Délice de France

At Paris Games Week, violence takes the shine off Sony’s push for the massmarket

At Paris Games Week, violence upstages Sony’s massmarket push

There is, in fairness, no way to perfectly time a live show when it’s being broadcast around the world. Yet that is no excuse for Sony’s Paris Games Week show – which kicked off at 5pm local time, and as such was always likely to be watched by school-age children in the event’s home region – being quite so extreme in its content. First, David Cage’s Detroit: Become Human was shown off, if you can call it that, in a scene depicting violent child abuse. Later, in the showclosing headline slot, a sequence from The Last Of Us II showed arms, heads and jaws split apart by hammers. Yes, the watershed means nothing when you’re working across timezones. But these were thoroughly inappropriate displays of two hotly anticipated games, at least one of which has no need to court controversy.

Word at the show was that the US PlayStation team had muscled in on an event that normally belonged to the European division, the gang across the pond unable to resist a chance to disrupt Microsoft’s news cycle a week before the release of Xbox One X. And perhaps, with the mood over there growing darker by the day thanks to Trump, fascism, racism, mass shootings and all the rest of it, PlayStation US thought, well, stuff it. The sky is falling in. Might as well get out the hammers.

Whatever the motivation, the real shame of this pair of demos was the way they overshadowed what should have been the real message of this event. Away from the fuss, it was a perfectly timed reminder to the masses that, while Microsoft may now have the edge in the technical arms race, it simply cannot hold a candle to its rival in terms of software. This was a show of great depth and range, reflecting a platform that, having raced to 50 million units with its For The Players tagline, is now broadening its reach as it targets 100 million sales.

That charge, as Jim Ryan reminded us at E3 (see E309), will be led in part by a focus on making the platform more accessible; Sony may have cornered the market, but it would prefer that market to be bigger. You don’t get that with a remake of Shadow Of The Colossus (playable for the first time here, and a predictable delight). Instead, Sony is pinning its hopes on Playlink, the smartphone-controlled range of games it unveiled at E3. Multiplayer distraction That’s You was an early success through PlayStation Plus, and the second wave of Playlink games look even more promising. The potential is obvious: touch is the most accessible, familiar and widely available input method on the planet, removing the barrier that traditional controls represent to people that don’t play games.

Elsewhere, there was heartening news for those who committed to PSVR at launch and were worried it was headed the way of Vita. There were plenty of announcements and cause for optimism about the second generation of PSVR software. With the technical and design challenges if not entirely solved, then at least better understood, now come the games. There’s a refined version of the headset too, now tethered by a single cable to a smaller breakout box that, unlike the original, is capable of HDR passthrough. There goes another £350.

So, yes, there’s breadth – there was also the now-standard sizzle reel of forthcoming indie games, including the surprise announcement of Spelunky 2, and a reminder that Sony continues to hold all manner of exclusive content deals with big publishers – but none of this means the company is forgetting the tagline that put PS4 on top of the pile. In addition to Detroit, TLOUII and

Shadow Of The Colossus, there was time for new looks at God Of War and Spider-Man, and the announcement of

Ghost Of Tsushima, a beautiful samurai action game made only slightly less intriguing by the news that Infamous developer Sucker Punch is making it. After a quiet, rather safe E3, this was a Sony that once again seems eager to please. With Xbox One X on shelves, that was probably the right line to take.

Across town, there

was the small matter of a five-day festival of videogames. Yet while there were certainly lessons here for others on the convention circuit – the venue, while only a short hop from central Paris, was vast, its wide aisles ensuring people could get where they wanted with ease -- there was little here to get truly excited about. It’s the wrong time of year for it, the year’s big games either already on shelves or about to be. Attendees dutifully queued up for a round of Call Of Duty: World War II multiplayer a whopping two days before release, but no one’s heart really seemed to be in it, and the consequence of all that space was a rather subdued atmosphere. At check in, a security sign warned that cosplayers were forbidden from bringing in weapons, real or otherwise, but they needn’t have really bothered. Sony had already put us off hammers for life.

After a quiet, rather safe E3, this was a Sony that once again seemed eager to please