The show must go on
The industry rallied to deliver some kind of E3 2021. But was it too much?
The highs – and occasional head-in-hands lows – of an E3 wrestling with a new identity
The 2021 incarnation of the greatest show on gaming Earth – the place where technical envelopes are traditionally pushed, where we expect the bleeding edge of interactive entertainment to be annually redefined – began with 1bit graphics on a 400x240 display. Yet the notion of Playdate opening the festivities at what we will charitably call E3 2021 was not as inappropriate as it first appeared. This was never going to be your dad’s E3, of course; COVID-19 saw to that. But so did the avalanche of publishers, media organisations and event companies that saw an opportunity to muscle in on a disrupted timetable, and hog a little of the biggest spotlight in games. The result was the busiest public schedule E3 has ever seen – and, at times, one of the dullest.
Indeed, Playdate’s 15-minute broadcast was one of the week’s highlights, snappily paced and bringing only good news to those eagerly awaiting Panic’s charming – and charmingly silly – handheld. The first ‘season’ of games has doubled in size, from 12 titles to 24; among those now developing games for the system are Papers, Please and Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope. The breezy, browser-based development platform was shown off for the first time, and there is a dock with a pen holder, because of course there is. There are those who find Playdate, and the Portland-based Panic, just a little too hipsterish, and indeed, the broadcast had a ‘we can pickle that’ sort of energy to it. Mileage naturally varies with this sort
of thing, but the innovation, creativity and simple joy on show here was a fine way to set the tone, even if what followed would struggle to match it.
That is not quite to say it was all downhill from there, but E3 2021 certainly ended up closer to sea level than it was at the start. It’s almost always like this, admittedly: reality is rarely a match for fanboy fever dreams. But at least in normal circumstances a bad E3 is over quickly, a tight three-day schedule of press conferences ripping off the Band-Aid. This time, with every company and its dog carving its half-hour or hour out of the schedule over the course of a whole week, it seemed to go on forever.
Early on, though, optimism reigned. Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest broadcast, the kickoff event for a seasonlong programme of events designed to celebrate both the magic of videogames and the continued existence of Keighley himself, was well stocked with exciting titles. Yes, for FromSoftware fans the whole thing was little more than a winkingly tantric tease for the will-theywon’t-they appearance of Elden Ring, which popped up at the end and looked predictably wondrous. But there were plenty of other delights elsewhere, from studios of all shapes and sizes. There was also the now-mandatory appearance of Keighley bestie Hideo Kojima, on hand to announce Death Stranding Director’s Cut for PS5, and muse airily about future projects.
Looking back, Keighley may wonder how the tone of the broadcast got so dark at points. Kojima went off on one about 9/11, while Giancarlo Esposito reeled off the names of history’s great despots in discussing his role in Far Cry 6. But the host must be largely satisfied with how it went on the night – and even more so once the curtain had dropped on E3 as a whole, placing his show in an even more flattering context. Keighley may be an easy target, but there’s no questioning his commitment, nor the graft he puts in. His shows tend to hit more than they miss, and in the wider context of this week-long festival of rolling apathy, that is some victory.
A recurring theme in Keighley’s shows, whether at E3, Gamescom or The Game Awards, has been his willingness to give indies plenty of time in the spotlight, rather than cosseting them away into two-minute sizzle reels the way platform holders often do. This year, the rest of E3 caught up with him. This was a happy consequence of the relentless schedule – Summer Game Fest segued smoothly into Day Of The Devs, for example, and so the latter inherited a chunk of the former’s viewers. While Double Fine’s show was the highlight as expected, there were fine showings from Guerrilla Collective and Wholesome Direct, among others. Yes, it resulted in an absolute avalanche of games being shown off over the course of the week, the vast majority of which were swiftly forgotten. But for all that the format was overwhelming, it meant some small games, from tiny teams, have got in front of potential customers and future fans.
It was just as well the indies were there to pick up the slack, given the travails of some of the industry’s bigger hitters. Gearbox’s stream had no surprises: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands had already been unveiled on Keighley’s stage. Those tuning in were treated, if you can call it that, to Randy Pitchford on the set of the Borderlands movie, interviewing cast and crew. Later, Capcom would spend half an hour talking with cultish enthusiasm about updates to games we already knew about. Bandai Namco handed over 15 minutes of its presentation to an interview about the latest episode of
The Dark Pictures Anthology. On it went.
Square Enix had plenty of new games to talk about, at least, though it still managed to under-deliver. Life Is Strange: True Colors stuck in the mind only for the narrator playing up the protagonist’s “psychic power of empathy”. There was an update on Babylon’s Fall, the PlatinumGames action title announced at E3 2018, which looks like it was actually announced ten years earlier, and is now a live-service game to boot.
It was just as well indies were there to pick up the slack, given the travails of some of the bigger hitters
Also unveiled were Eidos Montreal’s Guardians Of The Galaxy
tie-in, which had been leaked in advance of the show; a suite of ‘pixel remasters’ of the first six Final Fantasy games; and
Stranger In Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, whose trailer provided E3 2021’s most memorable moment. It was a disaster, instantly securing its place in E3 history alongside Ravidrums, Giant Enemy Crabs and all the rest. An instantly forgettable name; a hateful, 360-era protagonist ranting incessantly about his need to ‘kill Chaos’; a downloadable demo that didn’t work for two days – you couldn’t script it. The demo reveals it to be a perfectly serviceable Souls homage from
Nioh developer Team Ninja. A vital reminder of the importance of setting aside the budget and time for a decent trailer.
While the supporting cast at E3 2021 was larger than ever, those games and studios were never going to draw too much focus away from the traditional headline acts. E3 is a moment in time, an annual snapshot of the industry’s present state and probable future, driven largely, if not entirely, by the performances of the three platform holders. Sure, this year there were only two, with Sony opting to stay away again. But we still learned plenty, despite, and perhaps even from, PlayStation’s absence.
Microsoft’s showing was confident, resolutely on-message and suggesting that the acquisition spree of the past few years is finally starting to bear fruit. It has been firmly positioning Game Pass as the main driver of the Xbox value proposition for years now, but never has it felt this convincing. Of the 30 games shown off, 27 are heading to the subscription service. There are valid concerns around Microsoft’s business model: consolidation has implications for consumer choice – a subscription service for the very concept of ownership. But Game Pass has been good since launch, has only improved from there, and is now so central to the ecosystem that, if you don’t have Game Pass, do you really have an Xbox?
This wasn’t just a showcase for Game Pass, admittedly. It was also another hint at Xbox’s future in the cloud – something Microsoft is moving towards commendably slowly, no doubt mindful of Google’s attempt to give the world something it wasn’t yet ready for with Stadia. PC owners were looked after, too: every single Xbox game shown is also heading to Windows, and in most cases to its incarnation of Game Pass, no longer the awkward cousin of the console version.
But here, the focus was squarely on Xbox, and in particular the newest ones. This was the real coming-out party for the Series line, whose next-gen appeal had previously been dulled by the need for
software to also run on the comparatively weedy Xbox One. Leading the line for Series exclusives was Starfield, Bethesda’s spacefaring RPG. Little was shown in a CG trailer, and Todd Howard might have chosen his introductory words a little more carefully: “Now, for the first time in over 25 years, we’re creating a new universe” wasn’t quite the flex it may have looked on paper. But Starfield is more than just a game – it proves a point, too. After leaning far too heavily on Halo, Forza and Gears in the Xbox One era, Microsoft finally has a big-ticket, exclusive new IP – and plenty more coming down the pipe. The future looks bright.
Nintendo is an old hand at prerecorded broadcasts, and so expectations for its showing were high. Speculation that its E3 line-up would have been hit by the pandemic, given Japan’s wellpublicised struggle to adjust to working from home, proved largely wide of the mark. If anything was hurt it was the Breath Of The
Wild sequel, which was confirmed for 2022 by a cheerily apologetic Eiji Aonuma. Despite that, the Switch schedule looks busy enough in 2021 – only the hardest of hearts could find cause for complaint in a year that heralds the return of Metroid, Advance Wars and WarioWare. Zelda aside, the lone sour note was the non-appearance of the rumoured Switch Pro hardware revision. Its time will come: Nintendo is less reliant on E3 than its peers, given the success of its Direct broadcasts. An August hardware announcement will get just as much attention as one in June.
Indeed, there’s an argument that everything you didn’t like about E3 2021 is Nintendo’s fault. The Direct broadcasts have shown that you don’t need to join in with a big event or employ traditional media channels to get eyeballs on your products. Unsurprisingly, other companies have decided to have a go, and thanks to COVID-19, E3 saw that concept taken to its logical extreme. Certain firms, you fancy, will be hoping for a return to normality next year.
Exactly where PlayStation sits in all this is hard to ascertain. It is difficult, perhaps even unfair, to decry Sony for deciding its future lies away from E3. It may appear to have erred in clearing the floor for Microsoft to give its best E3 showing in years, but it is still selling PS5 consoles as quickly as it can make them, and will continue to do so. And, as blandly corporate as its State Of Play broadcasts are, the Horizon Forbidden West showcase has, at the time of writing, 6.8 million views on the PlayStation YouTube channel alone. By comparison, Microsoft’s repost of its Xbox showcase currently sits at just over 2 million. (A number that, in fairness, does not count any of the many co-streams.)
There are concerns over Sony’s activities, in particular the closure of
Japan Studio, and its messaging: making God Of War: Ragnarok and Horizon for PS4 as well as PS5 makes sound business sense, but it’s hard to square with the emphasis Sony execs put on the importance of generations in the run up to PS5’s launch. Sony’s no-show gave us no opportunity to interrogate any of this, but then that was a recurring theme. This was a week in which developers and publishers spoke directly to players, with the critical filter of the press corps cut almost entirely out of the picture. By and large, the media was only involved if it was putting on its own broadcast.
So, where does this leave us? There are a couple of key themes. The first is that we now have two years’ worth of clear evidence that a year with no E3 is worse than a year with one. Second, the value of the press’s role at this time of year in sorting the wheat from the chaff cannot be understated. You have seen what happens in its absence. Third, having fought Sony for primacy ever since its entry into the videogame business, Microsoft has finally found in Game Pass its blue ocean – a way to gain market share without going toe-to-toe with the market leader.
The three major platform holders have very different ideas of what videogames mean in 2021. For Microsoft, it is an allaccess subscription service that, over time, will become almost completely device-agnostic. For Sony, it is exclusive, $100-million blockbuster games. For Nintendo it is, well, whatever Nintendo feels like doing, from the strange to the sublime. E3 2021 may have spent an awful lot of time telling us not very much at all. But one thing is clear: we are in for a fascinating generation. We’re hoping for the opportunity to examine it from a much tighter zoom at E3 2022.
We now have two years’ worth of clear evidence that a year with no E3 is worse than a year with one