E3 2016 - Bethesda

Of the secondary tier of conferences at E3 alongside EA and Ubisoft, Bethesda was the undisputed winner last year thanks to down to earth speeches and plenty of game footage. This year they kick off with a new Quake title, an arena shooter FPS called Quake Champions.

Unsurprisingly after the success of the new Doom, which returned to a retro shooter style reminiscent of its 1993 original, this game will likely copy that style (also like its progenitor from 1996) capitalising on the frenetic, fast paced, less realistic play-style that has gone full circle and become refreshing again for people tired of grounded, cover-based shooters.

The CG trailer finishes and a budget Wilson Fisk arrives on stage to fully announce Quake Champions with technical specs like 120Hz and unlocked framerate which I can only guess is impressive judging by the crowd reaction. Then again by the end of this conference, judging by the crowd reaction would be like trying to jet ski on jellyfish wrapped around your feet. Ambiguous and potentially dangerous.

It's called "Rabbit In A Shitshow".

Bargain Bin Kingpin goes on to connect Quake with E-sports and competitive gaming which seems to be a big push for everyone this year. He makes a point to describe the game using words like "classic" and "fast" but disappointingly no actual gameplay is shown.

Next comes Pete Hines looking like he's got a head inside his head trying to get out. He talks about Bethesda's recent successes like Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout Shelter, Fallout 4 and Doom. My only criticism here is actually the crowd making obnoxious grunts and dog noises like "bros" at a sports match or something. Even EA didn't have that and half of their entire conference was sports.

This walk down memory lane also serves as a hype-ramp into future announcements, so what a flaccid anti-climax it is to hear about Elder Scrolls: Legends again. The strategy card game no one asked for. A cinematic trailer for the card game's "story mode" (which is a sentence I still don't fully understand) tries to introduce some characters before dramatically crashing to a black screen for ten seconds in the middle of it.

Peak Times continues to talk about the game with some possible gameplay footage showing behind him. It's difficult to determine what is gameplay when it revolves around staring at a virtual desk but he announces the game is also coming to mobiles and tablets which I guess makes sense.

Card games are fine, Video games are great. Combined though I just don't see the point.

Next up Bethesda Director and Teen Heartthrob Award Todd Howard thanks fans for making Fallout 4 such a success and introduces new add-ons to the game.

These include elevators, armour and weapon racks, conveyor belts and "track kits" which are essentially Marble Run style slides and flumes. Having not played the game this feels more like the components to building a factory at this point but presumably they can be used for traps and shelter defences.

This is furthered by a new feature of being able to build your own vault, seemingly blurring the line between Fallout 4 and Shelter. Speaking of which, will also get an upgrade with new locations, enemies, characters and combat system as well as being announced on PC as of July 2016.

I haven't seen gleeful sadism like this since Timesplitter's body-inflating dart gun.

"There is something else that you've been asking us about." Says Matthew Mccushionghey before a trailer for a remastered Skyrim plays and my only thought is "Who exactly was asking them about this and why?"

Well putting aside the fact that a remaster is almost always an inferior announcement to a brand new entry in a series, there are multiple problems with remastering Skyrim. Firstly it's the most recent game so there will be less of a contrast between graphics of last generation and this generation. Surely choosing an older game would emphasise the progress made since then with a far more significant contrast?

Secondly, by remastering an older game you get to revive its accessibility. Many new players (myself included) only began playing The Elder Scrolls series with Skyrim so to introduce players to some of the great prior games in the series can only be a good thing surely?

And thirdly epic RPG's like Skyrim often have players sink hundreds if not thousands of hours into them. Making all their progress essentially obsolete with a remaster doesn't make buying the touched-up version all too appealing.

But of course, remastering any of the older games also requires more work so just forget all those benefits I guess. The crowd at the conference seems pretty excited so I guess I'm in the minority on this one.

I won't pretend it doesn't look amazing, I just think there were better choices.

Next the reformed Niko Bellic steps on stage to talk about Dishonoured. Although rather than the expected Dishonoured 2, he announces a new game from Arcane Studios called Prey. A futuristic FPS with supernatural elements and psychological themes somewhere between Dead Space and Soma. Due for release sometime next year on Xbox One, PS4 and PC and despite a seemingly purely cinematic trailer, the setting and plot is very intriguing and Prey is a solid addition to the conference.

Noah Bennet from Heroes appears on screen to continue talking about Doom's success. It's grating at this point but at least Bethesda makes the point of thanking the fans and the talk does eventually progress to something worthwhile. Namely the whole host of features, maps, weapons and game modes being added soon, most of which are completely free which is hard to make any criticism of really..

Jack Coleman leaves and Bee Hives returns to announce a demo of Doom's first level arriving on all current gen platforms but for some reason, only for a week...That kind of stifles the good will attitude to be honest. Is it really such a huge business loss to just let people play the first level indefinitely?

He also claims "youngsters" call demos "shareware" now...Is that true? I still call them demos but I'm young, I am still young right? Shit! Are demos old fuddy duddy language now?

"I remember when a blowjob was what you did just to get the game cartridge working."

Continuing to impose quarter-life-crisis dread on me is the E3 crowd, as the game director for The Elder Scrolls Online appears. The deformed dog-seal grunts and barks return in force along with piercing sustained banshee wails and I begin to wonder if I'm watching E3 or the fucking X-Factor.

Speaking of meaningless dead air, game director Matt Firor continues to sing ESO's praises with it's 7 million players and other grand statistics emblazoned across a trailer for a game that's already out. I guess you'd call it a highlights reel or perhaps a porno since this conference is starting to feel so masturbatory.

The now intensely punchable crowd continues screaming at the stage until Matt finally announces something properly. A Dark Brotherhood DLC releasing...well, today actually. A trailer shows a lot of backstabbing and grim talk just as you'd expect but the crowd must have not expected that because they lose their little minds all over again.

A more technical update called "One Tamriel" is announced which, from what I can gather, connects all the players in the world with "no level restrictions" or "content barriers" and apparently that's never been done in a multi-platform MMORPG before. Which probably explains why I've had no interest in the genre as arbitrary content barriers seem like a stupid idea in the first place. Regardless, the audience yet again goes apeshit about the news.

Maybe they just really like this guy...

Moving on, Beate Rimes returns to explain how Bethesda too is trying to screw with the E3 conference formula as much as possible by having an after-party where the already raucous crowd can get shitfaced and watch Blink 182, who might be the first thing this audience didn't go rabid-dog insane for.

Bethesda steps into the Virtual Reality ring by announcing Fallout 4 and Doom to support VR capabilities, siding with the ludicrously expensive HTC Vive. We then bounce over to some kind of pre show-post show buffer commentators who make some bad jokes and then threaten to inflict them on game developers in interviews after the conference.

To close the show, oddly separated from the studio's earlier segment we hear from Arcane Studios again, this time, they are talking about Dishonoured 2. A clean-shaven, sleep-deprived David O'Doherty arrives to premier the gameplay footage. Footage that at first consists only of sweeping views around the game's environments but granted, they look visually impressive and his talk about the detail the city will have and the natural, interruptable behaviour of the NPC's sounds good too.

I'm going to describe the walkthrough overall because to stop and start as many times as this segment did would just be annoying. So the game has two playable protagonists, Corvo Attano from the first game and Emily Caldwin, the woman seen in last year's cinematic trailer. The walkthrough shows an area called the Dust District which naturally is plagued by dust storms that affect your visibility and the enemies'. We see some of Emily's supernatural powers and the creative traps and distractions you can create with their combinations.

Daybed O'Coffeetea talks about the wide array of choice the game will have in how you complete the missions. Stealth or action, lethal or non-lethal, with the latter presumably having some implication on the story or perhaps just whether guards can wake their colleagues up.

Another level displays time-travelling abilities between past and present versions of a level. Gimmicky perhaps but what looked like a fun feature for just one of the levels. The diverse and choice-oriented gameplay, tactical use of gadgets, supernatural abilities and weapons, plus the enchanting steampunk aesthetic makes Dishonoured 2 a potentially fantastic sequel and I haven't even played the first one.

Plus the time-travel doohickey itself looks cool as hell.

Things finish with Dishonoured 2's release date of November 11th 2016 and a gameplay trailer showing mostly what we just saw. Pete Finds himself back on stage and after a lot of thanking all the developers and bigging up their after-party shenanigans, the conference comes to a close.

Bethesda was never going to match the quality of last year's conference but they could have done without congratulating themselves on everything for the majority of this one. That said, what seems like some undeniably good content and games are on the way and had they employed snipers to take out those knuckle-dragging neandafucks in the audience I would consider Bethesda winners already...