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.

Well I guess before I get to the Nintendo Direct, I’m gonna write my usual intro.

In-between my last post (the disappointing Squeenix direct) and this one, there’s been a few presentations, they weren’t good. Back 4 Blood got a bit presentation, it looks fine. PC Gaming Show was fairly boring but it had some interesting indies. The Future Games Show was pretty boring. Take-Two wasted everyone’s time with something WORSE than the Koch Media presentation. Capcom did nothing, might have been more useless than the Gearbox thing. Wow this E3 is bad.

And now it’s Nintendo’s turn. Literally only they can save this terrible E3. The bar is set so low.

Nintendo has a LOT of rumors going on. 2D Donkey Kong game by the Mario Odyssey team, a 3D Kirby, a 2D Metroid (this is a leftover rumor that ended up false last year lol), something Fire Emblem (so many different versions of this rumor), an exclusive RE game, new Mario Kart, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t recall because there’s so many fake rumors I can’t keep track. The big one is the Switch Pro… which won’t be shown in the Direct if it’s a real product Nintendo wants to release. I don’t know if any of those rumors will be true. The safe bet is to say they aren’t but some of them are certainly interesting and possible.

Outside of the rumors, there’s a lot of things we can assume will be there or not. BotW2 is almost definitely showing up though I believe it will only come out early next year. We’ll see at least one Smash character (maybe 2). Seems like we’ll see a new Monkey Ball, that got a real leak. Maybe we’ll see some Zelda 35th anniversary… stuff (I’m not counting on it). We’ll NOT see Metroid Prime 4. We’ll probably not see Bayonetta 3 but there’s a chance I guess. I don’t think we’ll see Splatoon 3. I don’t think we’ll see any Pokemon but there’s a small chance since there was no pre-E3 pokemon direct. Pikmin 4 has been “sort of” announced for years, a real announcement would be… a thing. And Nintendo generally does announce actual things at E3 so… I figure we’ll have one decently-big announcement maybe, whether it’s something from the rumors or not. After how bad the rest of this E3 has been, I’m not keeping my hopes up, but it would be hard for Nintendo to fail as hard as any of the other presentations.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. The intro is written before seeing the show of course.

So anyways, let’s go. PLEASE Nintendo save this terrible E3. It really needs help.

Note: No I won’t do a post about the Treehouse stream, but I may talk about it in my “overall” E3 post after the event is over if there’s something shown there.

Well I don’t have a super long time to write an intro as I just finished posting my Microsoft post. Thankfully there’s been no other presentations in-between so I don’t think there’s much to talk about before.

Squeenix’s E3 presentations have varied in quality quite a bit. Some awful, some okay, they’re very random. There’s a few rumors going for this one, might be fun to see if they’re real. Namely a Dark Souls-style FF game by Team Ninja and an FF collection for modern platforms. Also we know Babylon’s Fall will be there, I’m hyped to see more of that and hopefully a release date finally. But after getting disappointed by Microsoft I’m keeping my expectations low here.

As usual these are my “live” reactions to the event, I’m gonna edit those to make them readable and write overall thoughts at the end. Intro is written before seeing the show.

Starts in a minute so… let’s go? Maybe Squeenix will be okay. I dunno, Microsoft managed to lower my hype substantially.

Well before I watch the presentation by Microsoft, let’s quickly go over yesterday’s E3 things I didn’t post about.

Devolver Digital was right after Ubisoft… Devolver always makes something really entertaining. The games? Not particularly interesting, IMO. Some looked okay but nothing really caught my attention. The presentation? Awesome fun, extremely well made.

Then there was Gearbox. They did literally nothing. Seriously. Fuck Gearbox.

I skipped UploadVR… partly because VR is lame, partly because I think I can’t even actually use VR anymore because of the current state of my eyes… I’d need to try it, but I think the screens would be in a distance that would suck for both of my eyes.

Oh and I actually logged into the E3 app. What the fuck is even this crap? Seriously I have no idea how to use it, what a shitty app. I got out of it after 5 minutes of fiddling with menus and not understanding what anything was. Good job proving your pointlessness, E3.

So anyways, now it’s Microsoft’s turn. I’m pretty excited for this, largely because Microsoft tends to be a good place for third-parties to do announcements. And also all games here will be multiplat, which is great. Their presentations in the past few E3s have been pretty solid, even when they didn’t announce things that interested me that much. I think this should be a pretty good presentation.

So let’s go with the live reaction! I’ll be writing my thoughts live, followed at the end of the show with my overall thoughts. I’ll post the entire reaction after I’ve edited everything. And as usual this intro is written before watching.

Timer is going down. LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOO!

Well, before we get to Ubisoft’s E3 thing, let’s talk about the other stuff I watched that I didn’t make posts about. Koch Media… Not only did it include the lizard man himself Geoff Keighley, but it was possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Instead of, you know, showing games, they just pretended to talk about games (because half the shit they said didn’t mean shit), and none of it was meaningful or interesting. It was so pointless and long, it was basically unwatchable. I stopped watching to go to the IGN stream…

The IGN stream was… lots of advertising we didn’t want to see in-between the advertising we DID want to see. Compared to the Koch Media bullshit, this actually had games. Some of them were even a little bit interesting. They had nothing major to show, and they could’ve done without the “personalities” being boring in-between the trailers… This wasn’t great but it was kinda okay-ish after the pure boredom that was the Koch Media thing.

The Guerrilla Collective Showcase actually had several really cool games. My highlights were Akatori and Severed Steel, but there were actually several games that I’m sure many people will find interesting in there. You can check out most the games here.

The Wholesome Direct was meh. 75 games shown, none of them were particularly interesting to me. Some of them might be more your taste than mine, there were some that I’m sure will be a little bit popular. The link I put for Guerrilla Collective also has a list of things from the Wholesome Direct.

So anyways, it’s Ubisoft’s turn. We’ll more than likely only see one cool thing, that being the Mario+Rabbids sequel which Nintendo themselves leaked by mistake (they published the page for it on their website too early). This is hilarious that they’d do that, as it’s really the only thing Ubisoft probably had to show that wasn’t gonna be shit. The only other things they could show that could be interesting would be a new Rayman or a new Blood Dragon, pretty much, and I doubt that’s happening. Everything else Ubisoft makes is shitballs. So we’ll see I guess.

So anyways… this is gonna be my live reactions to the Ubisoft presentation. I will write these as I’m watching, then I’ll write my overall thoughts on what is sure to be a shitshow, then I’ll edit my live thoughts just to make sure they’re readable, and that’s that! Also I’m writing this intro before watching.

Well the countdown is about to end so time to watch this crap. Let’s go I guess.

Last year E3 was skipped. Things were fine. There were a bunch of smaller events where games were announced, Nintendo took the great idea of waiting until the games were 2 months away from release before even announcing them (by randomly dropping the trailers on their youtube channel with no warning, which is great) which is WAY better than waiting years for any info, and a lot was delayed anyways on all fronts. As a result E3 showed itself to not be something that is needed anymore.

So E3 is coming back this year. Kinda? The ESA is gonna be running… something? On an app? People weirdly don’t know this, but the E3 presentations we watch on the internet aren’t actually E3 (they’re ran in separate buildings that are reserved by the game companies themselves, it just makes sense to have those running at the same time as actual E3 for some fan hype), with the actual E3 being the showfloor where journalists (largely) go down to try the new games/hardware and run interviews and presentations and such with the devs.

I usually post about E3 around a month before it happens, addressing rumors and what will happen there, with some predictions and such. This time it’s a bit of a different post than my usual because… I have no idea what E3 2021 is, and there’s no “real” info. What we have is basically useless.

Let’s see what I’ve got to say about this one!