The Sony conference blew me away. I'll admit I'm partial to Sony, but I was expecting this year to be quiet. Not many new game announcements except for VR stuff - which I expected to be like the Move games they first showed off. Figured I'd come out of this E3 not anticipating too much more than I already was.
I tuned into the show late, because for some reason I got confused with my time conversion and thought it started at 9:00 CST. I turned it on at 8:30, right in the middle of the Detroit trailer. Looked interesting, but I haven't been a fan of past Quantic Dreams games so I'm always wary of stuff they show. This one did look like a marked improvement over their past games tho, especially in the acting dept.
Then the next trailer started. Hrm, horror game - looks new. New IP, I mean. No existing IP crossed my mind that it could have been - SH is dead, and...what else could this possibly be? Definitely showing VR, not sure I'm up to playing a game like this in VR. Song starts, trailer is building to an end... RESIDENT EVIL!?!? Mind. Blown.
From there it was just non-stop. The VR stuff didn't look like party game crap shovelware - they were actual IPs with signs of real effort put behind them. Maybe many of them were short experiences, but still - that's ok. Even tho we didn't see any footage from Batman, the Rocksteady logo at the end gave me confidence in that one. X-Wing in VR? Yes, please!
Then they showed another space game, didn't look familiar to me at all (because I had ignored all the hubub over the new CoD, as I usually do). Dogfighting to fighting in space to a fps on a space station? Definitely looks cool. CoD?? Hrm, well, that one's on my radar now. Then Crash 1-3 remakes from the ground up? Awesome, surprised there's not more hype over this, but maybe it's just because there was SO MUCH GOOD shown! A Spider-man game - ahh, this is where they start coastin...made by Insomniac??? Oh, HELL yes! Days Gone took a very similar concept as TLoU and made what appears to be a very different game - cool. Absolutely interested.
Then I went back & watched the beginning of the show that I had missed. I'm hyped for a GoW game. Might not sound like much, but I've been one of the series' biggest detractors since the second one. This game looks like everything I had wished they'd do with the series and then some! The Days Gone trailer, still awesome. Horizon I was already hyped for, but that gameplay kicked it up to 11. My wife said we'll probably have to fight over that one - she liked that there was a female main character in what she said is the type of game that typically has a male main character.
Just amazing, start to finish. If I had to pick one thing to criticize, the only thing I could find would be the Lego Star Wars trailer because that game is practically out already. But then jumped from game to game so quickly that who could complain? It was over before you had a chance to get annoyed, and they were on to something else awesome. OH! And the Kojima game! Awesome reveal. He had said a little while back that he's working on a triple-A action title for Sony, so that's what I expect the genre to be (unless he flat out lied, which I wouldn't put past him - he IS sneaky
).
EA Conference - didn't watch / no score
Microsoft Conference - 2/5, being generous because I *have* seen worse. Practically everything was known already, and little of it was impressive to me. Interested in a handful of the games they showed, but for PC.
Ubisoft Conference - 4/5, more info on several games I was already interested in plus a very nice reveal of a new IP in Steep
Sony Conference - 10/5, they destroyed it and completely blew away any expectations I had. They made me seriously regret canceling my VR preorder, and that's something I didn't think was possible.
What time is the Nintendo thing today?
