E3: Sony Serves Up What Gamers Asked For

Jeremy’s Take: Without playing favorites, it’s probably safe to say that the Sony presentation at E3 2015 dropped the most and biggest bombs. Pinch yourself; you’re not dreaming… they opened with The Last Guardian. They OPENED with The Last Guardian.

Aside from (or perhaps due to) the obvious emotional release from the years of pent-up expectation, it feels as though The Last Guardian may have its work cut out for it. Games with development cycles of 8 years rarely benefit from such an extended timeline, and it’s clear that there may be some rough edges that may not even be smoothed over by the capabilities of the PlayStation 4. However, the game is banking on an impressive pedigree, and designer Fumito Ueda even made an appearance in the audience, receiving something like congratulations from those seated nearby.

Guerrilla games is taking a break from its decade-long engagement with Killzone to release a new IP, Horizon: Zero Dawn, which evokes a somewhat paradoxical prehistoric-future scenario, and smacks of Ninja Theory in its Enslaved: Odyssey to the West period. Horizon seems to fall in the Sony family tree somewhere on the same branch as The Last of Us or The Order: 1886, but perhaps with a bit more fantasy and variety on the offer. It’s hard to be too critical of giant biomechanical dinosaurs, at any rate.

It’s unfortunate that games like Hitman or even Street Fighter V might be considered filler between the stops on the way to more prominent offerings. Suffice it to say that they looked like they remain true to their nature.

Sean Murray from Hello Games performed a blind read on No Man’s Sky, choosing a random planet from amid the game’s vast universe, and it ended up falling slightly flat as no fauna were to be found on the procedurally-generated world. Unfortunately the game is banking a lot on a premise, impressive though it may be, and it sometimes seems as though a concrete case has not yet been made for what the playing No Man’s Sky will actually entail. A random space battle held a bit of premise, but the entire thing was over before it got too interesting.

Likewise, Alex Evans and Media Molecule demonstrated a creation tool that uses 3D space and seems to allow sculpting and creation using various virtual materials. One might be left with only a vague impression that there was something of entertainment value to be shown, although a demo reels showing a variety of creative scenarios (building an old claymation man in a chair, polar bears, space ships) recall something of the European “demo scene.” If these kinds of animations (or even stills) can be made with as little time or effort as implied, then it is an impressive enigma that future demonstrations may resolve for us.

Firewatch and a reel of Destiny: The Taken King DLC led into a short presentation of the monster-collecting-battling game World of Final Fantasy (one of the only mentions of PS Vita in the presentation). This itself, served to transition into the second big reveal of the night, a remake of Final Fantasy VII.

After a brief dalliance with Devolver Digital and a handful of games they are releasing, Adam Boyes unveiled the final (and perhaps MOST surprising) news of the evening: a crowdfunding effort for Shenmue 3, spearheaded by Yu Suzuki. He took pains to affirm that this is not a Sony project, but the descendant of the cult proto-open-world game is expected to successfully fund and arrive on PS4 and PC at the end of 2017.

Although Project Morpheus is taking up a reported 50% of Sony’s presence at E3, it afforded only a short mention by Andrew House before transitioning to the cable TV alternative, PlayStation Vue. Rather interesting was its a la carte pricing scheme, but the program is only available in very limited circulation, limiting its appeal.

Call of Duty Black Ops 3 nearly overstayed its welcome with an extremely Titanfall-esque battleground of large robots and cybernetically enhanced infantry, but a four-person multiplayer campaign has the potential to bolster some of the weaknesses of the older game’s narrative arc.

We went to a PlayStation presser, and a Star Wars event broke out, as the saying goes. Between the timed-exclusive playsets for Disney Infinity 3.0 and some striking footage from the multiplayer shooter Star Wars Battlefront 3, Sony is trying to position the PlayStation 4 as the preferred home of Star Wars games on console. (Noteworthy is that the earlier EA presser also showed Battlefront footage running on PS4 hardware.)

Bringing up the rearguard of the Sony event was Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, which began with a bit of a technical error when no control inputs appeared to be working. After a restart, it seemed to lend a bit of authenticity to the playthrough, as if an actual person (shockingly!) might actually be playing a live game on stage at E3.

Although nothing surprising or divergent was shown in the new Nathan Drake outing, the dialogue between Drake and Sully made for a good laugh in a comfortable and pleasantly predictable sort of way. Pleasant, but not characteristic of Sony’s overall presentation: During the hour or so of the event, it seemed that the laughably impossible might actually be within the bounds of reality.