For as many interesting and new games that e3 revealed this week--roughly six or so?--it may not be as family friend or even interesting as the expo would like to think of itself. While certain things have been toned down, like gratuitous usage of booth babes, there are still epic displays of real-life Warthogs from Halo and more than a few games focusing on head smashing and zombie killing.
Which was enough for Kris Gaft from Gamasutra.
"E3 2012 was finally the E3 of my disillusionment with the so-called triple-A video game industry. And yes, it really did take this long."
Rather than write about what a "triple-A video game industry" event had to offer, Gaft took out a red pen and slashed away at everything e3 claimed to stand for, pointing out the more than obvious fact that the games were evolving to become gorier without a purpose. Dancing games and following multi-colored equivalents of Lemmings around doesnt really excuse lowering other titles to the lowest common demonator.
"If you witnessed E3 as an intelligent enthusiast of video games, you realized the sad truth: The joy is dead, delight is gone. Joy and delight just aren't worth the monetary investment anymore for big-budget games. Joy and delight are replaced by 'I fucked your shit up, and I'm a bad-ass, let's crack open a Dew.' It took all of these games in one place for me to finally, reluctantly, admit that this is what triple-A video games are now."
It's entirely an editorial condemning the conference, the attendees and the developers. But it's certainly more cohesive than the best responses that Reddit has to offer.
On the video end, Adam Sessler, sporting a not-so-wrong-nor-ironic shirt, broke down his three take-aways from this year's conference. The main one: Nintendo not really sure what they're doing with the WiiU, even if it could be interesting. But maybe you're angry with how EA treated their releases, from the compound bow in Crysis 3 being "day one DLC" to Battlefield Premium forcing you to get multiple DLC packs just to complete the game.
Well, there's always this:
Even better, did you know most of what was shown this year at e3 is PC compatable! After all, the folks at Rock Paper Shotgun sure did, since major titles like Watch Dogs, The Last of Us and Far Cry 3 were all high performance PC with an Xbox 360 Controller.
"It is, to be perfectly honest, fairly, well, dishonest. Demoing your game on PC is the new CG trailer. Once again, these demos aren't representative of what console players will be seeing, but oooo, look at the pretty particle effects, perfect frame rate, individually rendered hair follicles, and no aliasing anywhere ever. Is it sketchy? Absolutely. But PC hardware's so advanced that I almost find it funny when people at these events complain about the lack of a "next generation." Look in front of you. It's already here."
Farewell, e3! You were fun. We laughed, we cried and a booth babe even saved someone's life.Yet we'll still come back next year.
