E3 2019 - Bethesda

A rosy, chirpy, player-praising montage starts the show and I quickly realise I've seen this before. From EA, from Microsoft, probably Ubisoft and Sony at some point as well. It's the "we fucked up" intro. The "look how human and likeable we are, please trust us and give us money again" opening pitch. It even ends with a cliched "We are you and we are all Bethesda" which to me just sounds like you're trying to rope us into being culpable for your mistakes.

Unless you have an amazing beard I don't care. Don't @ me.

It's the man with the lines, Pete Hines who has shrewdly integrated himself into the audience for his entrance making it harder for snipers to catch him. He spouts many lines that mean very little before introducing the priority target Todd Howard who is frustratingly honest and frank about the colossal fuck up of Fallout 76. He also claims it has recovered into a large and lively community which I can neither confirm or deny but it's certainly the first I've heard of it.

Todd dodges off stage and we're told about the success of Elder Scrolls: Blades. The mobile game that was shown last year and is now apparently coming to Nintendo Switch...for "free".

Two expendable human shields arrive on stage to make ill-advised further statements about Fallout 76. "You've told us how much you've loved this year's updates" Have you? Can anyone fact-check this?

The audience members certainly seem hopped up on something as they scream and woop at the announcement of features that should've been in the game at launch. NPCs, story questlines and "dialogue trees" as opposed to whatever people were occupying their time with before. Presumably stockpiling ordinance in an attempt to entertain themselves by crashing the servers.

Apparently having sunk too much into it to cut their losses, the game is desperately pushed further with a free trial for the week of E3. A man I'm now dubbing Presumpty-Dumpty claims "Because so many of you will be joining us, we'll give you a sneak peek at a new game mode."

Remember when games just had modes and they weren't their own separate piecemeal announcement every time?

It's Battle Royale because of course it's sodding Battle Royale and these chucklefucks keep using the word "free" when we know damn well these things are lined with more microtransactions than the games have bugs. I'm either being unreasonably cynical or there's a lot of sneaky appeasement, underhanded tomfuckery going on here.

Next Shinji Mikami appears and introduces a new game's creative director, an incredibly earnestly cheerful and nervous petite Asian lady. Putting the least hateable person Bethesda could find on stage after banging on about Fallout 76 for over twenty minutes.

The game itself "Ghostwire Tokyo" involves the mystery of people disappearing, as you might imagine, in Tokyo. We don't actually see any gameplay so almost all impressions are still up in the air. This combined with the company's mixed output of a messy Evil Within 1 and an astonishingly improved Evil Within 2 also leaves the fate of this new title hard to predict.

Another featurette of the oh-so human people of Bethesda talking about their personal lives and how they have hopes and dreams and children and kneecaps just like you. The defensiveness is thick in the air and these personable emotionally manipulative tactics are starting to irk me. It's basically what EA was doing except they're trying to convince us they're not arseholes instead of emotionless synthetics.

Or maybe they really are just showing off members of their company because they think we care. In which case, I don't, get on with the presentation please.

The Elder Scrolls Online gets a lengthy and expensive looking cinematic trailer of different classes fighting a dragon. I'm repeating myself but this CG trailer tells us very little and I'm highly sceptical the fancy choreography in the sequence will be at all recreatable in the game.

Dragons are quickly becoming the new zombies
and not in a cool undead kind of way.

This fairly underwhelming segment brings up a more interesting question as to the hollering fuckwads in the audience. At this point, basically relentless in their screams and actually disrupting the speakers on stage with their "enthusiasm."

I try to avoid news and opinions until I've written these but I couldn't help notice the spreading suspicion of "paid actors" or "plants" in the audience. Designed to make this presentation seem far more positive than the genuine audience reactions would.

A less conspiracy theory-esque take is that these people are actually trying to appear fake and/or disrupt the presentation through high-volume sarcasm. I don't imagine you'd be allowed in the room long for actual heckles and jeers but no one can blame you for unrealistically enthusiastic praise right?

I mean I guess these look like real people.

The latter is just my take so maybe it's more outlandish than the former but the main take away is that pondering this was.more interesting than anything happening on stage.

This remained true for a horribly cringey new entrant, quoting Monty Python as though it were never done before and putting on her best Disney voice. The Commander Keen game associated was at least tonally consistent in that it was an insufferable, cartoon mobile game I would like to never see again.

Unfortunately for me, Pete Hines returns to put words in my mouth about "loving mobile games" and we're subjected to a live action trailer for Elder Scrolls: Legends. A mobile card game and latest entry into the growing series of franchise fringe titles. Outskirt spin offs designed to distract you and keep sucking at your wallet while you wait for the mainline title and the only game you actually wanted in the first place.

I'd like to file a Cease and Desist against my own higher brain functions.

Moving on, the desperate to be quirky and funny Rage 2 makes an appearance I rather wish it hadn't. Deathloop is a new FPS based around time-loops with two opposing main characters. The trailer was very stylish and conceptually intriguing but again, purely CG. The devs on stage getting giddy about saying "fuck" doesn't fill me with confidence though.

Bafflingly we're back to the diary room with seemingly every bloody Bethesda employee who've nothing but glowing recommendations and praise for the company. I'm not sure if they're trying to convince us or recruit us at this point but it's as superfluous as the first round.

Some guys from ID software wax lyrical and boast about their achievements before introducing Orion. A thing that makes streaming games better. Something that also cannot be accurately quantified at all on an E3 stage and thus is a waste of time at best and outright lies at worst.

Finally a trailer and demo for Doom Eternal plays which looks solid if a little too similar for a sequel. We're told about interesting new environments but aren't allowed to see them and Mr. Doomguy Slayer now makes battle grunts upon taking damage which feels unnecessary and distracting for a supposed ungodly strong super soldier. I guess they're saving anything more noteworthy for their beloved Quakercon. 

"Oof" - The Doomslayer.

A trailer for the "all new multiplayer" follows while I try to remember what I got my arse handed to me in if it wasn't the multiplayer of Doom 2016. The show then closes with yet more of its schmaltzy inspirational docudrivel claiming "You are the heroes" and other patronising insincerities. The choice of music with the lyrics "when I tell you to jump, you say how high?" also doesn't help alleviate this sense of backhanded grovelling present throughout.

So did anything other than Doom, riding off its predecessor's coattails, appeal or seem interesting the entire conference? Not really. Even despite the elongated staring at it for this write-up, if you asked me again tomorrow, I think i'll have forgotten most of it.

I expected Bethesda to be in full damage control mode this year but the way they went about it has actually done nothing to foster any goodwill towards them. Deviously worded statements to shift responsibility, straight up potentially false claims on player engagement, emotionally manipulative yet ineffective employee b-roll and whatever the hell was going on with the audience.

If I give the benefit of the doubt maybe it wasn't all as insidious as it seemed but regardless of that it also wasn't very enjoyable or exciting, which is the bottom line really. Given the IPs at their disposal, I feel like it took effort to be this much of a flat-line.

-thy source of expendable income."