Why Bethesda Won E3.

Fallout 4. Fallout4 Fallout4.

No, but seriously as much as I was extremely impressed with the sheer magnitude of Fallout 4, I feel Bethesda really nailed it this year with their entire E3 conference. Bethesda did E3 right. How? In order to understand why Bethesda “won” e3, we must first look at the history of E3. For you see, E3 has not always been the way it is today.

     Long ago E3 used to be an event for people within the industry to show off their games to other people inside the industry. I’m not hip to the jive jargon, but it was basically an inside the industry event for investors, developers and publishers. Somewhere along the way (my guess is around the time G4 started covering e3) consumers began to make their way to E3. Games is a very interesting hobby. It tends to lend itself to a very passionate fan base. At the time games were rapidly evolving and the chance to have a sneak peek at the latest and greatest games was very… enticing (and still is today, it’s why we watch those cringy conferences every year). So, consumers flooding E3 was probably an inevitability to be honest. Watching E3 growing up it looked like an event that was designed around the actual developers. It was an opportunity for them to show off their hard work and get feedback from people. However, somewhere along the way companies attending E3 realized that E3 was an amazing marketing opportunity. This caused a rapid change in the way E3 was handled.

     Gameplay was replaced by pre-rendered trailers, for some reason live “musical” performances, and other ridiculous PR nonsense. E3 conferences slowly devolved from an opportunity to see and show off games, to 2 hour long commercials. It has gotten so bad that, numerous publishers with conferences haven’t bothered to actually show any gameplay in their presentation or spend well over half the presentation talking about non-game functionality in their consoles (No xbox, I still don’t care that I can plug my cable box into the Xbox one and watch TV… because I can watch cable without plugging in to the Xbox!). Or they spend waaaay to much time talking about “exclusive content” or how you’ll get to play it slightly before everyone else… (whoopty-friggin-do). Needless to say “gamers” have begun to grow tired of these shinanagans.

     Which brings me to why I loved Bethesda’s E3 conference, and why I feel they got it right. The first reason was the atmosphere (With drops of Jupiter in her hair). Recently, the atmosphere at most of these conferences has reflected the publisher’s attitude towards e3. Corporate shilling. It’s been very dull and boring. “We’re here to sell you this because it’s our job” kind of thing. To make matters worse publishers have people who aren’t involved with the games talk about the games. Whether it’s a CEO or an actor/musician/famous person whose never touched a game, they all result in an uncaring or disingenuous tone, that quite frankly at times has been condescending or down right insulting to anyone passionate or knowledgeable about games. So here’s where Bethesda got it right. They had the developers come up on stage and talk about the games. You could see it in their faces, a twinkle in their eyes, the excitement in their voice, this was their chance to finally reveal what they had spent so much time working on. Of course this was helped by the second reason, ACTUAL GAMEPLAY. Not, pre-rendered cutscenes, not even rendered in engine representation or footage, actual gameplay as you, the player, would experience the game. The best is that Bethesda started off their E3 conference with Doom gameplay. No, here’s a little trailer before, No, let’s talk about Doom for 10 minutes… they went straight for the meat ‘n potatoes, and I loves me some meat ‘n potatoes. While there was some trailer stuff at Bethesda’s E3 it was always kept up with more gameplay. Which brings me to the third and final reason, Fallout 4. I think Bethesda ending with Fallout 4, while the most obvious choice, was the wisest. Bethesda finished strong as a result. While fallout 4 didn’t have as much gameplay going on as Doom, or rather as much interesting gameplay, there was still a lot of gameplay being shown. Along side that gameplay, was a ton of new and unexpected features. Furthermore Bethesda really showed off how customizable the player’s world would be. The game is going to be taking a rather large amount of my free time. If you haven’t seen it you should, because there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game. Click to see here :D . To top it off Bethesda did two things to really seal the win at the end. They announced that Fallout 4 was coming out later this year, and they announced Fallout Shelter. It’s been so very long since the last Fallout game, and while Nov 10th is very close it is also so very far away. Enter Fallout Shelter, a free mobile fallout game that was not designed to suck all your money up, which was available at the end of Bethesda’s conference. Something that you could play right after the conference and it was free. A game which would tide you over a bit until the release of Fallout 4. Fantastic. The cherry on the sundae. The icing on the cake.

    Other publishers take note, That ladies and gentlemen is how you E3. ^(^w^)^

Also everyone else’s press conference sucked this year…

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