It’s not in my nature to be negative about things, but it’s also not in my nature to lie about things. Thus, I am left with a bittersweet feeling about E3.
E3 used to great, in fact, it used to be fantastic! It slowly degraded into what we see today due to corporate greed. EA, Ubisoft, Square-Enix, Sony, Nintendo, Konami and other triple-A publishers have become so desperate for profit that they have lost sight of what it means to be in game development. It’s no secret how low these companies are willing to go to exploit money from their consumers. They have simply lost their magic.
That doesn’t mean the show’s terrible, but it used to have a lot more weight. When a publisher announced a new title to an eager audience it meant they were almost done with it and it would release soon (usually within just a few months). Others would announce their game and release it on the same day causing consumers to almost weep with joy, but what do we have now?
“Insert Game Name Here”: Now in Development
And it gets worse; we barely see gameplay these days. Cinematics cloud the sky and saturate the show, leaving me feeling empty. I want to be excited, I really do, but how can I when all we get shown is something that is scripted and not in any way representative of the game’s final gameplay. In what Universe is it acceptable to show a game without any gameplay? It’s absolute nonsense and I have a lot more respect for the publishers who actually show us some gameplay, but I do feel like they might be lying to us. The gameplay we’ve seen so far seems pretty scripted as well. Horizon: Zero Dawn looks amazing, but I can’t shake the feeling that the final game won’t play anything like what we saw. Hope I’m wrong.
What’s more, when these games finally DO get released they are husks of what they were trying to be. Publishers are putting less effort than ever before into what makes games great and instead flood us with DLCs and ‘graphics’. They seem to think that we only care about graphical advancement and ‘content’. A basic rule of game development is to make your mechanic first and make it work beautifully with ugly graphics, but publishers seem to believe in the opposite.
To top it off, we get shown a cinematic trailer for a game and it immediately becomes available for pre-order... I’m sorry, what? You want me to pay 60 dollars for a product that I don’t have any clue as to what it will play like? How stupid do you think I am? Well, they seem to think I’m pretty stupid because their hype tactics seem to be working. People still fall for it and sales are being made. It’s not just sad, it’s soul crushing.
The magic is gone, but it is not dead. There are many developers who still know how to make great games and I’m confident that we’ll see more great games in the future, whether it was announced at E3 or not.
People have accused me of disliking E3 and then getting lost in the hype of all the ‘game talk’, but that’s not true - I get excited for games. The fact that they were announced at E3 makes no difference. We don’t need the show, we just need the games. So what is E3 if there are no playable games or (at the very least) a promise of gameplay in the immediate future?
The answer is: A really fancy place you go to talk about games and nothing else.
- Writer: Day
(Guest Blogger)
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