With the real culprit at large and seemingly always one step ahead, players must rely on Delilah, Henry’s supervisor, for the vital intel needed to piece the mystery together.Ĭommunication is just as important in Tacoma, which will see players interrogating an AI on board an abandoned space station with the goal of discovering the fate of its crew. Set in a stylish brightly coloured approximation of Yellowstone National Park, players control a newly appointed forest lookout called Henry who finds himself implicated in the disappearance of two teenage girls. The former is the debut project from Campo Santo, a small ensemble of industry veterans that includes talent from Telltale’s The Walking Dead team.
Though both previously announced, Firewatch and Tacoma were two of the most interesting smaller-scale projects to receive the big stage treatment, both first-person exploration games that stood out for their focus on dialogue and emphatic lack of violence. And as much as an outlet like The Skinny might argue that many of the medium’s best offerings aren’t to be found at glitzy industry shindigs (much like you don’t look to the Grammys for your music recommendations), unique and interesting games were far from scarce at E3 2015. Japanese games also enjoyed their most significant showing this decade: Microsoft announced it’ll be publishing a new game from Megaman director Keiji Inafune, while Sony will be instrumental in resuscitating the cult-favourite Shenmue series, both abating fears of a national industry in decline. It was a tiny glimmer of respite, for instance, to see an improvement in female representation across the board – both within the games themselves and among their creators – following what’s been a gruesome year of targeted hate campaigns against women in the industry. While no such thunderclap shook this year’s conference, there was still plenty to be optimistic about amid the usual monotony of sequels, shooters and smarmy executives. E3 after all, is where the world was introduced to the Nintendo Wii. And yet despite the silliness of it all, there remains a niggling promise that this could be the year you see something truly revolutionary, an idea so genuinely radical that it transcends all the marketing hype bullshit.
Even if the game being exhibited is just a few months from release and thus almost guaranteed to perform as advertised, why not just wait and play it for yourself? Watching an E3 stage demo can sometimes feel like being shown a scene from a film as a set of stills the unnatural display comes nowhere near approximating a first-hand experience with the genuine artifact but is nevertheless sure to undermine the initial impact of the finished work. In a lot of ways it’s profoundly absurd – what value is there, you might ask, in salivating over painstakingly rehearsed snippets of games that are still a way off from being done? Game projects can mutate wildly over the course of development, meaning the demos that accompany E3’s notorious big reveals (games that are years away from completion) are usually speculative prototypes at best.
0 kommentar(er)
