E3 2018

still not convinced that death stranding is a real game and not just kojima messing around making trailers

If that's the case I'll watch the eventual blu-ray collection.

i liked how the death stranding trailer was just showing off the movement animations

It would be great if Death Stranding has no combat and is just Norman Reedus making deliveries and hiding from ghosts

TLoU2: ... and then they all lez up

It would be great if Death Stranding has no combat and is just Norman Reedus making deliveries and hiding from ghosts

The Last of Us II trailer was riveting. Super hype.

big day lads

praying for josh in chicago

because he won't buy a PS4?

No joke, depending on how things go today that may decide it for me! Given how inexpensive a used or refurbished PS4 slim is, and given that the games can be $30 or $40 cheaper for big titles, I could save money by spending money. I'd buy it for the Souls and Bloodbourne stuff alone.

Obviously I'd keep the Switch though, because there are all those games I haven't played and my kids like it. Another major factor for me is that I rarely play the switch in portable mode, so I am basically hurting my gaming experience for no reason. Also, with stuff like Fortnite and Animal Crossing on the horizon, a second console might give me something to do when the kids commandeer the Nintendo.

My E3 report:

Cyberpunk 2077
Ever Scrolls 6
Death Stranding

I wouldn’t be surprised if all three weren’t released on this generation of consoles. 😳

I expect that I’ll need to update this after today’s Nintendo direct.

cyberpunk looks like its gonna be a 2020 release imo regardless of generation. don't really see anything in that trailer that isn't doable right now

im pretty excited for Death Stranding now that i've seen some gameplay (pretty sure all the walky bits are gameplay). yay a game trailer with no guns and no shooting! that world looks incredible. i'd definitely down for some weird sci fi where all you do is explore and see weird stuff if that's what it is.

don't have massive expectations for nintendo in terms of big surprises, i think the general theme will be games we already know about but haven't seen yet.

I think "when" will be very important for Nintendo/me. There are lots of games we already (think we) know about but we still have no idea when they're arriving. Stuff like Metroid and Yoshi or whatever - Hollow Knight - they've been teasing for months. And stuff like Dark Souls, that featured big in the last Direct - it was the finale iirc - but since getting delayed two months ago and missing a perfectly placed May released date, there have literally been no updates.

I watched that grim Last of Us 2 gameplay and was sort of captivated (extreme violence aside). I have no idea how the mechanics of something like that even works, and the AI interaction was uncanny. Like, you sneak up somewhere and hide in some bushes, then baddies in the background hustle over and talk about how they just saw someone right around here but they must be hiding, then divide up to find you. Or you rush through a scene and fluidly grab a bottle and throw it at someone while running. It was like watching someone play a cut-scene, which is to say, like playing an interactive movie. Which was pretty neat. Maybe all big games like this are like that, I have no idea.

i just watched Last of Us 2. looks amazing but the violence is a little too brutal/real for me. also why i stay away from horror movies.

nintendo will continue to publish roughly 1 big game a month which means august thru december will have ~5 games, 2 of which are pokemon and smash and another 2 are likely fire emblem and yoshi

based on everything i've heard i think one surprise that could exist is another non-bayonetta platinumgames switch game

really hope Fire Emblem is coming before xmas. wouldn't be surprised if another FE Echoes remake was announced for 3DS lol.

Yeah, but we have no idea, right? Metroid 4, for example - wasn't that introduced at E3 2017? Anyway I hope there are some surprises. Love Smash, but no interest in Pokemon, Fire Emblem or Yoshi. And that follows passing on Kirby and DK (the latter at least at that price point).

(LOL aside, I had no idea Marth was from Fire Emblem. There are all these characters in Wii Smash we play that are of unknown provenance, to us!)

So Last of Us 2, how do games like that even work? How do you program stuff that seemingly fluid and reactive, like fight scenes that seem choreographed yet must be responding to controller input? It really baffles me, a different sort of uncanny valley.

I hope Death Stranding is something special. I can't tell what the gameplay hook is yet.

it looks like one of those horror walking simulators but with kojima AAA money poured into it

So Last of Us 2, how do games like that even work? How do you program stuff that seemingly fluid and reactive, like fight scenes that seem choreographed yet must be responding to controller input? It really baffles me, a different sort of uncanny valley.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, June 12, 2018 9:49 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

generally there's 2 criteria to make this work:

1) the inputs/outputs aren't that complex, mostly a pass-or-fail sort of system

2) the content is heavily railroaded, there's not really a world to wander around, just smaller areas where the developers can exercise complete control over whats going on

yep. these things always looks great being demoed. in practice, the gameplay's typically more limited than you'd expect.

the first Last Of Us did a brilliant job of making you feel like you were choosing where to go, while funneling you down a particular direction.

yeah its all smoke and mirrors. not a bad thing, just a thing

the samurai game looks like it might actually be witcher style open world where you can hike around but sometimes wander into a cutscene with scripted stuff. spiderman will be that as well. tlou2 will almost certainly not be that, it's a heavily curated experience

Josh in the time you’ve been griping about Hollow Knight something like dozens of indie metroidvanias have hit the Switch eShop

to be fair only a couple of them are as good as hollow knight

theres some sort of panel about cyberpunk later tonight possibly showing some gameplay

the samurai game looks like witcher 3/red dead redemption in feudal japan, which is cool with me, but it also looks like it has a lot of that high-contrast lighting that witcher 3 has that bugs my eyes sometimes

Xpost Hollow Knight, from what I've seen, looks really cool, which is something I really liked about Steamworld Dig 2. Not the gameplay per se, but that it is not another riff on retro pixel games.

And the griping I've been doing is largely based on the feel of bait and switch. No pun intended. I wanted the system for the promise of certain titles, in addition to the usual Nintendo titles, and they were basically promised, in that they were announced. And either they have been entirely Off the Grid with no update, like Metroid four, have since dropped off the grid with delays and no updates, or have been coming soon for forever, like Hollow Knight. I don't think that's unreasonable of me. I've got plenty of titles to play, from Nintendo heavy-hitters to lot of intriguing little Indies. I just wanted something big to look forward to.

> Searching...
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> 9PM CEST / 12PM PST – GameSpot Live
> 11PM CEST / 2PM PST – IGN Live
> 2:30AM CEST / 5:30PM PST – E3 Coliseum Live#Cyberpunk2077 #E32018

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) June 12, 2018

One thing I've appreciated about the press conferences and releases I've heard or heard of is the number of developers conceding that as much as they'd like to release certain titles on the Switch, it would just be too much work if not impossible. They're being honest and transparent. Vs, say, whoever did The Sexy Brutale (Tequila Works?). They excitedly released that game on Switch, and I thought it looked cool, but supposedly it played so badly the developer apologized and announced they would release a patch. Weeks go by, maybe months, and the patch arrives, and reportedly makes the game *worse.* So the developer apologizes again, releases a new patch that reverses that patch, and then ... nothing. Even as they promote discounts and sales on a problematic product. Keep in mind, I've been out of the game (so to speak) for a long time. Is that normal?

And the griping I've been doing is largely based on the feel of bait and switch. No pun intended. I wanted the system for the promise of certain titles, in addition to the usual Nintendo titles, and they were basically promised, in that they were announced. And either they have been entirely Off the Grid with no update, like Metroid four, have since dropped off the grid with delays and no updates, or have been coming soon for forever, like Hollow Knight. I don't think that's unreasonable of me. I've got plenty of titles to play, from Nintendo heavy-hitters to lot of intriguing little Indies. I just wanted something big to look forward to.

Haha I'm really not relishing my current role around here as the grumpy old dude who's been through exactly this with multiple previous nintendo generations and tried to do the "switch might go the same way" warning months ago to a chorus of "ah shurrup gramps, it's going to be great this time!".

And hey who knows, maybe waverace and 1080 and f-zero will have been announced an hour from now and I'll switch sides instantly.

Probably none of those things are going to be announced today. I'm just in this for Smash reveals tbqh

anything surprising is gravy on top of the Smashed Potatoes, as it were

I'm just in this for Smash reveals tbqh

My bet is Mario

I'm curious, what character do people want in Smash that isn't in Smash? Dr. Jones from Startropics?

A bunch. I want Isaac from Golden Sun. Lots of insane people want Ridley and King K. Rool??

Ridley would be sick.

What about a Mario Creator level where players can change stuff about the level?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtvRaMPJWLs

Enjoyed this moment in yesterday's Giant Bomb commentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozosGipsoNE

Smash Ultimate looks siiiick. So happy I get to play Snake again.

This is one of the best E3s I can remember, honestly.

Don't know what precisely I was expecting from TLOU2, but I was expecting it to be a Rapture-level event, and instead it was, "Oh, the same HUD and menu system as the first game, plus melee dodge."

"Oh wait you can craft arrows now, so if I find a boxing glove...!?" /poofs-into-an-empty-pile-of-clothes

Apparently there has been talk that the Last of Us II footage was somehow faked. But this goes into it a bit:

https://kotaku.com/the-last-of-us-part-ii-s-violence-is-designed-to-be-rep-1826781044

Key takeaway:

“Those were all real systems,” Druckmann said. “So at an E3 demo you take complicated systems that are random and we’re making them deterministic and we play it a lot and rehearse it and choreograph it, so we’re showing off very specific things. But those are all real systems that players will experience when they play the game.”

So it's less that the game channels you in specific directions and more that the developers had specific directions in mind that they wanted to show off.