrible.

Blow up the city or save it. Kill the quest-giver or save him. Fight with the farmer or fight against him. Those sorts of choices feel exceedingly mechanical in Bethesda games, where you can almost see the boolean bit being set in the memory space saying you did this thing, as if you were directly input hex values like some drastically simplified Super Mario World credits warp.

The problem is that the effect of all your gun-toting and sword-swinging causes are simply too direct and too predictable. Of course everyone hates you for blowing up Megaton. Big whoop. There’s no depth to your choices. You don’t care what’s at the bottom of a puddle because you can see it, but the bottom of the ocean is a lot more mysterious and interesting.

When you play Wild Hunt, though, you feel like there’s a far deeper web than you can possibly predict (maybe even comprehend) as you make choices. The immediacy is very apparent but everything down the road is murky and full of fear and paranoia.

Not even all your choices are purely systemic. If you head over to Vice and read this story about how neglecting Gwent, Wild Hunt‘s in-game card game, cost the life of one of Geralt’s companions, you’ll see what I mean. It’s not just about the binary options you toggle between when choosing what quests to accept but also how you go about being yourself within the shoes of this Witcher.

Of course, Bethesda games can and have achieved the same thing. Their games offer you a myriad of tactics towards accomplishing your goals or shirking your responsibilities, but they all still arrive at the same terminus with just a smattering of complexity and intrigue.

There’s also the problem of combat. While Skyrim skews closer to the setting of The Witcher series, its fighting mechanics are overly simplistic. But that’s retro-fantasty and Fallout games are future-fantasy. But they’re still failing there as well as this Forbes piece points out with the V.A.T.S. feature.

Writing also tends to be an issue, opting for dry info dumps rather than the mature and layered stuff of The Witcher games, but truly the great divider and most inviting space for Bethesda to once again innovate their style is in the worlds they build and how they feel against the coarse actions and choices you do and make. Here’s hoping, fellas.