Well, tarnation. We weren't expecting out-of-towners at the gamer ranch this weekend, but seein' as you came by, why don't you grab a rope, and we'll get to lassoin' the most fascinatin' games of Not E3's big publisher conferences? You won't mind if I jump around with the topics a little. That's the way we get things done around these parts.

Sony

Between Concord, Marvel Rivals, and FragPunk, you have to wonder just how many hero shooters the market can support, especially because there's already warranted scepticism over how many live service games can simultaneously operate. Then again, almost anything with "Marvel" on the title screen is destined for success, and the Overwatch format hasn't shown any signs of dwindling appeal yet. Players feeling burned by the gluttonous microtransactions of Overwatch 2 might also be looking for an alternative. Concord's weekly cutscenes further promise more consistent characterisation than the competition does. Its characters are so close to those of Guardians of the Galaxy that they're trading paint, and I think that's interesting. Bootlegs of popular products have existed forever: Giana Sisters, Dave Soap, Robert Cop, but you're not meant to make one if you're a company with enough money to open a Sony product preview. Ubisoft had Star Wars: Outlaws as their starting pistol, and you got Firewalk Studios over here doing Hollywood-budget Ratatoing.

I don't believe animes should talk in these trailers because when they do, it sounds like someone's putting a gun to their head and telling them to "sound enthusiastic". This was the case for Infinity Nikki and Monster Hunter: Wilds. There was some Mario Odyssey-ass jazz in the Infinity Nikki section, though, and it was perhaps the first time anyone's put the phrase "Bubbly Voyage" to page. The Monster Hunter: Wilds preview, meanwhile, had scads of screentime for that creature with the tongue. I'd love to see more of the guy with the tongue.

Sony is putting in more elbow grease than any other games company to keep VR relevant. Unlike Nintendo and Microsoft, they have a stake in the hardware in addition to the software. But I'm afraid that the virtual reality blocks in these shows are the new motion control segments. A lot of viewers report checking out during these sequences, and it's no mystery why. You've got specialist peripherals owned by only a subset of viewers, and the games for them struggle to be as fully realised as any of the more traditional experiences in the same medium. It was just the same for the Kinect and PlayStation Move. It's like the industry has a motor here that they believe has untapped reserves of power, but no one's quite sure how to jump-start it.

No hate to Path of Exile, but it is one of those odd pieces of entertainment that has a massive fanbase that is often completely invisible to the general gaming audience. Its couch co-op mode reminds me of sitting in a friend's bedroom playing Gauntlet on the PS2.

Sony's showing this summer wasn't anything to write home about, and I've seen that explained away by the manufacturer's admittance that they aren't shipping first-party juggernauts before March 2025, but what did we just learn from Keighley's showcase? When you don't have the AAAs, you sub in some products off the beaten track. Sony isn't incapable of understanding that: look at the December 2023 State of Play. Can we see the thing with the tongue again?

Ubisoft

This year's Ubisoft Forward was nowhere near the worst, but that's not saying much. To no one's surprise, the thick bookends of the briefing were Star Wars: Outlaws and Assassin's Creed: Shadows. I'm not a Star Wars guy, and if you don't have an affinity for Lucas's original trilogy, it often feels like the series is speaking a different language. That's because it feeds audiences on a diet of nostalgia. Just seeing the lightsaber or the sands of Mos Eisley is meant to be a treat before anything happens with them, and if those memes don't hit that sweet spot for you, it all washes over your brain. More gameplay sequences at Not E3 are, broadly, a plus, but you also don't need an education on the mechanics of most Ubisoft games because you've played these titles before. You unlock regions of the map, you go to a compound of patrolling goons in those regions, you sneak through the shadows or water or long grass and knock out some enemies until one spots you, and then you do some minimalist melee or cover shooter combat.

My relationship with AAA open-world games is complicated. People talk about derivativeness in media as a purely negative thing, but when I play a Horizon or an Assassin's Creed, it's not that their rigorously standardised design disgusts me as much as it does fill me up for a long time after. To me, it would make sense if the medium had a lot of smaller games with homogenous mechanics or a few big games with diverse mechanics because, in either of those scenarios, the same sets of rules and tools wouldn't get overplayed. Instead, what we have is a lot of massive games imitating each other. If I've just spent three months hunting collectables and ascending talent trees, the last thing I need is ten more packages to come out that will fill my next three months with the same.

With voluminous base content, live events, and regular updates, many AAA games are pushing to monopolise the audience's time. You'll note that this is the opposite of what's been happening in video, social media, and mobile games. It was understood that in an increasingly busy world where a person might have hundreds of shiny baubles vying for their attention in a given week, the way to get your media experienced was not asking the user to put forty hours into a single product in the space of a month. It was micro-blogs in the form of tweets and short-form videos like TikToks and Vines. Even mobile games live and breathe on the concept of you being able to squeeze in a single blip of one when you're riding the bus or in the couple of minutes before bed. I'm not saying the maximalist AAA strategy is financially non-viable, but I am saying it's a lot.

It's not just the interactivity that tends to be generic in these smash-hit games; it's also the factions. That's where XDefiant baffles me. Ensemble fighters like Brawhalla and Super Smash Bros. justify themselves through the contrast between characters like Spongebob and John Cena or Banjo and Kirby. A lot of high-fidelity action games (action in the sense of action films), however, contain the same fungible, ill-defined paramilitaries. XDefiant unites Echelon from Splinter Cell, the Phantoms from Ghost Recon, and the GSK from Rainbow Six all on one bill, but these armies have virtually identical attitudes, styles, and plans of action, so what's the point? This isn't Alien vs. Predator; this is Alien vs. Alien vs. A Third Alien.

Ubisoft then has all these games and series on the back burner that they keep updating or making sequels to even when I've never met or even heard of someone being enthused about them. I'm talking about Skull & Bones, Riders Republic, or The Crew, the last of which is now on its third tour. I wanted to like The Crew, but the driving physics were never tight enough, and the RPG customisation clashed with its skill element. The Crew 1 was glitchy, and its world was soulless, while The Crew 2 was trying to simulate so many different kinds of racing at once, it didn't give any of them the attention they deserved. I also saw someone in the Giant Bomb chat make the point that if you are a publisher with an alleged history of abuse by management, maybe don't have a subsidiary called "Ivory Tower".

Then we gots that reaction reel to the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora DLC. EA used this mode of marketing before, and it's insulting to the viewer. It believes they'll prescribe to this bonehead logic of "Maybe if the guy inside the computer likes the product, I like the product too". The Ubisoft conference should just turn on your webcam and put your face in a box captioned with "Person who wants to play Skull & Bones".

Microsoft

At Xbox, Matt Booty spat on our heads and told us it was raining, professing Microsoft's love for their devs even as it lays them off en masse. And something's gone awry in the kingdom of Albion. It's four years since the new Fable was announced at an Xbox showcase, and yet we're still seeing pre-rendered trailers instead of gameplay. This would square with reports since 2021 that Playground's inexperience in RPGs, their engine, studio departures, and the uncertainty in their vision for the game was holding back progress. Look, I like Richard Ayoade, I like Matt King, but Matt King is not a video game.

I'm all out of venom now. Mostly. The Diablo IV trailer reminded me of the tyrannical dream monsters and hell plains of Stranger Things and did anyone else hear the Digital Devolver jingle in the Age of Mythology theme? A Perfect Dark sequel is a wonderful idea, not so much because I want more of the levels from the original and Zero, but because those shooters haven't aged particularly well. We're due for a refresh, and this time, Joanna's missions take place out in a bustling world instead of in paranoid, isolated locations. Utopian skyscrapers and Middle Eastern architecture were blanketed by a thick arboreal canopy. If DICE isn't going to be using the Mirror's Edge parkour anymore, Rare will be doing top work by continuing its legacy in this techno-thriller.

When Microsoft stopped featuring ID @ Xbox prominently at their events, I was disappointed, but Game Pass has been a vector for Microsoft to directly fund and distribute mid-tier and indie games. This has brought innovative creations back into the limelight of the Xbox Showcases. I can't wait for The Mixtape's sardonic 90s teens and knowingly-curated soundtrack. In case you missed it, it's The Artful Escape studio behind this one, so I'm expecting big things. With Judero, Phoenix Springs, and South of Midnight also at the show, we had four stop-motion-styled games in this year's previews.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a larger sandbox for Dontnod to explore the "alternate reality" concept they toyed with in chapter 4 of Life is Strange, although I'll take some convincing that Max Caulfield needs another starring role. I can see the pitch: the first game used Max's photography as a metaphor for time travel, and this revival uses the composition of pictures as an allegory for creating an alternate universe. The dual timelines may also be a clever solution to deal with Life is Strange 1's endings that branch in completely different directions, seeming to preclude any continuity. But we did already have a point-and-click novel about Max Caulfield trying to turn back and clock on the death of her friend and futily attempting to avoid the excruciating pain of loss. Double Exposure would seem to have her trying to learn a lesson she already has.

Speaking of Indys, we got a lengthy reveal for a new Harrison Ford rendering test. Shorts timeslots, games remaining half-built during development, and a desire for a prestigious tone has meant that you see a lot of trailers with characters breathily monologuing about their epic destinies. No one is impressed by hearing that there's a bunch of really cool, important stuff going to happen that we don't get to see now. What I liked about the Indian John preview was that we witnessed a full-length scene in Indy's story, which told us more about what to expect from the narrative than the pre-amble about historical monuments. The Great Circle looks to understand the task of adapting source material not just as porting the characters and subject matter but also the scripting and pacing. I wonder how it plays. It could be that we may have gone full circle from Indiana Jones inspiring Uncharted to Uncharted inspiring Indiana Jones.

I'm interested to see how the industrial sci-fi oddities of Atomfall interact with its rural British culture. You usually only get to see atomic alternate histories in the context of the US, Russia, or Ukraine. You might interested to know that the leak of nuclear material at the "Windscale plant" mentioned in the trailer really happened. It's not very well known about in the UK, but Windscale was a smaller-impact British equivalent to Chernobyl, complete with early warning signs that went ignored and government cover-ups in the name of public image.^[1] There will be curious looky-loos bummed to find out that Atomfall isn't a Fallout 4-like but a survival crafting game. As for actual Fallout, it feels like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 had a better sense of how to tune its tone in comparison. Increasingly, Bethesda's RPG lionises the 40s cultural conservatism it was designed to criticise, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 doesn't look to be an environment of whimsical wartime pop and Fancy Lad Snackcakes, but one of squalid despair.

Lastly, my Gears opinions are weird. I don't think the series gets all that special until 3 when it's able to shed some of its hypermasculinity, get some colour in its cheeks, and loosen up its movement a bit. When Microsoft put out a remastered Gears, it didn't get much love and I think there's a reason for that. The last GoW I played was 4, which ends with probably the best sequence in the series: Your whole squad becomes giant robots, and buildings are your new chest-high walls. I've held off on playing 5, not because I don't want more Gears but because I wanted to save donning the doo rag one last time for a special occasion. Now, I no longer have to wait. At the Xbox conference, the soft may have been micro, but my satisfaction was large.

Loose Bits

Let's go quickfire through some more gems in the indie cabinet:

If there's one small creation at this Not E3 you must check out it's Screenbound. We often think of 2D projections as reductionist cross-sections of a 3D world, e.g. In The Allegory of the Cave, but Screenbound has this fascinating viewpoint wherein the 3D and 2D are impressions of each other, but neither contains all the details. Therefore, you need to maintain awareness of both.

Lok is an extension of word games like Wordle and word searches but with an ingenious twist I've never seen in the centuries of the format: it uses a bespoke language made just for the game.

I love glitch art, but its deployment can feel only skin deep. Psychroma uses blocky colour separation as a metaphor for detachment from your identity and world. If you're miserable about the number of games at the show that won't arrive this year, know that Psychroma is already available on Steam.

Light Odyssey asks, "What if the Shadow of the Colusses could move fast and guarded a brutalist environment?", dragging the concept of hulking dark giants kicking and screaming down to bullet hell.

There's a new boutique title coming out called Black Ops 6, and it's all about rolling around on the floor like a scrungly boy.

N.O.D.E. is the spitting image of Inside, but its play is more like Quadrilateral Cowboy, which had you type out code for a remote-controllable robot and then run it. Both games have distinct setup and execute phases rather than simply being real-time or turn-based, but N.O.D.E. looks a little more approachable than Cowboy in that it's using stock logic modules instead of asking you to write the program. You already see a similar approach in beginner software development tools like Game Maker and Scratch.

Don't forget to Schim! There are various examples of interactive media playing with that "floor is lava" game from our childhoods, but I'd also sometimes pretend that the light or shadows were the only place I could stand. Schim makes it oh-so-real. I hope the gameplay finds a lot of avenues for that core mechanic to take, but either way, I love how the whole game looks like a Lego instruction manual.

Lastly, we have Phoenix Springs, and I know this one is unique because I'm not sure how to put its art style into words; I have few points of comparison for it. A black backdrop is frequently visible behind its rushing fields of colour. However, the colouring on the models cleanly divides light from shadow. A point-and-click with an inventory of thoughts instead of items lends itself to investigation and conversation over playing with in-world mechanisms.

Conclusion

Well, that's it. The campfire's out, the horses are back in the barn, and you'll want to be moseying on out of here until next summer. All told, it was a mighty fine year for us at Not E3. Let's hope next time, it can be brighter year for the developers, too. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Inside Story: Our Reactor is on Fire (1990). Produced by Denys Blakeway. BBC