#doom 2015

Bethesda kicked things off Sunday evening (all approximations of time are EST) which I didn’t bother with since, as mentioned previously, I am not a fan of Bethesda in the slightest.  I’m sure I can take a wild guess and say most everyone was excited by more Fallout 4, but my take away was ID Software’s new Doom.  This series has come so far and it looks like it is, in a way, returning to a style closer to that of the original with environments you can actually see in.  I’m not really a Horror genre guy, be it movies or games, so Doom 3 utterly terrified me, and I don’t think I played long enough to see an enemy (#GamerConfessions).  This new iteration looks more action focused while retaining jumpy moments and its armies of grotesque demons for scare tactics.

Monday was a lot of blah, blah, blah for me.  Xbox started things in the afternoon, which I heard they announced an update coming to the X-1 that will give it limited backwards compatibility.  That’s kinda neat I guess.  Sony doesn’t want to budge on that front, but with their showing this year I think we can forgive them.

A little later EA had their turn.  This was possibly the most humorous event to follow and not for whatever the hell they were showing, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst being the only thing out of the ordinary from their yearly iteration titles.  No, what had my brother and I cracking up was the public reactions/actions during the showing, specifically on Twitch.  Now granted Twitch chatters are among the scum of the Earth, but man were they extra vicious for EA.  The highlight though was the massive loss of viewers part way into the stream, according to my brother when they hit the sports section viewership just died, plummeting from about 300k live viewers to about 130k in mere moments.  If not for the fact that they are (somehow) a multi-million (billion?) dollar company, they really have no reason to be highlighted with a press conference at E3 since their shit is the same thing every year.

Next was So- no wait, Ubisoft.  They... uh... were there, I guess.  Does anyone know what they did, I didn’t watch it nor have I heard anything from it.  They have fallen so far off my map, I don’t even know what game series they do anymore.  Yea, let’s move on.

Then it was PlayStation, closing out the evening of Day 0.  And boy did they hit the ground running, showing off The Last Guardian (again) as their first reveal!  This game looks like it’ll retain all the charm of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

Horizon Zero Dawn is by the same studio as Killzone, Guerrilla Games, so of course it is pretty as hell.  The brief introduction to the world has me curious to learn more about it, and the gameplay looks pretty interesting.

Let’s take a moment to talk about Media Molecule.  How awesome and creative are these guys and gals?  Seriously, LittleBigPlanet, Tear Away, and now Dreams.  This developer makes quite possibly the most fascinating games ever.