E3 2014 Recap

For those who haven’t been keeping up on my Facebook page, I’ve been able to follow E3 in great detail this year. The bonus of not having a job at the moment is the free time to write and watch E3 live. The bad news is currently not having money to get any of these games. Luckily most of them will be come out late this year or early next year… though that does leave Summer rather high-and-dry. So let’s discuss what was good, what was bad, and who the metaphorical “winner” of E3 2014 is for the year. 

THE GOOD: E3 surprised me this year by actually showing games I want to play and see. In previous years there’d always been some level of disappointment or lacking of surprises. This year it was the little surprises that, to me, stole the show. It wasn’t all perfect, but we’ll get into that later. First, here’s the top ten things I found most engaging, interesting, or awe-inspiring of 2014’s E3.

 #10 – Mii Fighters (and Palutena, I guess) – I’m excited for Smash Bros to come out later this year. We got a delay on the 3DS game, which sucks, but I’ll live with it. Bringing out the bottom of our list is the information we got regard Smash Bros at E3 (on Tuesday at least). The Mii Fighters were something we were all interested in last time around, but it never happened. This time, Sakurai made them work and they actually possess a variety of abilities that allow the gameplay of the Mii Fighters to never really get old or stale. There are limitations to that variation, but from what I’ve seen, this looks like a promising addition to the Smash Bros cast and I’m looking forward to giving them a go… Also Palutena makes an appearance. Should have been Waluigi.

 #09 - Make it Yourself: Project Spark, LittleBigPlanet 3, and Mario Maker – All three of these titles have one thing in common, you make the games or content yourself. This was my first good look at Project Spark and what could be done with it and I am almost convinced to buy an XBone just to play with this alone. There’s lots of room to make all manner of complex game ideas and I’d love to see what I could do with it. LBP makes a return with new characters and their usual level editor. And Nintendo finally gives Nintendo-fans the ability to make their own Mario levels with either the 8-bit original graphics or the NSMB graphics. Can we maybe get an option for SMW graphics? Those were visually the best looking ones. I’m excited to play with all of these (some more than others, obviously).

 #08 – Movie Time: Rise of Tomb Raider and Phantom Dust – I don’t like trailers for games that just show CGI and no actual gameplay. There was A LOT of that this year, but of them all, these two were not offensive and made me genuinely curious about the games. The former is a sequel to the recent reboot and aims to explore the psychological damage that Lara endured from that game. The latter is a reboot of an Xbox (original) game in a hopes it’ll catch on this time around. I’ll wait for gameplay trailers before I commit to any purchase.

#07 – Evil At Its Best: Far Cry 4 and Arkham Knight – Unfortunately, more CGI trailers, but the former did also show some gameplay in a separate trailer while the latter had a little gameplay by way of showing the Batmobile mechanics. Both of which had one thing in common, establishing the villains and showing how a CGI heavy trailer should be done. FC4 introduced us to the new villain who is beautifully disgusting in every right way while Arkham reacquaints us with our old friends, SCARECROW. Both of which were spectacular and I can’t wait to play them just to enjoy going against both of these madmen later this year.

 #06 – X Marks the Spot: XenoBlade Chronicles X – For two years now, we’ve known of X and seen some of X, but knew nothing about the story, details about the gameplay, or even what the full title would be. We finally got all that this year as well as a tentative release date of… 2015. This would have ranked near the top had we had a 2014 release date, but this game still looks amazing, varied in mechanics, and fun. The trailer we get this time showcased the story of the game a bit more. Check it out if you want details, but this will certainly be a must-have WiiU title.

 #05 – Saints will have competition on the harddrive: GTAV for PC – I’ve been watching Let’s Play after Let’s Play from Achievement Hunter as they show just how much fun GTAV could be. And while I could have bought it for PS3, I don’t have many friends on PSN, making GTA-Online less than fun. But on the PC, my Steam friendlist is substantially large and most of my good friends who game all have decent PC’s. In short, PC was where I wanted to play it the most, so I waited. I’m glad to see that I will soon be able to join in the madness of Los Santos soon enough. This should certainly hold me over until Volition brings out their Saints Row style of online crime games to compete with GTA-Online. Maybe we’ll have Heists by then too.

 

#04 – Hero of Time, now Hero of WiiU: Zelda WiiU and Hyrule Warriors – I’m not a Zelda fan. I don’t hate Zelda, but I’ve never been engrossed in the franchise that much. Hyrule Warriors was the game to come out to get me interested in Zelda again, and that’s coming out in September for those of us in America. The visuals are breathtaking, the action looks intense, and the surprises we keep getting with Zelda and Midna being playable are fantastic (looking forward to seeing if Ganondorf is playable). But just when I thought Zelda couldn’t be more interesting, Zelda WiiU gets a trailer showing that it will have more of a Skyrim style of open world. And the visuals in that were just as impressive, if not more so. Not to mention that the protagonist looks to have a more ambiguous gender (could it be Zelda instead of Link?). There’s a lot we still want to know about these games and we’ll have to wait for more details.

 #03 – Going Platinum with: Bayonetta 2 bundle AND Scalebound – I knew that Bayonetta 2 would get some coverage (media, not clothing) during E3 this year, which was enough to keep me interested. But they surprised us with an exclusive release for the XBone, Scalebound. It was a cinematic trailer, but knowing Platinum, it will be a heavy stylized-action game. This time, it involves fighting monsters alongside a dragon partner. It looks interesting, but I’ll wait for gameplay trailers before deciding if it’s worth shelling out the money for an Xbone. Bayonetta 2 on the other hand, gave us a bit more story in the trailer AND announced the original Bayonetta game would be bundled with this new game for the WiiU players to enjoy… I love you Platinum. You guys really do some amazing stuff for the fans.

 #02 – Color! Color EVERYWHERE!: Sunset Overdrive and Splatoon – When the XBone was first announced, Project Spark was one of the only two things that caught my attention, but I knew nothing about. Sunset Overdrive was the second and it still looks just as amazing, colorful, and fun as it did before. It’s almost enough to convince me to buy the system (along with everything else already mentioned here). The bigger surprise, however, was that Nintendo also had a colorful online-multiplayer shooter game in the works as well. Splatoon was made by some incredibly high Japanese guys in which you play character who play paintball and morph into squids to move around the arena faster. There looks like a larger variety of gameplay mechanics that make the level of strategic play sound so vast and in-depth, that it’s too good to be true. Nintendo surprised me a lot this year, and Splatoon was definitely one of the things that made it work… however there was one more thing that took a lot of us by surprise…

 #01 – SPAAAAAAAAACE!: No Man’s Sky, Dreadnought, and StarFoxWiiU – It’s like the lack of StarFox games and the demand for them has been heard by the industry at large. We’ve been wanting to fly around in space for a while and our demands our finally being answered. No Man’s Sky was announced on Monday night, getting exclusive rights to the PS4 before coming to the PC as well. Then Dreadnought news from Yaeger (the artists behind Spec Ops: The Line) dropped, showing even more space-flying action. After that, I thought to myself, if Nintendo announced StarFox was going to happen, this would make a perfect E3. Somehow they read my mind or heard my prayers because StarFox was announced and it was good news for all. Finally getting to return to the Arwings to take flight among the stars once again!

But with the good comes the bad. So let’s discuss what went wrong at E3 this year. Starting with the least “offensive” and working our way up the list. 

#10 – Half Life 3, Still Not Confirmed – I kid. I don’t really give a single sodding shit about the Half-Life games. Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine games. But I’m content with not caring if the rest of the story is ever concluded in future games because my investment in the story wasn’t that great. I’d be much more interested in Left 4 Dead 3 or even Portal 3 (though I’m not sure what they’d do for that one). But, overall, I’m just disappointed we didn’t get to see Valve, again, at E3. I know it’s not their usual scene, but at least make an announcement or say you’ve got something cooking so we (they) can stop asking you guys about Half-Life 3. I only want it out so the fans will shut up. Otherwise, I don’t care. 

#09 – Sony Phoning It In – Last year, Sony destroyed Microsoft handily. Enough to push Microsoft into changing many features of their console and winning the admiration of gamers across the land. This year, they didn’t really do anything interesting or exciting. Compared to last year, Sony’s conference was incredibly boring. None of their announcements had the same awe and wonder of anything shown at Microsoft’s or Nintendo’s for this year. In short, they didn’t seem to put the same level of work into this presentation as last year… not that it really matters. After last year, they deserve to take it easy, but this does smack of being a bit lazy.

 #08 – Mario Party 10 – I’m not hating on the series as a whole, and I even like the concept of a fifth player being Bowser and ruining everyone’s day. But I am annoyed this exists and it still uses that stupid mechanic where everyone moves together in the same vehicle rather than as individuals like in regular board games. I don’t like how the game still looks like the teeth from the Mario Party 1, 2, & 3 days have been ripped out. In short, I will probably hold off on buying this for a while, if ever. The magic of the older Mario Parties have been gone for some time now and I’m still waiting for Nintendo to find that magic again.

 

#07 – Let it Die – This isn’t me accusing this game of being bad or that it will be bad. Why did I put this on the list? It’s a SUDA51 game. I love SUDA51 for his quirky weird games and cool ideas. But I also love the unique visual styles his games often have. The loads of colors, cel-shading, and visually unique appeal that makes me want more SUDA51 (hell, I made Killer is Dead close to my GOTY in 2013). So why so down on this? Because it’s lacking in all the vibrant visuals Suda51 games are known for. Now, it could still be just as good, but I’m currently on the fence at the moment. We’ll see when more gameplay and story are shown.

 

#06 – No New Pokemon Info – Granted, at the time of writing, E3 is still going and we might get more info later… but thanks to the Coro-Coro leak from a week ago, we aren’t getting new information we don’t already know about OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire. But additional shame for no confirmation on DeltaEmerald, Pokemon Z or even Pokken: Pokemon Fighter. I get wanting to shift focus to other things, Nintendo, but Pokemon is still amazing and loved by many and we do want to see more of it ASAP. This was brought up in discussion with some people on forums though, saying how we shouldn’t be upset about Nintendo not having new information from a recent leak. And while that’s true, I never said I was upset. I was just hoping that we’d get more information outside of that. I was hoping for a bit more surprise from Pokemon. As it stands, everything was just kind of expected.

 #05 – Movie Madness – One thing that bugged me was how there were so many trailers with no gameplay. This was mostly prominent in the XboxOne conference, and while I admitted earliest that SOME of these trailers looked good, fact is they are still just cinematic trailers lacking any gameplay. In fact, this is probably where Nintendo’s strength was this year because it showed almost entirely gameplay trailers, which was what I was most excited to see. This isn’t anything new though. E3 has always been about crappy cinematic trailers… but…

 #04 – Conceptual Prototype Trailers – What the fuck is this? This was all on EA and all we were shown for half of their most interesting games was “conceptual prototype trailers” that showed them making (supposedly) the map of certain Star Wars levels or the character design of Faith (we know what she looks like EA, there was a Mirror’s Edge game we already played). These weren’t trailers for games. This was EA wanking into our face with pretty looking images and proof of concept visuals with no plot, no gameplay, no cinematics, nothing. EA’s whole show was an entire waste and further proof why EA is out of touch with the industry.

 #03 – Remastered Chief – I said this when the Xbone and the PS4 launched, and it was that without backwards compatibility, both consoles are crippled for me because that limits their libraries to the shit amount of games they’ll have out at launch. It takes up more space on my entertainment unit with giant pieces of plastic, and many games I still want to play require me to switch devices because developers have still been making 360 and PS3 games. Well the solution to that was to further rip off players by simply remaking all the games and making them available on the latest iteration of console rather than update the console to have a “Backwards Compatible Option”. Thanks to this, they now have valid excuses to re-release the entire Halo series. And while this initially frustrated me, Last of Us getting a re-release for the new consoles after only being ONE YEAR OLD is even worse. It’s the same bullshit that Tomb Raider pulled earlier this year with their Definitive Edition. It’s the same bullshit happening with GTAV (the PC port is acceptable because that’s a new device entirely, but remaking it for a later iteration of consoles is bullshit when backwards compatibility would have alleviated that problem entirely). In short, it’s anti-consume bullshit that I don’t agree with because it encourages us to spend more money on games we already have simply to keep playing them conveniently on a single console. This is one of the many reasons why I’ve held off getting the other two current generation consoles, because I don’t agree with this logic in the slightest.

#02 – Ubisoft Can’t Keep Their Mouth Shut – Ubisoft had one good trailer this year that drew me in and it wasn’t even the game, but the villain of the game. Everything else they’ve done has been negligible or downright stupid and pissing me off. Two statements this year show just how bad Ubisoft can be. The first was how they stated they have a WiiU game that’s been finished for months, but refuse to release until more WiiU units are sold. So rather than be mature and pro-active, trying to sell the game on a console you said you’d support because you believed in it at launch, you’re going to hold it for ransom alongside Beyond Good & Evil 2? Either support the console or don’t, but don’t say one and do the other and talk about it like it won’t piss people off. You talk about how you want to save resources, but then waste them on a game you probably don’t fully intend to release anyway. Speaking of which, then Ubisoft discussed why they won’t have female character avatars in the new Assassin’s Creed Unity co-op modes. Apparently it’s to reduce costs on animation and voice acting. And while I’ll give them credit in that it does cost a bit… why is that really an issue? Assassin’s Creed is tremendously popular and Ubisoft should have plenty of money to afford that. Why is this suddenly a problem? Volition can pull that off no problem in their Saints Row games, and I can’t imagine they make that much more money than Ubisoft who has yearly releases of Assassin’s Creed. So either they’re spending too much money on WiiU games they won’t release, or they’re talking out of their enormous ass when the truth is they’re just lazy and cheap. 

#01 – No Dreamcast 2 – This will forever by the worst part of any E3, when we don’t get a new console from Sega. I will await their glorious return to the console arms race to put Xbox and Playstation in their place while they compete with their old and eternal rival, Nintendo. Alas, seems such a day will not come to pass, but I can dream…. I can dream…

The winners and losers? For me, Nintendo clearly won E3 this year. Microsoft was still making up for last year’s complete mess and while they did good, there was nothing in their conference that inspired the same sense of awe or wonder that the Nintendo show did. Microsoft was, indeed, competent this year and showed us games. But Nintendo was also able to have fun with it and showed us some surprises (like Splatoon) we never saw coming. Sony, while not really losing, doesn’t seem to really care about winning this year.

I’d say the losers this year were definitely between Ubisoft and EA. EA seemed focused on not showing us any actual games we were interested in and generally wasting everyone’s time. Ubisoft set out to say stupid things and piss people off without thinking about the consequences. But I’ll give the golden turd to EA because Ubisoft at least showed trailers to games and not concept art for things that will eventually be games if we’re lucky. They can both go to hell, but EA will likely get there faster.