However, one thing was ruined this year. That was E3. Games media has a unique
yearly cycle not shared by other forms of entertainment. There is one week in early
June where about 70% of the big announcements of the year all happen. E3
has been in rapid decline for years. Even in a non-plague year, E3 2020 was going
to be a weird event that was a pale imitation of the last few E3 conventions,
which were themselves pale imitations of the proper megashows of the convention’s
golden years. But even if E3 itself might have sucked; it was a focal point.
Sony was not going to the show proper, but it was going to have announcements around that
time. Now with E3 gone and social distancing ruling the day, the usual rhythm of
gaming news was destroyed. All the shows scattered to the four winds. It’s
early August and we still do not know the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X prices.
I was not really sure if I should really do my usual E3
Reaction post this year considering there wasn’t actually an E3. Generally I'm in a bad mood about the immediate gaming future too. I
have very low hopes for next year and very few big releases seem that exciting to me. I
know good games are coming at some point. Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2 will
probably release around the time I finally bother to review Part 1. But that wasn't announced. Warner Bros. still has not shown anything for the new Batman
game, to my infinite fury. Nintendo slept all summer.
More announcements are coming, sure. But I'm done waiting for what *might* get shown. I'm doing my E3 Reaction Post now. If you have a big game to show, you missed your chance. And in my general bad mood today, I'm going to start off on a bad foot. Here are the games I am not just unexcited for, I am anti-excited for them. Here's all the worst stories of the "E3-ish Season" 2020.
Project Whatever By Square Enix
Why isn’t this Final Fantasy XVI?
I have zero confidence in Project um… Project Althea was it? Project Athena? It is "Project Athia", turns out. I guess Square Enix doesn’t have much confidence in it either or else
they would call it “Final Fantasy XVI”. The trailer looks interesting, but also
looks like vague concept footage for a game that might come out in about eight
years. Hard to get excited, considering.
Square Enix Japan has shifted to mostly using Unreal Engine
like everybody else in the games industry, and since then actually have started
making games. Before that they were making things on their own custom engines
like The White Engine/Crystal Tools, and later The Luminous Engine. Between 2005 and 2015, they shipped all of FIVE full games on those engines, most of them Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels. To get to five I have to count the first version of Final Fantasy XIV, a game so bad that it was erased from history. I’m not at all a
games dev or familiar with engines. There’s definitely impressive tech behind
those engines. Final Fantasy XV is still stunning, prettier than Final Fantasy VII Remake in
a few ways. But Square Enix has had nothing but trouble with its in-house
engines. How did we wait ten years for Versus XIII only to get a different game in the end? Blame those engines.
I do not understand the branding of this either. Project
Athia is not the final title, which is good because I cannot remember it.
Project What Again? For all I know, this will be Final Fantasy XVI one day. But
showing a minute of concept gameplay for a new IP is not a way to get anybody interested
in your new project. Project Whatever looks intriguing. But is it more interesting than Angi’s
Philosophy, the short film Square Enix made to show off The Luminous Engine’s
potential years ago? Hell, the fake game Unreal Engine 5 showed off just recently looks cooler. I want to play that game.
Anyway, if you want any other big news from Square Enix, you
can look into that Avengers game. And that is all I have to say about that Avengers game. It sure exists. So when can we hear about Final Fantasy VII Remake 2?
Halo Infinite and The Sad Gorilla Screenshot
I’m not a Halo guy. I’ve actually never played a Halo game
by choice. I really have no
interest in the adventures of Master Chief or his increasingly hot hologram
robot daughter Cortana. The most I've played of their story is when Cortana sometimes scares the shit out of me when she comes
to life on my Windows PC. Halo was always just what other people were playing
in high school or college. My memories of this whole franchise involve bad
beer, body odor, and absolutely sucking at the multiplayer.
So, if I were to say “Halo Infinite looks bad”, it is not
with the tinge of embittered fanboy bias like you heard with Project Not-FFXVI. I’m saying this with the objective
distance of somebody who doesn’t care. I’m more curious just in the terms of
what a flop reveal this was.
Halo Infinite looks bad. I want to be clear about a few
things here. First off, capital-G Gamers are entitled bitches and some of the
worst people online. Myself included considering my Final Fantasy whining. Secondly, not everything is about cutting edge graphics.
We are basically in an era of graphics where we’ve reached an upper limit of how
technically impressive a game can look. We need to seriously consider whether endlessly expanding graphics tech is worth it. Will Xbox Series X games really look
so much better than Xbox One games? Is that small boost worth the impact on your wallet,
the millions of exploited labor hours, and the environmental damage? If
Halo Infinite were to jump out and proclaim proudly “we’re post-graphics, the
game looks good enough and that’s fine”, that would be a major statement. I would
support that statement. Breath of the Wild was not cutting edge and never
needed to be. It looks great.
But Microsoft is not making that statement. Halo Infinite is a flagship title for a box that will cost you about $600. By that standard it should look amazing, and instead it looks mediocre. It does not look terrible. The sad gorilla screenshot is just out of context, the rest of it looked fine. But Halo Infinite does not look like I want to spend $600 for it. I’ve heard the demo lacked some lighting tech. If a major part of your game's graphics potential is missing from the key reveal just a few months before release, that's bad. Why didn't they just delay the demo? This game might be a real hot fucking mess on release day
There's still time for Halo Infinite. But this game will not look that much better than what you’ve already seen. And anyway, this looks like a Halo-ass Halo game, nothing more. Even beyond graphics there’s very little here that seems revolutionary. It is Halo with a grappling hook. For some that's all it needs to be. For me: so what? Good thing Halo Infinite was not the only game Microsoft gave a really deep look into during its conference…
Except shit, that’s exactly what they did. We didn't see anything real of Fable, Avowed, State of Decay 3, Stalker 2, and honestly, even Everwild. This is the one game coming in the near future and it is unimpressive.
Microsoft did a bad job explaining what Halo Infinite even was. I guess it is open world? It is a Destiny-like? I don't know much of Halo lore but I know Evil Cortana is a thing. Where is she? What Earthly reason is there to buy an Xbox Series X over a PC anyway?
Everything Ubisoft
Yeah, I’m not really an Ubisoft guy either. But where I
mostly ignore Halo now, I have an active hate for most of what Ubisoft makes. I
instinctively hate Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry the way a lot of people
instinctively hate pop music. Are you tired of Taylor Swift? Well, I’m tired of
this same general open world formula over and over. (And Taylor Swift’s new
album is great, so you’re wrong.)
Far Cry 6 looks especially reprehensible. But that's not that far off from the usual nonsense Far Cry
games do. The US just overthrew a democratically-elected government in South America
last year. Already we have a game fantasizing about the standard tropes of
Banana Republics and dictators. I expect nothing less from the company that
made Ghost Recon: Wildlands, a game that imagined Bolivia as a narco state begging
to be invaded by US special forces. That fantasy is a lot less fun when real
South American countries are being destroyed by the CIA, huh? Ubisoft doesn’t
care. The Third World is just a playground for their violence fantasies. I don't get why a company so theoretically uninterested in politics keeps walking up to the line of controversial issues, only to say nothing about them.
The rest of it: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is Assassin’s
Creed but now about that TV show Vikings. Ubisoft tastelessly threw around references
to the Holocaust in their new Watch Dogs Legion trailer. I’ve given up hope that game
will be worth anything. And of course, there is not a peep about Beyond Good
and Evil 2, a game I now believe will never actually come out. Can I at least
see that Breath of the Wild rip-off game you’re making? No?
So yeah, usual terrible slate of games for Ubisoft. I should ignore all this because 1) I’ve said all this before, and 2) people who
are fans of this stuff don’t care. Who am I even preaching to?
But Ubisoft also turned out to be a horror show behind the scenes this year. Just days before their “E3” conference several executives had to resign/be fired from the company due to very public reports of sexual misconduct. That list includes the creator director of Valhalla, Ashraf Ismail. Major company figures are still leaving as yet more bad press comes out.
Thanks to Jason Schreier's Bloomberg reports, we now know that this kind of abuse does
not happen in a vacuum either. The same guys who were abusing their staff were
also creatively lazy and it reflects in their games. They insisted that games
starring women could not sell, so every AssCreed game had to have a boring dude
on the cover (except Bayek, who I’m told was fine). Turns out a boys club at the
top of a corporation is not conducive to making interesting games.
Maybe that’s why we could never get Beyond Good and Evil 2. The higher ups were too busy leering at the young women whose careers they could ruin at a whim to put the work into making an actually-fun space adventure game. I always thought Ubisoft was just a really boring studio run by really boring people. Turns out their games were actually the banality of evil.
Jingle Bells, Batman Smells
Ten years ago, it was a great time to be a Batman fan. We had The Dark Knight, Rocksteady's Arkham games, and even the New 52 Batman comics reboot started great. Then it all fell apart. The Caped Crusader
is at a low point today.
Everybody decided The Dark Knight Rises and Batman: Arkham
Knight were terrible endings to their series. Pun not intended, I’ll go to
bat for them both. I won't go to bat for Batman v Superman, one of the worst movies of the
decade. People love Joker
for some reason, I have no idea what. Maybe they like watching Zazie Beetz
being almost raped for two hours, I sure didn’t. Armond White infamously panned
The Dark Knight in 2008 for being “hipster nihilism”. Maybe he was wrong at the
time, but he sure did accurately predict the future of this franchise. Read his
review again and tell me he not perfectly describe the problems with
Joker, Zack Snyder, and even that gross comic story where the Joker cuts off
his own face.
Lego Batman 2 though? Really great.
Anyway, video games. It has been five years since Batman has
been in anything that isn’t a crossover fighting game. Rocksteady was clearly
done with the franchise after Arkham Knight. Sadly, a lot of gamers agreed with
them. Five years was enough time for people to get hungry again for Halo
after Halo 5 mostly disappointed. I don't see that same hunger for Batman. I feel alone in waiting for the next game.
Last September Warner Bros. Montreal teased some cryptic graphic implying the next Batman game. Usually teases like this come with a big announcement just days later.
Instead I have now waited ELEVEN MOTHERFUCKING MONTHS with no news. This has to be the worst
marketing campaign in gaming history. It makes no sense. Apparently, a trailer is set to come out
August 22nd at Warner Bros. “FanDome” event. But no. You snooze you
lose. You strung me along for the best part of a year without even a peep as to
what you were making. I'm writing this piece now. You get nothing.
Rocksteady, meanwhile, has had all kinds of hype as to what
they were up to. They’re one of the best studios in the industry and they’ve
been radio silent for five years. Whatever it is, it has to be amazing, right? A Superman game? The whole Justice League?
No. It’s Suicide Squad. (fart noise.) A Suicide Squad game that is
rumored to be Games as a Service too. (wet fart noise.) So if you think that
boring Avengers game would have been better with Jai Courtney instead of the
Hulk, here’s your game. I haven’t seen the trailer yet, maybe it’s amazing. To me,
and most people, Suicide Squad just means that terrible movie from 2016. I even
liked that movie – it was a fascinating trash fire at least. But I still have no excitement for a full-ass
Suicide Squad game. Regular audiences loved Suicide Squad so much they skipped
The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn this winter. They were morons,
Birds of Prey ruled. But this is far from a guaranteed hit.
I’ll gladly eat crow on August 22nd if both these games actually look great. However, today, this looks like two swings, two misses.. Plus, considering the opinion of police in this country right now, maybe we actually don't need Batman for awhile.
GhostWire: Tokyo
This is not the same game you showed off last year,
Bethesda. Deathloop looks like the same game and that looks great. GhostWire:
Tokyo is some other game. This is like how Human Head’s Prey 2 turned into Arkane’s
Prey just five years later, which are two games that obviously have nothing to
do with each other. 2019’s GhostWire: Tokyo was this very quiet, sullen horror
game build around ethereal J-horror imagery, and a really tasty bowl of ramen. 2020’s GhostWire: Tokyo is a balls-to-the-wall action FPS game with some Shin Megami Tensei-looking monster designs. You’re
doing like Naruto Jutsu on Slenderman. It is as much related to real J-horror
as DOOM is related to Rosemary’s Baby. And there's no ramen in sight!
The big story of GhostWire: Tokyo is the loss of director Ikumi
Nakamura, AKA the best part of E3 2019. She was that adorable Japanese lady hopping on one foot in excitement for her game. It has been too soon since her
departure to explain such a radical shift in ideas and tone. I believe this game
was going to be an FPS and maybe was going to be more meatheaded than the first
trailer suggested. But I can speculate there was a debate going on behind the scenes.
Bethesda wanted a louder more pop-friendly game, perhaps Nakamura wanted something
weirder and more horror. One side seems to have won this discussion. We’ll probably never
know the real story.
Funny thing is that GhostWire: Tokyo (2019) was too scary for me and I never was going to play that. I could respect it from the background. I can only hope to respect Resident Evil VII or SOMA, games way too frightening for me to finish. GhostWire: Tokyo (2020) actually does look more palatable for me. There is even an outside chance that Ikumi Nakamura’s departure results in an Okami 3. This might have worked out great for me.
One Vagina Option 2077
In theory Cyberupnk 2077 will actually come out in 2020. It is
without a doubt the most anticipated game of the year. I’m looking forward to
it because I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to write 10,000 words after I’m done. I am less hopeful for a game I will enjoy.
Here’s my question for you all: are we more in love with
the idea of Cyberpunk 2077 more than we’re in love with what this game might
actually be? The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of my favorite RPGs of all time. If
you’re writing a list of "5 Most Important Games of the 2010s", you cannot
leave Witcher 3 out. It defined an entire generation of open world gaming. But what if
actually what I loved about Witcher 3 was not the CD Projekt Red park? What if I just really love the source material author, Andrei Sapkowski, and his ideas? You know Geralt, Yennifer, Ciri, and their whole
rich world of political and historical conflicts? CD Projekt Red did not create that. Those things will not be in Cyberpunk 2077. This isn’t
Witcher 4.
I just have not seen anything in this Cyberpunk world that
seems nearly as interesting. There is no authored character. You’re just an
avatar you create yourself. So that makes me sure we will not play a character nearly as interesting as Geralt of Rivia. Also, we will probably not have
relationships that really pull the heartstrings like Witcher 3 had. Complain all you want about too many Games about Dads, but sometimes that works. Geralt finding his daughter Ciri after 40 hours of searching was one of the greatest gaming moments
of the last decade. What in
Cyberpunk can equal that? Witcher 3 made every sidequest a great short
story. That was the Sapkowski Witcher short
stories influecing the projction. Andrei Sapkowski created the moral quandaries, fantasy satire, and interesting twists. CD Projek Red just emuatled him.
Are you sure Cyberpunk 2077’s quests will be as good?
But on the other hand, I really love Kathryn Bigalow’s movie Strange Days. That is a way underrated film. Adding a feature where you can play out the VR movies from that story is an idea at least. Maybe this can be as much weird fun as Johnny Mnemonic. I’m worried Cyberpunk 2077 might end up more like Billy Idol’s embarrassingly bad album, Cyberpunk. You won’t be a hacker hero. You’ll just be a pathetic poser.
Oh, and then there's all the trans issues CD Projekt Red keeps stepping into over and over again. I'm not going to comment on that. It isn't my decision what is offensive to people or not. I will say though that advertising your game as having "One Vagina Option" is goddamned hilarious. I want to start a band and call it "One Vagina Option".
Aeon Must Die!
This is one of the weirdest stories of the year and it keeps
evolving. This might be inaccurate just hours after I post this.
So just the other day Sony had another Direct. Most of the show was
about Pathless, a really great looking game I’ll talk about soon. Then they also focused on Godfall,
a game I think I can safely ignore for the rest of my life. But in between
those events was a slew of trailers. I have been drowning in games trailers for months
now. It is exhausting trying to keep up. Anyway, one of those trailers was for
Aeon Must Die! an indie cartoony beat-up-um with a pretty cool aesthetic. This means it is
one of a billion games just like it. Sadly, not only will you never play all
these games, you will not even remember all of them. There's just too much content.
Except mere minutes after Aeon premiered on the Sony
show, a tweet appeared claiming this game was not what it seemed. You do not need to be a huge company like Ubisoft to be terrible to your workforce. Even the indie scene has horror shows. The events described are so familiar that you know the story already. Quote:
“unbearable work conditions with endless crunch, harassment, abuse, corruption,
and manipulation.”
This is where it gets really confusing.
The reports
say that Aeon Must Die was not merely made on the backs of abused workers, it was stolen. Limestone Games
management seems to be trying to finish the game with scab labor after their entire
workforce left the company. One of the co-founders of the studio is included on
the list of people kicked out, and he’s demanding his share of the ownership. The
details are very fuzzy, but it seems the people who actually made this game are
getting their credit of the finished product. Workers have not been paid, the
IP’s ownership is unclear, and twelve people now have uncertain futures. Even I cannot fully follow the story. I can't tell if the employees all quit or were fired. I’m not even clear who made this
trailer. It is also vague what role the publisher, Focus Home Interactive, had
in the events. They’ve been accused of ignoring complaints sent by Limestone’s
abused employees. Then they allegely worked with management to see that those employees were fired.
Obviously, Sony shouldn’t have given this game the highlight it got. Whether this story is all true or just a few disgruntled ex-employees, I don’t know. But this is not the shitstorm to step into, is it?
The real
tragic part is not how unique this story is, but how common. Forget the weird
details of a game being stolen from the people making it. The crunch and abuse
part of the story are just daily news now if you follow gaming.
What a hobby sometimes, man.
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