E3 2018

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.

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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.

“We’re making a game about the cycle of violence and we’re making a statement about violent actions and the impact they have on the character that’s committing them and on the people close to them,” he said. “And our whole approach is to say, ‘We want to treat this as realistically as possible.’ When you stab someone—if you watch reference videos, which we have, it’s gross and it’s messy and it’s not sanitized like you see in most movies and games. And we wanted to get the player to feel that.”

'As realistic as possible' would probably involve making the protagonist a lot more vulnerable - not able to kill twelve enemies in succession with relative ease...

rmde @ "making a statement about violent actions" at least the Far Cry people had the sense to not pretend their 25 hour shooting simulator was "making a statement" on gun violence

also wtf @ "if you watch reference videos, which we have"

Yeah, that was all bs. If they wanted to make a statement about violence they wouldn't be so violent.

Best statement about violence would be to make a video game about gay people kissing and not having to do any violence

it has been interesting seeing the debate around this. lots of people going "What, you just want it cartoony to make it easier to handle?" as if changing a visceral physical act of leaping onto a human and jamming an edged blade into their neck into a single button press isn't an abstraction. or the fact that if you fail and get killed, you don't die forever, you get a retry, just like any cartoon. it is cartoony anyways. luxuriating in realistic mutilation is just a cherry on top. it's certainly a discussion worth having, as games become more and more realistic, but i don't think it's as simple as "cartoony = bad, realistic = good". videogames strive to be realistic and have long fetishized "realism". in many ways a realistic death is a reward.

on the other hand apparently the first game was super bloody too and these were always horror games. despite hearing that it's an incredible benchmark in gaming, i haven't played it. seeing the second game, i don't think i ever will.

The preview didn't strike me as being that gratuitously violent, and I generally hate violent games and feel bad when I run over pedestrians in GTA. You know - compared to Sniper Elite, or a Final Destination thing, those things really love to ogle their violence.

It is an interesting debate, sort of, and it's not new. Movies are the best comparison, especially as games continue to approach movies. "Realism" is held in high esteem in movies, both in things like war movies and horror movies, the former more "realistic," the latter more fantasy but both "real" depictions of cause/effect violence (despite, of course, both being fake). You can make a war movie or a horror movie with no violence, but it's probably much harder with a game, not least because games like this are also more or less hybrid-action games (that is, war/horror/action/fantasy all wrapped up). There are plenty of puzzle games and games with cartoonish violence (Mario et al.), just as movies have their equivalent (like the Marvel movies, which are more or less 100% violent yet nearly bloodless). This sort of game is the other end of the spectrum and probably wouldn't work without the hyper realism, which is to say, violence.

Still, I can think of some pretty easy thematic solutions. For example, rewarding, say, mercy killing over sadistic killing, or having killing carry some sort of karmic cost that affects play, so that seeing that sort of hyper violence gore doesn't come as a reward so much as a sign you did something wrong, or could have done things a better way with better results. Or the more violent you are the harder it is to play, or it starts to affect accuracy or something a little bit. Basically the opposite of something like "Doom," where the bigger the violence, the bigger the reward. There are probably games like this already, maybe "Last of Us" (one or two) is one of them, I have no idea. I think the first one involves a lot of strangling? I thought there were zombies involved.

Speaking of which, I watched some of the gruesome gameplay of the Resident Evil 2 remake and yeah, that's pretty realistic and gross, too, but it's straight horror, and you're killing (humanoid) monsters. The little bits I've seen of Resident Evil 7 were a lot more sadistic.

https://www.polygon.com/e3/2018/6/13/17459358/super-smash-bros-ultimate-solid-snake-butt

fallout76 looks like dogmeatshit but the existence of cyberpunk 2077 makes me not mind

on the other hand apparently the first game was super bloody too and these were always horror games. despite hearing that it's an incredible benchmark in gaming, i haven't played it. seeing the second game, i don't think i ever will.

FWIW the violence and brutality of the original game are an integral part of the story, and honestly shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. (It also was NOT particularly graphic.)

That said, this article (IMO) rightly questions if the violence is as critically productive as it was in the first game.

https://www.gamesradar.com/the-last-of-us-part-2-is-struggling-to-stand-out-amid-a-brutal-video-game-landscape-the-original-inspired/

Definitely a good point - I was a bit worried after the first teaser which lacked some needed context for the violence. The E3 trailer took my worries away though.

yeah i hear the story & gameplay is very holistic and cohesive. i have played a little of TLOU but it was mostly killing inhuman monsters so this took me by surprise. i haven't played TLOU all the way through so i don't have full context.

kind of funny that Death Stranding was my favorite and it was mostly just people walking through landscapes lol. it took me a while to realize it wasn't CGI that it was in game footage with the HUD (if there is one) off. very meditative and surreal. i am very curious about this game.

loved Nintendo dropping Fortnight for free. a free game the day of E3! that rules. the game is fun and the art is colorful and nice and a little psychedelic. this is why i go to Nintendo.

can't wait to see the new Bloodstained demo, i know they have something new at the conference that will go out to backers soon. i believe it is a good chunk of the start of the game.