We’re onto our third event at E3 2018, Bethesda’s E3 Showcase. Here are my notes from their press event.
Pete Hines’ Late Nite Comedy Special Pete Hines opened the show on his weird stage that put him in the middle of the crowd. He joked, pointedly, about the Rage 2 leak from Walmart Canada and introduced Rage 2.
Rage 2
When Hines said he was going to introduce Rage, we got Andrew W.K. instead of a trailer. W.K. and his band musically asked the audience if they were “ready to rage” and if they were “ready to kill” and “ready to die.” After the impromptu one-sided musical interview, Tim Willits from id and Magnus Nedfors from Avalanche Studios (they’re the ones actually developing Rage 2) appeared on-stage. They were extremely awkward, but not in a terrible way. Instead, you just feel bad for them that nobody is clapping during their pauses for audience response.
Eventually, Willits and Nedfors introduced the Rage 2 trailer you can watch above. It’s a little strange that Rage is getting a sequel, it wasn’t well received, but I really appreciated some of the art in the game. The post-apocalyptic theme is also a little strange when you think about Bethesda having not one, but two post-apocalypse universes to keep track of with Fallout 76.
Of course, where Fallout can take its time to let you wander around the wastelands of America, Rage is more about a Mad Max style of quick, chaotic, open-world first-person shooting. The game made quick cuts between different scenes and adopts a kind of purple screen tone adjustment whenever the protagonist Walker gets really angry. There was an odd break to an infomercial screen on a computer monitor in-game that told us about some ridiculous collector’s edition of Rage 2. Supposedly it includes a wall-mounted, talking, decapitated head of a mutant.
Rage 2 will be out some time in Spring 2019 for Windows, PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One.
The Elder Scrolls Legends
It was a delight to see a fellow online community manager speaking for a game when Christian Van Hoose appeared on-stage after Rage 2 to talk about The Elder Scrolls Legends. Unfortunately I have no interest in a free-to-play Elder Scrolls CCG, but apparently it’ll be re-launching with overhauled visuals “soon.” Console ports will also be brought to the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4. It’s already on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
The Elder Scrolls Online
Game Director Matt Firor showed up on-stage to talk about The Elder Scrolls Online‘s MMORPG successes and to announce a new “dungeon DLC” called Wolfhunter “…based on werewolves.” They’re also going to release a new story DLC called Murkmire about the Argonians. The ESO folks have a blog post where you can read a little bit more about those here. Both of these expansions will be out later this year, without any specific date given. ESO has been out for four years now. It’s on Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Doom Eternal
Hugo Martin and Marty Stratton from id showed up on-stage to introduce Doom Eternal, their new sequel to Doom (2016). They promised more of everything in the game, and more details at QuakeCon on August 10th.
Quake Champions
Another online community manager on-stage talking about their game. Joshua Boyle promised more tournaments at QuakeCon and DreamHack Winter. He also told the audience that you could get free access to the free-to-play game through the 17th of June. It’s a game that I want to give another shot, but I didn’t especially care for the free-to-play nature of it with lootboxes and other garbage along with character-specific powers when I first tried it. Quake 3 is still my favorite Quake, but you probably know that by now.
Prey: Mooncrash
Arkane’s Susan Kath and Ricardo Bare introduced a free update to Prey via a pre-recorded video. It’s out now, and it has three new modes. Story Mode, New Game+, and a Survival Mode.
Kath and Bare also introduced a new DLC coming out for Prey called Mooncrash that’s supposed to be infinitely replayable. They said the “hazards, enemies, and loot” would be different each time you play. The trailer demonstrated that each death resets the game world to a fresh state. That makes it sound a lot like a roguelike. Mooncrash is a $20 add-on to Prey that requires the base game, it’s available now on Steam for Windows, PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One.
Kath and Bare appeared on-stage after the Mooncrash trailer to talk about Typhon Hunter, a one-versus-five mimics multiplayer addition to Mooncrash. It’ll be out “later this summer.”
Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Jerk Gustafsson and Jens Matthies from Machine Games showed up to talk about Wolfenstein 2 on the Nintendo Switch on June 29th, and a game about BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters set in their version of 1980’s Paris.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood will be a single-player or co-op game for two players to play the daughters. BJ narrates the teaser trailer and says that “To survive you’ll have to embrace the suffering.” it’ll be out in 2019.
Virtual Reality Stuff
Pete Hines returned to talk VR. He said that Prey’s Typhon Hunter multiplayer would be available in VR, and it’ll also have a single-player experience where Transtar employees will solve puzzles aboard Talos 1, the space station from Prey.
Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot was also announced, it’s a VR game where you’re a hacker that takes over Nazi robots. “In our never-ending quest to bring our message of ‘Fuck Nazis’ to every platform possible.” Here’s a trailer for it. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot will be out some time in 2019:
Bethesda Game Studios
Some of the following portions of the show weren’t excerpted into their own videos, this video above contains everything those portions of the event. The details for it on YouTube have pointers to different sections.
Skyrim: Very Special Edition
Pete Hines brought Todd Howard out to make some jokes about E3 before introducing the latest version of Skyrim. Spoiler: The trailer above introduces a silly interactive fiction version of the game for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. I believe this is something that you can play with today if you have an Alexa-enabled smart-speaker if you let the internet’s version of Wal-Mart into your home.
Fallout 76’s Rumors Were Right: It’s All Online
Todd Howard again said that Fallout 76 is four times the size of Fallout 4 and still set in the hills of West Virginia. Ron Perlman’s narration over the trailer tells us that “…in Vault 76, our future begins.” Howard spoke after the trailer this time to talk a little bit more about Vault 76, telling us that this was one of the first vaults to open and the people inside were there for just 25 years.
Another trailer plays, this time it is a gameplay trailer that shows us a little bit of what it looks like to wake-up on Reclamation Day when 76’s vault dwellers are supposed to wake up and leave to reclaim the earth.
Todd Howard tells us that there is “new rendering, lighting, and landscape technology” with “16 times the detail” that lets you view weather systems from across the map. This means it’s still the same janky engine but with new graphical bullshit. Howard also says that West Virginia “… is where the actual nuclear secrets are.” and that “The quest the overseer sends you on will take you through six distinct regions…”
Howard confirms the rumors and says that “Fallout 76 is entirely online” and that every character you meet in the game will a real person. Howard also said that you’ll be able to play the game single-player. “We’ve always wanted to see what our style of game would be with multiplayer” I believe that’s giving short-shrift to The Elder Scrolls Online, even though this isn’t a very similar game. Howard says that it’s a soft-core open-world survival game where “Death never means the loss of progression or the loss of your character.”
About the online, “you’ll be in a world with dozens, not hundreds and not thousands of other players.”
“You’ll decide the heroes and you’ll decide the villains.”
A short trailer plays that demonstrates teams of players rolling through the wasteland. Howard says that you can “build wherever you want” and a trailer plays that demonstrates how you can build anywhere with a Vault-Tec C.A.M.P. device, which I would guess might actually limit the radius around which you can build, to keep the jank away.
Howard then promises multiple nuclear weapon sites on the map that you can use. A trailer plays that tells us how to acquire launch codes and target nukes on the map and find rewards from the resulting destruction.
Howard says “we’ve built a platform with 100% dedicated servers that will support this game now and for years to come,” but that there would be a beta available later this year because Bethesda recognizes that their games sometimes ship with software bugs. Let’s be honest, at this point a beta is a glorified demo and an incentive companies use to encourage pre-orders of games of unknown quality.
Then Howard talked about the collector’s edition of the game that would include a glow-in-the-dark map of the new game’s world, figures, and a T-51b power armor helmet. It can make your voice sound weird and has a headlamp. There’s even a trailer just for that version of the game which you can watch here:
Fallout 76 will be out on November 14th, 2018 for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows.
Fallout Shelter
Howard said the free-to-play game is coming to the PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch. These versions are out now. Todd Howard says that more people have played Fallout Shelter than any other Bethesda game.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades
Todd Howard announced a new free-to-play first-person RPG for mobile devices with “console-quality graphics.” The controls are supposed to be adaptable to tap-to-move or swiping and tapping gestures, and the game works in portrait mode as well as landscape. I think that’s pretty smart because I, at least, tend to avoid any landscape mobile games.
The game is supposed to have a few different modes. Abyss is a “rogue-like experience” with an endless dungeon, there’s a multiplayer 1-on-1 arena, and the main mode is in town mode. It has stories and quests and you can build the town.
Howard then said that the game would be available wherever they can make it work, including desktop computers, consoles, and virtual reality headsets. Apparently this is all a shared game world across platforms, good luck getting Sony to play nice with that.
Starfield
Todd Howard introduced a new single-player game called Starfield with a very short announcement trailer. Howard says they’ve been working on it for years and doesn’t say anything else about the game.
The Elder Scrolls VI
I hope you like mountains because that’s all we get about this today.
Overall
Bethesda is a strange publisher and developer. They love to talk about kicking Nazi ass when they talk about Wolfenstein, but our national embarrassment’s younger brother, Robert Trump, sits on Zenimax’s board. If Zenimax hates Nazis so much then Robert Trump needs to go.
Of the games they showed, I’m a little less interested in the Prey expansion than I was before I knew about it, Mooncrash now that I know what it is. $20 is a lot to pay for what looks a little bit like a new mode in Prey, but the Steam page for that expansion makes it sound more interesting.
Fallout 76 is very ambitious, but it looks like the same engine at the core as Fallout 4, which is not good, and I’m not sure that I’m very interested in the game unless it has story. Fallout 4’s story was incredibly disappointing and I dropped out of the game after it wouldn’t let me proceed with it in the way I wanted after the game revealed its biggest turn. I’d really like another Fallout spin-off with a lot of story like New Vegas, but it’s possible that 76 will be good as an open-world survival game for people that are into that. I haven’t been that interested in it.
The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield are both interesting but we don’t really know anything about them.