Playstation Conference: E3 Of Dreams 2.0? Or Flop?

     Sony has officially killed it yet again when it comes to E3, absolutely killed it. While the games were a lot more powerful last year, everything else about this conference was amazing. From the pacing, to the lack of unneeded information that would have otherwise just bloated the time that the conference was on. Not a single speaker stayed on stage longer than was needed to get the message across to the audience. 

     It literally started with a bang of orchestral renditions of music for the first trailer which was God Of War. In the past, God of War was a game that felt one dimensional, not only with gameplay, but with character depth and development, but this game feels head and shoulders above those that came before, and it is exciting. Immediately after the amazing showing of God Of War, they finally revealed the new game being developed by the Sony Bend studio, after a number of years, and after a coy trailer they swiftly moved onto a new trailer for Last Guardian. This trailer not only introduced new aspects to this game but they also showed the existence of dialogue, and the date of realease for this title is 26 October 2016. 

     The pacing to this presentation was unreal, and to continue to follow that trend they led directly into a new gameplay segment of Horizon: Zero Dawn. This time it was decided to show a bit more of the other aspects of the game such as the character interactions, and missions that you can partake in which seem to happen organically in and around the character in a way that feels natural. The lead-ins into the games were smooth and fit well with what they showed and at the perfect length so as not for anything to outstay its welcome. After an interesting gameplay segment for the game Detroit: Become Human, which showed the way that the different paths you could take branched off and giving the hint towards the different character stories that they could be sectioned off, they moved swiftly onto VR. 

     Apparently they learned from their mistakes with showing VR in previous years and made a damn good showing of it, that felt less forced and created a feeling that VR can be interesting. The first game that was shown was a bit of a bit of a trick on the part of Sony and Capcom where they used a demo called 'The Kitchen' which was a roundabout way for them to reveal Resident Evil 7, which seems to be following its horror roots while also seemingly keeping parts of the more recent entries. While this game is shown during the VR portion, it is not exclusively a VR game, it just has a mode where you can play the whole game in VR mode. The other VR demos were mostly short and sweet trailers that showed what they needed and went away, which kept the pace high, and the release date for the PSVR is 13 October 2016, for $399.00.

     The rest of the conference was just as fast and game focused as it was earlier in the conference, and when there was talking it was to the point and quick,not wasting anytime with double talk or jargon, just talking about the game, showing the game and moving on. Crash Bandicoot is getting the first three games in the series fully remastered, while also being put into the newest Skylanders game. Call Of Duty made an appearance, and it wasn't its typically overblown self absorbed presentation that spent too much time preening itself, and for once in a decent while it looked good. Then the conference decided to end with a bang Kojima Hideo appeared on-stage and showed an in-engine trailer for something called 'Death Stranding' which starred Norman Reedus, and looked to be in amazing form once again, tech, and idea wise for Kojima-san. And as a last hoorah they decided to show a gameplay trailer for the Sony Bend game 'Days Gone' which seems to be an open world zombie sort of post apocalypse third person game which looks quite good. In conclusion, it can be said with an amount of confidence, that Sony has once again taken E3 by storm, not even Bethesda could compete this time, Sony has unequivocally proven that they understand the way to get their message across in the most positive way possible. If this is the trend Sony is going to follow, then it is exciting to see where they go from here.