E3 2017 - events starting Saturday 6/10

[A Black Falcon]

Bethesda's conference just finished. I'm generally critical of them of course, but they do own id and their main focus this year was on... a new Wolfenstein game, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. It's from the developers of the highly regarded Wolf game from a few years ago and looks pretty good. The visuals are good of course, but the gameplay looks good. This time the game is set in an America conquered by the Nazis (the last game was set in Europe), and you need to help defeat the Nazis here. That sounds serious, but the trailer is weird in an interesting and amusing way. The art design, silly writing and story, and more are pretty good. Watch the video of the game, it's well worth it. From the Nazi-propaganda fake-TV shows to the ingame cutscenes this game may be doing something that has been done before, but it's having fun with it. The silliness within a serious franchise, Nazi robots to destroy, and all have long been some of my favorite things about the Wolfenstein franchise, and this one looks good. The title intrigues me too; "The New Colossus" is of course the title of the famous poem written for the Statue of Liberty, which goes "send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and such, and was written by a Jewish woman in the late 1800s. The game is about a rebellion against the Nazi occupiers so it could just be a reference to the obvious (freedom, America, etc.) but will it be any more than that? And even if it's unintentional I can't help but think of at least a few modern political issues this makes you think of...

Other than that, this conference was pretty much just a video, there were almost no elements on the stage. Wolfenstein II was the highlight but they also showed some new Dishonored 2 thing, some footage of Skyrim for the Switch including Amiibo support (scan the Link amiibo and you get his outfit in the game or something, I'd need to watch it again), several VR projects (VR, something conspicuously absent from MS's conference) for Doom and Fallout 4, little bits about their card game Elder Scrolls Legends, some new content for The Elder Scrolls Online, and maybe a bit more. Decent conference overall, and short too at only 40-ish minutes. Decent for a Bethesda conference, I guess.