E3 2018

[GoGo Yubari]

Square starts in ten minutes. No stream link from me because I’m at work.

[Maxx]

Started the stream a bit late, so I have no idea if they ever gave context to what these Tomb Raider enemies did that make them so bad.  It just feels like Lara sadistically killing a bunch of dudes.

[Bobfoc]

I've just started watching. I doubt I'll see anything interesting that hasn't already been revealed, but I'll have it on anyway.

Also, can we announce the Kingdom Hearts games for PC now, please?

[probablyoliver]

Well that was a load of actual nothing.

Although Just Cause 4 does look tremendous.

[Bobfoc]

Was that it? Didn't seem like much of an event.

[apsham]

I saw a bunch of awesome games - what are you people expecting?

[probablyoliver]

I saw a bunch of awesome games that were shown off yesterday at Microsoft.

You can't just blindly defend everything ApSham. 😂

[Bobfoc]

1 minute ago, Ollie said:

I saw a bunch of awesome games that were shown off yesterday at Microsoft.

Pretty much this. It's not that the games were bad, just that we already saw most of them yesterday.

[apsham]

4 minutes ago, Ollie said:

I saw a bunch of awesome games that were shown off yesterday at Microsoft.

You can't just blindly defend everything ApSham. 😂

Oh yeah, all those PS4/PC/Switch exclusives that Microsoft showed off. 🙄

Not to mention what else were they going to show? Make up some news games on the spot because they got shown already at the Microsoft conference?

[Ruki]

2 hours ago, Pentashám Jr. said:

Square'll probably be doing something about the FF7 remake I'm guessing.

I was right!

 

But if they do show anything? It'll be at Sony tonight.

 

Only things I liked was Octopath and Dragon Quest

[apsham]

Just now, Ruki said:

But if they do show anything? It'll be at Sony tonight.

That'll likely be the place for it if anything, I forgot that Sony was tonight. Maybe Avengers too.

[probablyoliver]

The main event was the exact same trailer for Kingdom Hearts that was shown off yesterday. If that's your top billing for the most important video game conference of the year, that's underwhelming.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - shown yesterday
Final Fantasy XIV - new expansion for an 8 year old MMO. Hardly ground-breaking.
Life Is Strange spin-off - shown yesterday
Dragon Quest 11 - fair.
Babylon's Fall - again, fair.
Octopath Traveller - that's three.
Just Cause 4 - shown yesterday.
The Quiet Man - blink and you'd miss live-action teaser for a totally unknown project.
Kingdom Hearts 3 - shown yesterday.

So that's, what, 2 new game reveals? Everything else was known about or shown off yesterday.

If that makes a good conference in your eyes than you're expectations must be the lowest of the low for these things.

[apsham]

Try realistic, the studio can only handle so many projects at once. And even with the XIV announcement you're downplaying the fact that it's a new piece of content for one the most successful currently running MMOs (still with a subscription needed model even) - when most everything else event related for it has been rehashed, so a crossover with MH only means that it's going to be new content that is going to keep it going.

I don't see why Microsoft's conference has anything to do with the roster of games that they are showing off to be put out - they're working on more that we know about even, but that's likely been put off for a reveal at a different event or more likely than not, paid/promoted by Sony to put it in their conference tonight.

And it burns my fucking blood every time I try to be positive about something to get the 'lol, look at this guy who isn't shit talking straight out of the gate' - and that wasn't even the case this time, I saw 9 games that I was interested in and seriously wondered why it was a 'load of nothing'.

[probablyoliver]

Yeah, so why sell all of your properties to be shown on another stage? If this was all Square was ready to show, then they should have held back some of it for their own conference because it just fell really flat. It wasn't a bad conference in the sense that old EA conferences was bad, but it was bad in that nothing was new or exciting or interesting because the new and exciting and interesting things were all shown yesterday.

[GoGo Yubari]

Yeah, I honestly don't know why Square even bothered with a press conference. The Kingdom Hearts trailer wasn't literally the exact same but there was so much of it that was in the trailer shown yesterday that you can hardly blame people for thinking it was, and they would have been much better served showing off a portion of gameplay or something instead. It's not a bad assortment of games to say the least, it's a pretty solid lineup, but if you're a single publisher and you don't have a "wow" moment in the chamber you're better off just having all your stuff on other presentations, which Square already did a ton of with Xbox yesterday.

[apsham]

It's not like they booked out a venue like Bethesda - they made a video of their upcoming games, including some stuff that wasn't in other conferences yet - and set a time for when it was going to be played. It'd be nice to get everything on the Sony/Microsoft press conference and even if the things they showed today end up in the Sony/Nintendo ones tonight and tomorrow I don't really know why it rules out just saying "here's some more publicity that we have to put out barely anything for" - there's literally no downside.

[GoGo Yubari]

6 minutes ago, Pentashám Jr. said:

It's not like they booked out a venue like Bethesda - they made a video of their upcoming games, including some stuff that wasn't in other conferences yet - and set a time for when it was going to be played. It'd be nice to get everything on the Sony/Microsoft press conference and even if the things they showed today end up in the Sony/Nintendo ones tonight and tomorrow I don't really know why it rules out just saying "here's some more publicity that we have to put out barely anything for" - there's literally no downside.

the thing is, I think the very act of putting on a dedicated press conference when you didn't do that last year is basically signaling you have something important. The format doesn't matter because, hey, Nintendo also doesn't do full-venue press conferences as such anymore either. Like, hey, in a vacuum it's honestly better than EA's press conference this year but it still felt really inconsequential.

Anyway! Ubisoft in a couple minutes.

 

[Bobfoc]

I think it's a case of us being trained to expect publishers to hold something back for their own briefings. Square Enix hadn't held a presentation for three years, so I think it's fair to say that most people expected their return to mean that they had something major up their sleeves that they wanted to save for their own show.

I'm not bothered myself, and I only gave it a look because it happened to be on when I got home from work, but I can see how people may have built themselves up to expect footage of the Final Fantasy VII Remake, for example.

[Maxx]

The lack of an update on the FF7 remake is pretty ridiculous.  It was announced in 2015, they should be able to tell us something by now.  They've also got licenses for the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, two insanely hot properties, they should be showing off something related to those.  But it is entirely possible Disney made them hold off on those two and will have info come out at D23 instead.  


Ubisoft is up next and I'm finding myself hardpressed to think of an Ubi series I care about at all.  I've played lots of their games and just never got invested in any of them, Far Cry is about as close as I get.

[apsham]

Oh well yeah, but I mean - if Bethesda booked out a big building and didn't have much to say, that would just be an unneeded cost. 30 minutes to show me the new Dragon Quest game and that sweet Dark Souls-y trailer for Babylon's Fall amongst the other stuff for no cost was pretty reasonable.