Experience Point #2 - Summer Games Fest 2022 (Patreon)

So another year and yet another online, digital-only "festival" of video game announcements. Call me a "boomer" but I yearn for the days when E3 ruled the hype landscape and every single publisher, developer and magazine brought their A-game in order to get eyeballs on whatever they had planned for the upcoming year.

Thanks to Covid, everything had to become very impersonal but I really think this is likely to be the way things stay. Why bother arranging a booth or a fancy presentation when you can just stick 12 cinematic trailers back to back?

From the actual Summer Games Fest presentation, fronted by the ever-young Geoff Keighley, we actually got relatively little in the way of exciting or major announcements. Games that we already knew were in development like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Warhammer DarkTide and the One Piece JRPG got bigger trailers and a few smaller indie titles were announced but really there was a lack of a big WOW moment.

Maybe it was supposed to be the reveal of the Last of Us 1 remake but as this had leaked weeks ago, it again fell somewhat flat.

I've got to be honest, I really struggle to get excited about the idea of playing through this game for what would be the fourth time (once with a friend on release, once when I got a PS3 and then again when it was released on PS4) and it really makes me question what people are happy to accept for £75. Screenshots certainly make it look like a serious upgrade in the looks department but I fundamentally don't understand chasing that goal when in 5 years' time - we'll look back at TLOU1 on PS5 and think it looks dated.

If Resident Evil 1 Remake and Final Fantasy 7 Remake showed that these kinds of popular reboot games can be ambitious and inventive - Naughty Dog have 100% chosen the easy route out and I would not be surprised to see another TLOU remake before 2030.

Ironically, the way to do this sort of thing was shown by the returning Glen Schofield, who brought with him footage of The Callitso Protocol which is essentially just Dead Space 4.

It's a series I hold close to my heart and would love more than anything for this to do well and prove to developers that you can just reform and create a spiritual successor to your mega-publisher cancelled series. Just imagine a world where Pandemic developers reform and put out a spiritual successor to Destroy All Humans? or where Lionhead developers are able to put out a "not Fable" Fable 4.

As for the actual game? Well it looks so similar to Dead Space 1 that it could literally be a remake; which makes me think I'm more excited about the promise of what it could represent, rather than the actual game itself.

Later in the weekend, Xbox and Bethesda took over proceedings and we got a look at the hundreds of billions of games that are releasing on Game Pass over the next few months.

Again, my ambivalence took over and I pretty much went glass-eyed at the lack of anything to really get excited about - until we saw Starfield...

Now given the game has been in development for what feels like 10 years, I had thought that what we'd see at this critical juncture would be somewhat more impressive and I'm left with a sense that this game may have had a more difficult development than Bethesda have let on.

What's disturbed me is a growing concept that "it's okay that it looks very janky, the modding community will fix that" which to me strikes a very dangerous tone for future development. We already have an industry happy to put out broken, buggy games and fix them months after launch so this idea that now the developer themselves shouldn't even have to do this and that fans of the games should have to deliver some sort of free break-fix service takes it to a whole new level of absurd.

Beyond the obvious technical issues (which admittedly there is plenty of time to fix), what strikes me is just how barren the game looks.

My two favourite pieces of Bethesda's work are Morrowind and the Shivering Isles DLC for Oblivion which meant I was desperately disappointed by the lack of imagination or intrigue on show.  Video games are at their very best when they are delivering worlds that show off incredible creativity and I'm not sure I get that sense from Starfield. Thousands of procedurally generated worlds sounds fantastic on paper but sometimes no amount of quantity can compare to a truly original, highly designed space.

Capcom capped off the weekend's events (like the pun?) with a showcase of their upcoming games that somehow managed to disappoint on a whole new level.

Somehow Dragon's Dogma 2 remains unannounced and ExoPrimal continues to blue ball fans of Dino Crisis desperate for that franchise to make it's return. Just imagine how us fans of Breath of Fire feel - Capcom has been holding out on us for almost 20 years.

Most of the coverage centred on Resident Evil with the inevitable Village DLC getting a release date and Resident Evil 4 Remake being shown off for the first time.

Once again, call me a grumpy sod, but I am struggling to understand the point of this game and really can't believe that this is where the industry has ended up. Resident Evil 4 is still a supremely playable game, available on almost every modern console and just as fun as it was back on release. Unlike Resident Evil 2 and 3, which remain locked away on older hardware and admittedly, are somewhat of an acquired taste from a gameplay perspective, I just don't see the need for 4 to receive the HD treatment.

I'd much prefer to see that extended to Code Veronica, a Resident Evil game that could honestly really use a remake, fixing some of its jagged edges and bringing it to a new audience. Sadly though, 4 Remake is a cold reminder that video game remakes exist to resell us things that are guaranteed to be popular, rather than because there is any artistic drive or even popular demand for it.

What's even worse is that I'll likely end up playing it just like all the others and my bellyaching and moaning will have all been for nothing - but I suppose that's the world we live in. Our voices have never been louder but by the time they reach the important ears, they are lost in a sea of infinite echoes. 

Might as well just accept it and try to enjoy it - who knows maybe Leon will say the bingo line after all.