Well E3 2021 is done. It mostly sucked. There’s one part that didn’t.

So time to rant about E3 as a whole! There’s not even that much to talk about here, but I think I can use that fact as a platform to talk about stuff anyways.

I’ll be grading each presentation, and talking about what bothered me about them and maybe get to the core of WHY all these presentations suck.

• Grading the presentations
• Game companies are allergic to telling us about their games
• Highlights of E3 2021
• Why do the same games keep popping up in every presentation?
• Why do people think the Microsoft presentation was good?
• Why was “E3” a thing?
• So if E3 is pointless, what should game companies do?
• Gamers aren’t bad
• Overall thoughts

Grading the presentations

So how I grade these is gonna be a letter grade. A is really good. F is really bad. How you get a better grade is by announcing stuff, or giving good new info about games. Showing gameplay is positive points. Showing cinematic trailers is negative points. New games and release dates are positive points. Updates to already-released games are usually negative points (especially if the updates are underwhelming). It seems like there’s a lot of ways to get positive points, but it’s WAY easier to get negative points. As a starting point, everyone is on an F-, and hopefully accrue to a higher score from there. Makes sense, you start at zero and build up… and hopefully not down.

There’s a few I can’t really grade. I’m mostly positive about the Guerrilla Collective Showcase (a few highlights for me), IGN had some okay moments, and I’m mostly meh on the Wholesome Direct, PC Gaming Show and Future Games Show. They’re kinda ungradable because they’re niche.

There’s some I have to grade negatively and have no reason to really elaborate on. These are UNDER F-, so under 0%. Koch Media was just long boring pointless meaningless talking, H- on that one. Take-Two gets an I- for being worse than Koch. Capcom is an H as well since they did literally nothing, despite having NO games announced (other than Pragmata which is out in 2023 anyways, and 2 other games that are out within the next month)… like, why not announce stuff? Are they making nothing? And finally Gearbox gets an H, just about as useless as Capcom’s. And Bandai Namco were supposed to present something… They just dropped a trailer for a game that was already announced at Summer Game Fest or something that didn’t look super interesting… so… I dunno, F-.

As for the ones with actual scores…

Summer Game Fest: E+. This show started up almost-okay with Wonderlands (though that had no gameplay so it was a pretty bad reveal) and better with Metal Slug Tactics. Then the rest of it was crap. Long boring awful crap. Then there was Elden Ring at the end which we could finally see is Dark Souls 4 with a different title, good to finally have real info on the game after a long time of silence, looks good, thumbs up. So it did have 3 decent announcements, but the rest of the presentation was such a huge waste of time I have to bring the score way down.
Ubisoft: D-. That grade is brought up just by Mario + Rabbids 2, and a bit by Extraction because even if the gameplay was scripted BS, it was still gameplay and it looked pretty decent. Everything else in this show was crap, and there’s stuff that was announced years ago that is still not getting info at all like Skull and Bones which… people are excited for that, right? Why’s it taking so long to copy-paste the ship combat from AC4?
Devolver Digital: A for effort, D- for content. They’re just entertaining (and made an amazing video production-wise, I was really impressed with the filmmaking here), even if I didn’t end up caring about any of the games shown I’m happy I watched.
Xbox and Bethesda: E+. The presentation itself was formatted fine, but everything IN it… sucked. Lots of shitty games, updates to old games, release dates for games that are on everything… It felt mostly pointless. It was hard to even decide on highlights when the whole thing was so empty. All the announcements had no gameplay, so no reason to be hyped. I give points for Forza Horizon 5 being both a new announcement and actually having gameplay, but that’s pretty generous since… you knew how the game played before it was even announced, because it’s Forza Horizon. Even the way they presented Halo Infinite, I pretty much can’t give points for that, they showed nothing from the single player game other than a pointless cutscenes, after all (and no release date). All Microsoft REALLY did in this show is flex at how great Game Pass is… and at this point it’s hard to argue with them. And I realized in my post about the MS presentation that I kinda forgot to highlight Age of Empires 4, it does look good even if it’s not a game I’ll buy. That was a mistake and I moved this grade from an E to an E+ as a result…
Square Enix: E. Big fucking oof. The most exciting thing here was the CHAOS meme. GotG looks like it might be okay-ish maybe? But it’s hard to tell from that specific gameplay demonstration. The rest of the show was weird nonsense like FF1 to 6 being “pixel-remastered” (whatever that means) but only on Steam and Mobile, updates for crap, removing my excitement for Babylon’s Fall by making it a live service and the super confusing trailer for what may or may not be a retelling of FF1. If the trailer was the only thing for it, I’d have zero idea Final Fantasy Origin. The demo exists to help a bit, but I can’t credit something external, I have to go by the trailer. Terrible presentation overall. If they had made a good trailer for Final Fantasy Origin, the grade would be closer to a D+, and if the FF1 to 6 thing was on EVERYTHING and was a collection, it would go even higher, maybe a C+. It would’ve been SO easy for this presentation to be… okay.
Nintendo: A. They announced games, good ones. They showed GAMEPLAY for those games they announced. Some of the announcements were the hypest things ever too. Even the boring “we gotta do these highlights of shitty third-party crap” moments were over fast so they didn’t waste too much time on garbage (heck, one of those was for a pretty cool-looking Cruis’n game so even those parts had some potentially-interesting things). And almost everything shown comes out THIS year too. How does no one other than NINTENDO know how to make a presentation?

Basically, everyone sucked other than Nintendo. This shouldn’t happen.

Game companies are allergic to giving us actually meaningful information about their games

If you look at most of these presentations, you’ll notice one thing that’s painfully obvious: Game companies don’t want to tell us what their games are. What’s Starfield? What’s Redfall? What’s Final Fantasy Origin? What’s Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands? What’s Contraband? What’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora? You literally cannot answer any of these questions. Even something like A Plague Tale Requiem… sure it’s a sequel, but the first game isn’t THAT well known, so showing some gameplay would be ideal, right now I was given no reason to care (either for this one or the first one) as someone who didn’t play the first one. To explain what I mean with A Plague Tale, I’ll talk about the opposite… They could’ve not shown gameplay for Forza Horizon 5 and we’d still know exactly how that plays. It’s a super popular, long running series that gets a new game almost every year (between Motorsport and Horizon). It’s a known quantity. I have similar complaints about Outer Worlds 2, they’re obviously announcing it before knowing anything about it themselves, why do that? It’s pointless.

Even GotG, which gave us a good amount of gameplay, still leaves us with a pile of questions about the basic functionality of the game. Is it a super-linear “do dialogue choices and sometimes shoot stuff” game? Are there parts where you have some freedom? Any sidequests? Any alternate paths? Anything? In a way I don’t know really what this game actually is, it was too basic of a trailer despite the long gameplay segment.

There’s something like Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin that seems like it might have had a decent trailer if you don’t think about it… so let’s think about it! The trailer showed a little bit gameplay, but it didn’t show anything really meaningful (and, after looking at gameplay from the demo, it showed basically nothing). It shows the guy hitting things with a sword. It shows the guy… transforming enemies into red crystals and smashing them. I don’t know what that is. Then the story… in this trailer you get to Garland, which means this is obviously related to FF1. Is it a prequel? Is it a retelling? Does it end at Garland? I mean, probably not, but who knows? Do you get to explore the world? Fight pirates to steal their ship? Fight the four fiends? Or is it something else entirely? I have NO idea what this game is, neither do you, and Squeenix didn’t tell us even the most basic things about it. The demo helps a bit… if you’re one of the 3 people with a PS5 that’s not a scalper. Like, the trailer didn’t mention skill trees, or mid-combo job changing, or pretty cool magic system. But I can’t judge the E3 presentation based on a demo that came out after (maybe I could’ve if it actually worked in the first place… but it didn’t). So this trailer was shit 😀

Or something like Riders Republic. There seems to be so much disconnected crap in this game, I have no idea how any of it functions, or if any of it will be fun. Like, I get you bike and snowboard and jetpack glide and parachute, but why? How? Where? The game needs to have some rhyme or reason, but I have no idea, this trailer certainly didn’t show how the game functions. It looks lame though so whatever I guess.

One of the weirder announcements was Painkiller… This was announced in the Summer Game Fest, in the weirdest announcement ever. It wasn’t an announcement for a game, it was an announcement for a new… publisher? Fucking why? Then Painkiller was mentioned to be getting a new game. No trailer, no mention of what the game is, just that it exists… Huh. I mean, this can KIND of work as a reveal if it’s handled well. This was just… mentioned off-hand. Very confusing. You obviously get the “no gameplay” problem, and with a franchise like Painkiller, fans know the gameplay, everyone else don’t (so a similar problems to the A Plague Tale sequel). It’s not like it’s Pokemon, or Zelda, or Metroid. Those you can totally just reveal a game’s title and know what’s up. Painkiller… it’s a bit harder. Plus… it almost sounded like it’s barely started development, so how long until we actually see it.

Why is it so hard for developers to tell us what their games are? I want to know what these games are so I can be excited for them. Right now I can’t be excited for most of the shit that was at this E3. There’s really no reason not to give us a basic idea of a game’s gameplay. For a good example here, Mario + Rabbids 2 had a great trailer. Shows meaningful bits of gameplay including changes from the first game, shows a good idea of the basic story and even gameplay progression, there you go. Simple. Nintendo’s Direct was full of good examples too.

The only games I’ve named here that warrant any kind of hype is… kinda… Wonderlands (or it would if Borderlands 3 didn’t suck) and the A Plague Tale sequel, but only for fans of the original. The rest, not worth getting excited about. Even Final Fantasy Origin, which showed gameplay, I can’t justify excitement for until the demo.

The few highlights of E3 2021

This was complicated to figure out for many reasons. First off… there wasn’t a good solid “all games at E3” lists, as the ones I found were literally missing games. I only include specific things here. First, they need to be new announcements, or substantial updates about upcoming games (as is one of the first few I mention here). A game without a GOOD gameplay trailer, doesn’t count here. I’m doing this as an exercise, to show that this E3 was garbage. That, despite there being literally over 15 presentations, I could hardly scrape together any games to put as highlights.  I included random shit that wasn’t even at E3 just to pad this highlight segment. Also I’m not including straight ports and remasters, mostly. So actually a few things I do consider to be highlights aren’t listed here because I’m trying to have standards.

The top highlight would be… Nintendo’s Direct. So much stuff. Advance Wars. WarioWare. Mario Party. METROID DREAD. Even if it’s not a new announcement, the gameplay for BotW2 was hype, as was SMT5’s gameplay and release date. That Direct was really good.

Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope looks great. The first game was awesome, they seem to have done interesting gameplay changes, very excited to play it.

Metal Slug Tactics. It just looks awesome, I’m growing to really like Dotemu as a publisher, they handle some cool projects.

Elden Ring might just be Dark Souls 4, but I think it looks really good, even if it doesn’t differentiate itself from other Souls games much (from what we’ve seen). Now there’s reason to be excited for it, unlike before.

There’s a few smaller/indie games that caught my attention. Akatori, Atomic Heart, Gloomwood, Replaced, Salt and Sacrifice, Slime Rancher 2, BloodRayne Betrayal: Fresh Bites, Firegirl, Severed Steel, Cruis’n Blast, Rocksmith+, Project Warlock 2, Fallen Aces, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties… Maybe there’s a few I’m forgetting, there were a few cool ones.

2 River City Girls games were announced. One is a sequel, the other is a localized port of the Super Famicom game “Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka”, which would have been a River City Ransom sequel if it came out here. Pretty hype.

Not a highlight for me but Forza Horizon 5 had a good reveal. I’ll be nice and put it here.

Age of Empires 4 looks good.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 looked pretty good but I kinda wish we saw a bit more gameplay (most of the gameplay footage was just showing off the great lighting, it does LOOK really good visually).

The Guardians of the Galaxy game might be a highlight if there’s more depth to the gameplay than what the gameplay demonstration showed, it was a pretty bad demonstration TBH but it looks much better than the shitty Avengers game. I might actually get that.

Not sure if this was an “E3” reveal but it sure was announced during E3. Knockout Home Fitness looks great. In Japan this was called FiNC HOME FiT, I’ve been following it for a while. Unlike Fitness Boxing which is just boxing, this features all sorts of exercises.

This isn’t even an E3 reveal but I feel like I NEED to squeeze as much as I can… Valis, Valis 2 and Valis 3 were confirmed to be getting Switch ports. Yeah breaking all the rules to include something cool no one will care about, from a non-E3 source, and they’re ports.

Not including it as a highlight, but the Final Fantasy Origin demo, once it actually fucking functioned, seems actually pretty good… I wonder why the trailer for it was so shit.

I’m really trying here. There’s so little to even talk about. I usually have way more highlights at an E3.

Why do the same games keep popping up in every presentation?

This happens pretty much every E3, but it’s quite noticeable every time it happens.

The big game that did this a lot this time was Monster Hunter Stories 2. That game DOES look really good, but why did I need to see like 4 new trailers for this throughout this E3? I ignored most of them because I’m getting the game anyways, but they seem to want to spoil fucking everything about it. Why? Plus it had like 40 minutes of gameplay at the Nintendo Treehouse just in case all those trailers weren’t enough. It’s especially egregious with this game because it had so many trailers already before E3, Capcom is putting SO much behind it for some reason. At this point I think even Rise didn’t get this much advertisement.

Far Cry 6 was also all over the place too, and only once was it anywhere near interesting, and it’s the trailer with the attack rooster. That game doesn’t even look all that good in general, Far Cry is really boring when it’s not Blood Dragon. But still it appeared many times this E3 even though it really doesn’t need to. It’s Far Cry, it’ll do fine.

Life is Strange popped up like 4 times too. That series is ass, stop shoving it in my face so much.

Back 4 Blood was in 2 or 3 presentations, plus had its own focused presentation. That’s too much. I get why it got the focused presentation, and I almost get why it was also at Microsoft’s thing because of Game Pass, but this was a known game that already had a release date and all… Just have the focused presentation.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands showed up 3 or 4 times. Each time it was the same shitty cinematic trailer that reveals nothing about the game. So why bother? It wasn’t a good trailer in the first place, showing it 4 times isn’t gonna change that.

There’s a few other games that popped up several times, but I can kinda forgive some of these like Severed Steel or Tribes of Midgard or even Two Point Campus which was at like 4 presentations because they’re smaller and any attention is good. Meanwhile there’s no reason for something like Just Dance to pop up more than once, but it did.

Look, people are watching everything at E3. And all the trailers end up being separately uploaded to youtube as well. There’s no reason to show a game more than once in the whole show. I’m sure I missed a few things, but yeah… No need for the repetition.

Why do people think the Microsoft presentation was good?

This is a legitimate question. I see a lot of people saying Microsoft’s presentation was good (some putting it as the best), but I can’t find decent justification. All the new announcements sucked because they showed no gameplay (other than Forza Horizon 5), we still don’t have a date for Halo Infinite, and most of the games shown weren’t interesting. An announcement for a new IP that doesn’t show gameplay is not an announcement at all. I don’t even care if a “good dev” is making the game. Gameplay first, other shit later.

Like, I’m re-reading through my impressions, there was NOTHING exciting in Microsoft’s presentation unless you’re into Forza. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was an older announcement, so that was just a bit of new gameplay, and it wasn’t even a good representation of the game, it mostly just showed off cool lighting tech, very odd. I will say I was slightly unfair before, kinda forgetting that Age of Empires 4 was in there. That’s about it here. The format was great, they were showing “games”… but the content was ass. A nice format doesn’t excuse shitty announcements.

The only “good” thing about Microsoft’s presentation is that it cements Game Pass as a solid service if you’re okay with not owning the games you play. I will likely subscribe to it at some point, if there’s ever a lull in releases and there’s some stuff I want to play that’s on there.

Why was “E3” a thing?

So what exactly was “E3” here… for? They had a stream where they restreamed other peoples’ streams. That’s pointless. LOTS of people were doing this, from shitty journalistic outlets like IGN or Gamespot, to Jerry down the street streaming on Twitch. We didn’t need E3 and their shitty presenters there because everyone else was also streaming E3 presentations. E3 themselves added no value (in fact they were negative value, if you actually watched their streams outside of the presentations, it was horribly shit content).

E3 did have an app… It sure was a thing I’m sure people used (/s). If they could figure out how it worked. I couldn’t. I really tried, I clicked all the options. It was bad and didn’t really indicate what you were supposed to do with it. Why make an app without explaining its usage?

So why is E3 a thing? I’m trying really hard to figure out the ESA’s value here. The industry is no longer in a state where E3 is needed. We watch all the announcements live, so already the value of games journalists covering the event is basically zero, and we don’t need the ESA to do anything for anyone to see these announcements either, they can just stream them on youtube and twitch without the ESA doing anything. Heck, what’s even the need of having a time in June where everyone does reveals? More often than not these have terrible timing for most devs and they end up not having shit to reveal so you end up with an E3 (like this year) where nothing is announced.

And even without the ESA’s “involvement”, why did this need this “big hype event with plenty of companies doing streams” kinda deal? Serious question there. I have no idea why this needed to be a thing. We’re LONG past the usefulness of such an event/timeframe. And since we’re also long past game journalists having value as far as reporting on streams (or game announcements from big publishers or big streams), I’m failing more and more to see why we need E3, or similar things (looking at you, Geoff Keighley).

So if E3 is pointless, what should game companies do?

Easy. Game companies ABSOLUTELY should be doing streams to announce games. The difference though is that they need to be, you know, sensible about it. There’s really no reason to all do presentations/announcements in June all at the same time as everyone else. This concept, it’s gotta go. There’s no reason to do this. Doesn’t matter when in the year it is, don’t force yourself to do a stream if you have nothing to show. Look how ridiculous some of these E3 streams were this year, like the Capcom one, or the Bandai Namco one. There’s many solutions that are considerably better.

Solution one: When a game is ready to be announced (you need a good gameplay trailer for this, of course, otherwise wait), you plop a trailer on the youtubes and push it through social media. The closer to release, the better. This happens a lot already, just keep doing that and find ways to make these more noticeable.

Solution two: Wait until you have several things to announce, then schedule a big stream with a ton of announcements. Simple, easy, doesn’t even need to be that high-effort. Unless you’re Devolver Digital, in which case PLEASE keep being high-effort with your presentations.

Solution three: For smaller devs, neither of these might work unless you get lucky. But there’s stuff like Guerrilla Collection and all sorts of similar streams where you can team up for a bunch of announcements with other devs. Or you can sneak your way into some of the bigger publishers’ multigame streams, like what happens a lot with Nintendo actually (they even do indie-focused streams where some really cool games get shown off all the time).

Waiting for June is dumb. Forcing yourself to do a stream in June when you have nothing to show is dumb. Just reveal games when they’re ready to be revealed. Heck, having the hype cycle be YEARS long is stupid and only leads to disappointment, don’t do that. Reveal games when there’s something substantial to show.

There, do this and E3 is as good as dead, as is whatever dumbness the Dorito Pope lizardman is doing. The sooner those shitty events die, the better.

“Nintendo Direct” is the future, just change that company name and be happy. Capcom Direct. Konami Direct (just kidding). Sony State of Play. Microsoft Presents. Squeenix Does Things. Whatever. This format is what all companies should adopt. And if they want to help indies along the way, awesome. Let E3 die. Kill it if you have to.

Gamers aren’t bad

So I jumped into the “official” E3 stream a couple times. It seems like it was always about talking about how gamers are awful people every time I went on there. Not sure what the play is here, you’re not SUPPOSED to ATTACK your core audience. You shouldn’t be lecturing people. Fuckheads.

No, gamers aren’t bad. In general gamers are even great, even the fanboys. This doesn’t even need to be said. Get the fuck out of here.

Seriously that “official” E3 stream was a bunch of self-indulgent fake BS “lol I’m such a gamer, I totally play games”, followed by “Hey guys, gamers are terrible people you should hate”. It was the most garbage thing ever, made by people who hate both games and gamers.

Overall thoughts

E3 has proven that it no longer has to exist. Game announcements can always happen without E3 being a thing. They already do. Forcing a date for E3 presentations means some companies will prepare presentations where nothing will be shown. See: every presentation this year other than Nintendo’s.

My conclusion for this E3 I guess is similar to my conclusion of most. It sucked, like it generally does. It sucked WAY more than usual though, so I have a LOT of problems with it. Calling this the worst E3 ever is putting it lightly, it was actually awful. No one had games (other than Nintendo), the “official” E3 stream was just hateful shit and some of the companies made NO sense. Like… Bandai Namco had SO MUCH STUFF they could show. They showed one game and their stream just ended without even an outro. Odd.

I still like talking about it, because I like games. My inane rantings are always fun to do. And I got a bunch of really cool games to look forward to as well, so it ends up not being bad for me. I just wish the game companies weren’t so excited and happy about wasting everyone’s time here, but they’re not the biggest problem, their bad presentation are a symptom. E3 is the problem. It has to go.

I hope there’s no more E3/Summer Game Fest/VGAs, but just more company-specific presentation streams throughout the year instead when things are ready to be revealed. Wouldn’t that be just so much nicer?

The sooner E3 dies, the better.

If there’s still an E3 next year, I’ll still watch every presentation even if it’s as stupid as a Verizon presentation (which sucked by the way), I’ll still comment on as many as I feel I need to, and I’ll still complain that E3 is shit and needs to end.