Today at Sony’s PlayStation E3 press conference, they showed off a handful of games including The Last of Us Part 2, some more Spider-Man, and the gorgeous-looking Ghost of Tsushima. They also announced Nioh 2. Good day for samurai games!
The show was logistically odd, as attendees were herded through a couple of different locations while the hosts on the stream vamped for time. It was also light on major announcements, but they did show some nice-looking games and took breaks for a couple of lovely musical interludes.
First up, they showed a bunch more The Last of Us Part 2.
The whole thing was introduced by composer Gustavo Santaolalla playing his Last of Us theme on a six-string banjo. It was neat.
We got to see teenage/20-something Ellie hanging out at a friendly gathering and kissing her girlfriend, before a dramatic cut to her killing the shit out of some dudes in a darkened wood.
What followed was a pretty standard video game stealth sequence, albeit one with the absurd, probably unhealthy level of polish we’ve all come to expect from Naughty Dog games. (Also, side note, Ellie went prone while sneaking, indicating this will be a crouch/run/prone stealth game instead of a crouch/run game. I’m sure you were wondering.)
So basically this demo went: Sweet dancing scene, nice kiss, extremely gnarly murder fest, end on some nice kissing. This game is going to be a lot.
Next came Ghost of Tsushima, an open-world samurai game.
This demo started with a dude on stage absolutely shredding on the shakuhachi, which was fantastic and not something I was expecting to see at E3.
As for the game: The Witcher vibes were strong with this one, which is being developed by Infamous studio Sucker Punch. The demo depicted a character making his way through war-torn feudal Japan, with the kind of sword fighting and sneaking you would expect.
Damn, though. It was really nice-looking. Like, wow. Leaves.
Control is a third-person game from Remedy.
It looked pretty wild, and given that it’s made by the folks behind Max Payne, Alan Wake and most recently Quantum Break, I will play it.
We got a look at the Resident Evil 2 remaster.
It looks nice, though I’ll admit I didn’t even play the remaster of the first one. It’s coming out on 25 January 2019.
We got another look at Kingdom Hearts 3‘s Pirates of the Caribbean world.
I feel like I’ve seen so many minimal-context snippets of this game at various press conferences over the last two days that I have no idea what it even is any more. Does anyone? Does anyone know what Kingdom Hearts 3 is? I’m not sure anyone does. Anyway! Here’s CGI Jack Sparrow!
Death Stranding: It’s still weird!
Hideo Kojima’s weird-arse sci-fi/horror/I-don’t-know-what game still looks wild, and like the sort of thing that will continue to be weird right up to and probably well after it finally comes out and I finally play it. Makes sense, since this game seems as though it’s gonna involve a lot of time-shifting fuckery.
Nioh 2! Fuck yeah!
I’m psyched about this. Super psyched! I need to finish the first game. But I don’t care! I will still play this. OK, I think I worked through my excitement just then. Thank you for sharing this experience with me.
Spider-Man looks great and I want to play it, too.
That’s the point of these press conferences, right? To make us want to play a certain video game? If so, mission accomplished re: Spider-Man.
Sony’s big stage show ended with Insomniac’s Spider-Man, which is coming out in September. The sequence they showed had a prison break featuring a whole bunch of Spidey’s most famous enemies, as well as some outrageously expensive-looking setpieces and action sequences.
Last but not least, FromSoftware is making… a PSVR game!
Filed under “things I was not expecting From to announce at Sony’s E3 press conference” is Déraciné, a PSVR game that is apparently a big departure from their other games.
A Few Other Things: People who pre-order Black Ops 4 will get some free maps for Black Ops 3, and if you have a PlayStation Plus subscription you get Black Ops 3 as a free download today; we saw a short Destiny 2: Forsaken trailer indicating Cayde-6 is gonna get shot, or killed, or “killed” and then you spend the campaign bringing him back from the dead. They also showed a platformer called Trover Saves the Universe from Rick and Morty‘s Jostin Roiland for PS4 and PSVR.
And that’s that! No big surprises at Sony’s show, but it sure has been a good E3 for samurai stuff.
Only one more E3 conference until we can all go walk around outside and not think about video games for a week… wait, no, I mean one more press conference until the expo floor opens and we can go play these games, talk to the people making them, and chase news until we catch it and train it to fetch us our slippers in the morning. Stick around, because E3 is just getting started.
Comments
45 responses to “Everything Sony Showed At E3 2018”
What a weird conference
I play Xbox but I raced home to watch the Sony conference.
Was super impressed by how beautiful the Last of Us: Part II gameplay was and how awesome the story and gameplay looked in Death Stranding even though it was spooky as shit. 😀
Overall however I was quite disappointed, I was hoping Sony would have way more to show the fans than what they did. I know people are fed up at times with sequels but honestly, if you’re looking for numbers surely you can revisit your roots and draw up new titles? Surely throwing in a Crash Bandicoot, Final Fantasy, Spyro game or what have you would have drummed up hype amongst the fanbase super easily. They definitely showed that they are working on huge story based titles but all in all it just felt like they didn’t have much they wanted to or could announce and it left the conference feeling a bit half assed.
Hopefully in the coming months PS players will see some more details on their favourite titles and have a bunch more to look forward to.
New IP is the highlight of Sony’s consoles, always has been. Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Bloodborne, God of War, Nioh, Demon’s Souls, Until Dawn, Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian, Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter. They all don’t have a number after them, Sony starts new IPs, that’s what’s exciting about them.
That was an utter waste of fucking time
Telling part was when the Twitch stream crashed – there was about 245,000 people watching, after the crash resumed there was barely more than 65-70,000 for the remaining 45 minutes
It was an arrogant wank fest from a company that is far too comfortable in its position
it did feel a bit like that didn’t it. They showed a few games and explained absolutely nothing
I dont think its a good idea about 15 minutes into your conference to take an “intermission” for 15 minutes to get people to another set. In theory great idea, but it made for boring TV. Those guys at the panel were struggling to fill in time. They should have used the time better to show more trailers etc… I dunno after last years announcement fest I think i expected too much
Also the little Dreams interstitials were the absolute highlight.
Yeah that was a bit stupid – moving people around I mean.
I remember looking at the clock about 25 minutes after the presentation started, and the only game they had actually showed at that point was TLOU2. 25 minutes in, 1 game. Snorefest.
No wonder they lost so many viewers when the stream crashed not too long after that. Granted some of them may have jumped over to the youtube stream (which wasn’t great either, it had annoying audio issues) but it still tells a story. Viewers wanted to see games. Microsoft’s presentation wasn’t great either but at least they understood people wanted to see games.
RE2 isn’t a simple remaster. A remaster is taking the original game and giving it a new coat of paint. This is a complete *remake*. It’s being completely redone from the ground up.
That’s about the only thing I found kinda cool during that presentation though, the rest of it was pretty meh to me. I have a PS4, I was looking forward to seeing some new games announced, but it wasn’t much at all. Also why do Samurais speak English?
That was off-putting for me with Ghost… as well. The main ‘good’ characters have American accents but the ‘bad’ guys have thick heavy Asian-American accents? Maybe I’m just not feeling it because I really struggle getting into any game in the Far-East. Still, it looks beautiful
I’d rather watch what is going on, than read subtitles.
Death Stranding stuff was off the chain.
The Last of Us 2 looked off the chain.
That banjo was off the chain.
That flute was off the chain.
Control , ditto.
Spiderman looked pretty good too, for a game I normally wouldn’t care about.
Ghosts – It’s a ubisoft game so I probably won’t get it, but the combat looked kind of dull.
My head is still spinning from the Bethesda conference which was all, “Hey, here’s tons of Prey stuff” but also, Doom 2, TES VI and Starfield all confirmed. Man!
Sony, don’t open a conference ever again in a barn with terrible lighting and acoustics and then put your conference on hold for 20 minutes while you shuffled everyone else into another venue
I think the lack of new major announcements is more an indication that people are winding down this gen and starting to work on next gen games. Todd Howard said that the technology for ES6 is ‘almost here’ so within a couple of years hopefully we’ll see new consoles and full on 4k 60fps gaming, although someone will probably pipe up and complain that consoles can’t play 8k res @ 120fps…
Hearing some of crowd go nuts when the two girls kissed in TLOU:2 start made me roll my eyes…
I’m all for inclusiveness, but it felt very much unnatural and just a marketing tactic… Felt very much a “look we have a lesbian in our game, aren’t we cool for doing it”…
already was a lesbian due to left behind.
Well, they developed that aspect of the Ellie character quite a long time ago.
But yeah i agree – making a big point of it like that comes across as being very contrived.
What if that scene was Joel kissing his wife? Would that be “contrived”?
accurate
Joel has gotten married since TLOS1?
We haven’t seen anything of Joel. Ellie is the main character and the trailer established she is in a relationship. Joel could be living like Gaius Caligula surrounded by domesticated clicker gardeners for all we know.
I am using the situation of a male protagonist having a central love interest as a point of comparison for those that don’t like seeing two women kiss.
Anything with anything not straight is forced and uncomfortable for you. People celebrating games opening up with different stories is bad. Got it.
I don’t mind it at all and acceptance of everyone is a must. BUT, I kinda get where they are coming from. Roughly 3% (or something like that) of people are actually gay yet its the new cool thing to make sure there is a gay character in every show, movie and game. Its not as common as we think
The main character in the video game is gay.
I get where you are coming from but her preference was hinted at in the first one. Relationships were the basis of the original, the father daughter stuff between Joel and Ellie, Joel and what’s her name.
Charectar relationships are a huge part of the game. For me the original was a story with a game thrown in.
I don’t see in the second why they shouldn’t be charectar and relationship driven and it is what made so much of the first.
The trailer just shows that she has matured and moved on. Plus the animation is brilliant so there is also showing off that work. A kiss is a hard thing to animate.
Actually it’s more like 5%, and closer to 20% have some degree of attraction to the same sex. Take a small city of 2 million population, statistically at the very least you have 50 thousand gay people there. 1 in 20, If you’re any kind of normal person, you are guaranteed to know someone who is. They ARE as common as we think, and they DO need more representation, positive representation, not false stereotypes. Ellie isn’t a stereotype, and we sure as SHIT don’t get many LGBT characters in games. You know what else? There’s always goddamn lesbians too, because it’s the safe option, we need more gay males in media.
Lets not argue percentages because i could easily refute those figures just as you have mine. Either way they easily a minority and why would you choose to cater towards a minority? Because its the ‘cool’ or ‘in’ thing to be doing. They are extremely well represented in my mind.
Let me reinforce that i don’t mind seeing it all, but when i saw the video i just thought ‘wow, another lesbian character in a tv show, movie or game’ … it was a little eye roll worthy. And as you so beautifully put, off course it was a lesbian.
If they are extremely well represented in your mind, then your mind is wrong. You clearly don’t understand why it is important for everybody, not just LGBT themselves, that there is sufficient representation. It’s not catering to a minority, it’s catering to society and the progression thereof. Maybe you really don’t know a single gay person and so have a total outsiders perspective, but things look different when it affects yourself or those you know and care about. There is obviously still so so much progress to make, in the levels of representation as well as how they are represented, particularly in games, romance options in some RPGs is nowhere near enough.
No, you’re wrong…. Good argument
I know many of them, please don’t speculate your argument either.
How many games were “gritty third person action / stealth” games?
I love me some Sony but I would’ve liked a bit more variety. Bring on Nintendo next and I really hope they don’t disappoint because this has been a fairly weak E3.
I was disappointed in The Last of Us 2 showing. Gameplay looked the same as 1, which is fine and to be expected. The story however lacked any sort of emotion. Ellie’s at a party, then makes out with some woman. There wasn’t really anything to it. I didn’t expect any sort of major spoilers, but I did expect some sort of hint at direction. Worse, the trailer seemed to only care about showing how badass Ellie was. The original game also had trailers showing Joel killing a lot of people, but the focus was more on the brutality of the world than his skill, which I didn’t feel this one really captured.They said they only wanted to do another TLoU if they had a story to tell, but if the story is only how cool Ellie is then that seems a bit boring.
Maybe I’m just been too cynical. Here’s hoping it’s as amazing as the first.
The party itself seemed out of place in the whole TLOU universe to be honest.
During the first game I never got the impression that characters in the post-outbreak world TLOU takes place in would take time out to have a party. I mean, obviously the survivors need to find a way to have fun occasionally somehow…but…these guys are trying to survive. The world is falling apart around them, and it’s not just the Clickers they need to worry about. Supplies are low. Some people in more remote areas have resorted to cannibalism. The survivors live in run-down buildings that could fall apart at any moment. They lose friends and family every day. But here, they are dancing in a nicely decorated building and don’t seem to care about what’s going on outside. It all just struck me as very out of place.
In fact, when the trailer first started and I saw this scene, I was actually second guessing myself for a while – “Wait, I thought this was TLOU2? It looks like a different game. Are Naughty Dog working on another new game? What is it? Oh…this *is* TLOU2? But it doesn’t look right…”
Is it not possible that a group of people are in a situation where they feel relatively safe and actually want to do something to bring about a bit of joy? It’s a bit narrow-minded to think they can’t have any fun in their world. Ellie told jokes and read comics in TLOU. Why not this?
They’d also established a functional community in relative safety at the end of TLOU. Whatever pushes Ellie out of that is going to be deeply personal and she is going to confront wild areas that are predictably way, way worse than they were many years ago during TLOU. Like the scavengers were brutal in TLOU, but now you are talking about people that have been eating one another and killing mercilessly for years. It makes sense that the life of a srtong community is more pleasant, but the life of a bandit is much more animalistic.
I know I’m in the minority… and maybe I just need to go back and play the first one again, but I only gave it 6/10 when I played it. While I do think there were some really good things in it, I also think there were some pretty crappy parts that really brought it down.
Joel was by far the worst part to me (easy 2 points off because of him). His mute attitude made the dialogue quite boring for a good chunk of the game. Ellie tried to make things interesting and he just kept shutting her down.
The Clickers sections were often far to buggy and frustrating for me i.e. random detection by distant clickers while you are standing still behind a wall. or AI followers doing stupid shit and attracting attention etc.).
Plus a few other small things.
Joel’s mute attitude was needed.
He had lost his daughter and then Ellie arrives. Of course he isn’t going to be happy. Through the game he opens up more and more to her.
I thought it was good charectar progression. As opposed to having one personality that through thick and thin and all that happens, never changes.
Though that’s just me.
Progression is fine. But Joel’s progression was far to slow and boring.
Man, I just wanted to see some Spyro gameplay. I thought it’d be from Sony but I guess not.
To be honest, it was mostly a whole lot of nothing much going on… I guess it depends on if you love your TPS action games or not, but a lot of it didn’t really appeal to me that much. What I did see was pretty… meh, I guess? Couple of scraps of (probably scripted) gameplay footage without a lot of context… not much better than teaser trailers.
TLOU 2 looks awesome, I don’t understand anything of Death Stranding, and the rest didn’t look overly interesting to me. Also the stream was absolute garbage with audio issues on YouTube and dropouts on Twitch. Bethesda so far has won E3 if there’s such a thing to ‘win’.
Microsoft announced acquisition of tps action game studios and that was applauded, Sony shows TPS action games and it’s a negative.
I didn’t applaud or even mention MS and whatever they were doing.
Oh I think I get it now… Death Stranding is about a guy who gets stranded in the Scottish highlands and pushes himself to the limit getting his luggage to the nearest airport.
I really dont know what people are complaining about when you have The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man (usually unnoteworthy but Insomniac developed, Sony backed) and Death Stranding as exclusives. Spiderman is out in a couple of months, Last of Us 2 is on the near horizon and the others are to look forward to. Sure Microsoft showed 50 games, but 45 of those will either launch alongside PS4 or eventually end up on it. Square Enix showed a couple of PS4 exclusives too in their conference.
So while the “conference” itself was a bit of a shitfest, what was shown of the games was excellent.
Yeah. I didn’t watch the conference but flicking through the trailers it looks like a really strong line up to me.
TLOU 2 looking like an insta-buy for me. Never loved a game as much as the first.
My general reaction while watching the conference was, “What the hell are they doing??”
Sony’s last couple of press conferences have been fantastic – snappy, to-the-point, and chock-full of games and announcements. This was pretty much none of that.
I’m in awe of the quality of the acting Naughty Dog can get out of their digital characters, but the gameplay sequence was so disgustingly violent I felt sick watching it. I won’t be playing Last of Us 2, I felt my anxiety levels rising just watching it.
Like someone else mentioned, there was a real “sameness” to a lot of the games. If Sony’s trying to demonstrate that there’s a wide variety of game experiences on its machine, it didn’t really succeed this year.
And well done I guess for trying something new with the format, but I think we can all agree, it really didn’t work out. Better luck next year.
Wait… a Remedy game that isn’t exclusive to Microsoft???