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+--- Thread: Not-E3 2022 (/showthread.php?tid=7396)
Not-E3 2022 - A Black Falcon - 14th June 2022
There was no E3 this year, it was cancelled. But in lieu of it we did get some video presentations, and even a few in-person events in LA for journalists.
I watched most of the presentations online, And as for the rest of this not-E3... well, it sure wasn't E3. Microsoft had a full, regular E3-style show. Two hours long. It was pretty good, and they showed a lot of interesting indie games, but MS has almost nothing releasing this year -- basically their second half 2022 schedule is 'well we've got updates for a bunch of our current games and a couple of smaller projects like Obsidian's pretty cool looking new medieval-themed adventure game.' Then in the first half of 2023 they have some major releases again, including Starfield and the next mainline Forza Motorsport game. AAA game development takes too long, that is the core of it. MS started a bunch of major projects several years ago now. That they are still so far from completion that they are almost all more than a year out says a lot about how overlong game development takes now.
Other than MS, though, there wasn't a lot of note. At least, not all that much on the AAA front outside of maybe Street Fighter 6. Capcom had a full one hour showcase. They had no new announcements, but did show info about their upcoming stuff, including Street Fighter 6 and one other game that looked kind of cool. Geoff Keighley did a summer games show. It had footage of a bunch of the big AAA-tier shooters and zombie games releasing in the nearish future. I found this show quite boring, there was almost nothing at all of interest. There was also a Day of the Devs showcase, which had a bunch of neat stuff in it, and PC Gamer had another PC Gaming Show. That one was good, several pretty cool strategy games were shown, among others. Oh, and Sony had a little half hour video last week. No full presentation from them. They showed ... I don't even remember any of it other than the barely-any-different-looking Last of Us 1 remaster. So not much. Oh, SF6 was first shown at the Sony show, but it's not PS-exclusive this time, thank goodness -- it'll also be on Xbox Series.
But that's it. No Nintendo, no EA, no Ubisoft, no Square-Enix, no show floor... yeah. For me of course Nintendo's so-far-complete absence is the biggest hole, but even once they finally DO have a Direct announcing things, it's still clear that we're way behind a "normal" year in terms of major releases. There still were some interesting announcements and games shown, but I think that it is very clear that the pandemic is still significantly affecting game development. On top of that,AAA game development is insanely overpriced and has overlong dev cycles.
This combination leads to the fairly odd situation you see in the market now. That is, there is a combination of an utterly insane flood of indie titles, and a dearth of top-budget ones, with few in between. Independent small developers release so many games that Steam and the Nintendo Switch, particular, are inundated by games by the thousands, many barely of any note but some actually good and buried under the piles of forgettable stuff. Finding the good ones is harder than ever, since no one outfit can actually cover everything; there are far far far too many games releasing now to even consider it. There are like 1,500 games on sale on the Switch this week! Of course ,few of these are fully polished modern games, but still it's a huge number of releases. But on the other hand, on the top end game development costs so, SO much money and so much time that only the very safest games get made at that budget tier. I of course am not exactly a fan of most of the "AAA" space, though a few are games I find fun here and there. Countering their relatively small numbers though, many big-budget games are designed for long-term, high-time-investment play, making them hard to follow unless you really dedicate yourself to the game. But no one person, or media outlet, can do that for every one of them. So they don't try, and the resulting coverage is scattershot, covering the major titles and ... some random indie stuff that people notice.
Overall, this industry has grown and you can't follow it all anymore, or even try to. It's kind of sad honestly, I like to know what games are out there... but what I can see is an industry with problems. The wealth of indie games is overwhelming, and their quality all over the place. The dearth of mid-budget games is a big issue; "B games" mostly died out last decade. And the AAA space is dominated by shooters I have little interest in. There are still plenty of games releasing I like, but actually finding things is harder than ever. E3 time is one of the best opportunities games have to try to break through that and actually get noticed, and there were some games I hadn't heard of but now will be looking out for... but still, there are no good answers here, I don't think. The old ways of finding games -- magazines, reviews, coverage in gaming media websites, and such -- have broken down, and the new ones -- streaming, social media, etc -- only highlight the few titles which actually hit big. The rest are forgotten in the massive floods of games releasing all the time. And I'm sure that some of those are actually really good and interesting.
Yes, I know I've said this stuff before, but E3 time reminds me of how much of a problem all of this stuff is, and how few answers anyone has. I mean, you can't say "make fewer games, developers!" when they are making enough money to continue making them... and solving the media, reviewing, and discoverability problems seem impossible.
RE: Not-E3 2022 - Dark Jaguar - 18th June 2022
RE: Not-E3 2022 - A Black Falcon - 19th June 2022
Yeah, pretty much. It was bad.
RE: Not-E3 2022 - Dark Jaguar - 19th June 2022
E3 is just... kinda pointless right now. I understand where you may be coming from in how to track all the new releases, but there are resources available. Many of the big gaming news sites have a release calendar to help, and beyond that I tend to peruse a few places online to find out about the more niche grey market stuff like "Another Metroid 2 Remake" or... or that game that isn't Mother 4 any more but I still want it.
The whole "feel" of E3 comes across like they're some kind of eternal half-time show. Whatever E3 used to be, it isn't that any more. Not by a long shot. I just don't care. I read the announcements in bite sized form the next day... or few days after E3 ends and with the benefit of being filtered a bit better from the original source, which is a gigantic advertisement. E3 is no longer a trade show. It's a series of commercials. I'll be glad when it's gone. That's a "when" not "if".
RE: Not-E3 2022 - A Black Falcon - 30th June 2022
So, Nintendo finally did a summer Direct a few days ago... and it was a third party games only video. Oh come ON, when will you tell us what games will be releasing this holiday? Unless Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (which had its own Direct earlier this month), Pokemon, and Splatoon 3 are all going to release this year and that's all they have? That's unlikely though, there are sure to be a few other things... but what? Nintendo isn't willing to say. (Rumors of a Metroid Prime remaster continue to exist but I won't believe it until it happens, it's been too many years without that actually happening for me to believe...)
As for what was shown, though, it was alright. They did show Ubisoft's second Mario & Rabbids game, which is looking pretty good. It's a strategy game just like the first one, I'll be getting it for sure. A new Dragon Quest action-adventure game was also shown which could be fun. Other than that it was mostly just a bunch of indie stuff. Some looked neat, but several days later I'm not remembering most of it.
As for that XC3 Direct, I actually haven't watched it yet but probably should.
Outside of Nintendo, Square announced the second part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake series. I think it's a PS5 timed exclusive, as the first one was (the first one was timed full exclusivity for several years, followed by console exclusivity following; it is on PC now.). It has a projected release date of late 2023 and they showed a trailer. I'm obviously far from a series fan, but... well, it's good that it will release sometime vaguely not THAT far off, I guess. The bigger news though is that it mentions the FF7 remake series being a trilogy, which is odd given that apparently the first one only covers a small fraction of the game. Will the remakes completely diverge from the original, merge lots of stuff together, or what? ... and yes, I know that the remake is one of those "it's a remake but it also isn't" things. It will only be in the later ones where people will know how far they go with that, though.