Here we are again, this time for the first in a 3 part series featuring the best and worst of E3. So look forward to parts 2 and 3 over the next week or so. Please check out all the Out of Lives mini-casts we did for the conferences you can find them on this website, Sound Cloud, YouTube or ITunes. I personally featured on Square Enix, Nintendo, Sony and the PC episodes. With a big list of regulars and new guests covering E3 it was the simply the best to be a part of it. If you enjoyed it give a thank you to Ross Miller, Scott Sedman and Kevin Tarne for putting it together and support the special guests, hopefully we will see them all on regular editions of the Out of Lives podcast in future!
First up are my reactions to the 3 things I posted here last week that I was looking forward to.
Number 1 is of course No Mans Sky and yet again I’ve been left disappointed by the lack of a release date. I WANT TO KNOW WHEN I CAN PLAY IT! It’s the sort of game I have been dreaming of since I first picked up my Gameboy and played Pokémon Yellow at the tender age of 4. It continues to impress me with the visual style and sheer scope of ambition on display. To see it running live on stage was really special, but as Scott and others have rightly pointed out they still haven’t really showed us what we will be doing on these planets… exploring is great but there must be more than that to do once you have found interesting things to see. As ever I want to see more, much, much more.
EA’s conference was overall a bit disappointing nothing that really stood out, a nice CG trailer for Mass Effect 4 didn’t give much away, a lot of talking about Sports games and no announcements in the way of cool new Star Wars games like I was hoping for. However there is a silver lining, Star Wars: Battlefront has finally answered some of the major criticisms it’s gotten over the last few months. Heroes are playable, there is co-op modes and a form of single-player experience plus it looked absolutely fantastic in action. I love it, switching between 1st person and 3rd person view seems to work really fluidly, the vehicles are exactly as I was hoping they would be. I’m excited and if the servers hold up at launch it will be an excellent game.
Last but not least is of course Sony’s extravaganza! The conference was slick, well presented and packed full of goodies for us gamers on PS4. They opened up with The Last Guardian which was excellent to have after all these years finally re-revealed and yet somehow they still failed to explain what the game is actually about. It looks just as interesting as it always has done but it remains without context other than watch out for poorly built wooden platforms (a staple of many, many games over the years). They continued to showcase some fabulous Indie titles including No Mans Sky as mentioned above but I’ll move onto a couple more highlights for me. Guerrilla Games’ new IP is Horizon: Zero Dawn looks absolutely stunning, it’s borrowed the colour pallet of Killzone: Shadowfall but that is hardly something to complain about! I love the whole concept of it and it has Mecha-dinosaurs/animals what more could you need. I hope it really is a 2016 game because I’ll be waiting excitedly to see more. Then there was a game called Firewatch… I’d heard about it before and until I saw it in action at the conference I didn’t really understand why I’d want to play it but now I do. They showed the perfect amount; just enough to get me properly intrigued as to what was going on and then left it there. Who was in the tower? I don’t know but I’m going to find out!
What do you guys think? Do you agree with me? Let me know your thoughts on No Mans Sky, EA and Sony here in the comments, on Facebook or on Twitter @adamthomas1994. As always thanks for reading this, any feedback is appreciated and Duckhunt!
