What Happened With E3 2021?

Well, that was a bit of a strange year. We’re now a year on from the faux E3. I thought it worked as a series of weekly showcases, spread out enough. It was rough, there wasn’t that polish we’re used to seeing going wrong with a live crowd, and we still had moments. No “You’re breathtaking,” moments, but we had little things like thinking ill of Ubisoft for their lack of proper action on sexual assault, as revealed that summer. Though this year’s proper digital-only E3 was just so weird.

Slightly undercut by the late to announce Kickoff Live and Summer Games Fest, E3 and its surroundings kicked off early to only take a whole day off before we got back into E3 proper. This is where I think we lost all the energy of the biggest week (or long weekend) in gaming, as we took a day out to dry ourselves off from the Elden Ring reveal. Well, some of us did. Nothing in the full five days of showcases (six if you count the break) picked up the pace and ran right through until the end. We had little things revealed to excite us, but the pacing was all over the place.

If we chop off Geoff Keighley’s bi-monthly advertisements at this point, E3 started with the Wholesome Direct. I don’t know who set out this year’s timetable, but they need to understand how these shows work. For those of us sitting in our pants and sauce drenched shirt from the bacon sandwich made that morning, hopping on Skype or Discord to snark our way through some conferences, it is very different. Sitting at home, only watching the countless conferences and not doing the extracurricular activities of this year’s shows, there is a bubble that forms.

Now, there are slight variations on this opinion throughout our staff with some wanting a slight interview after a game is shown, while others prefer a rapid-fire trailer-focused approach. Either way, different showcases have alternate mindsets to this all of their own, with this year’s being particularly head-spinning. For example, the Wholesome Direct fired game after game after game, then about an hour later the Ubisoft Forward pulled that fun and wholesome energy into a nosedive. Nintendo’s presence this year was the nail in the coffin for all the reasons Ubisoft turned up, and they appeared with nothing to show for themselves other than trailers of tripe, pre-rendered nonsense, and Rabbid Rosalina as their saving grace.

This, sadly, set the tone for what would be the next few days of either the same trailers we’d already seen in other shows or showcases at such length it bored you to sleep. I don’t know a single person who looked at that Rainbow Six Extraction (renamed from Quarantine) and was excited for E3 and what it was going to show. By the time we got to the PC Gaming show a day later, hopes weren’t growing either. The entire exhibit showed both a lack of coherency and a horrid pace. With a touch less of a reliance on lengthy interviews to fill out space and a bit of talking between directors and producers of these shows, we might have had something less soul-destroying.

While I have that thread hanging in the air, I’ll take this time to talk about the PC Gaming Show: The show that broke me in 2015. I didn’t think you could make a show that was even close to how disastrous that first PC Gaming was at the time, but it turns out I was wrong. All they had to do was add in an interconnected plotline that was adhered to as laws are in a theater of war. One minute Sean Plott and the new woman that I can’t remember the name of for the life of me were transported to earth, the next minute, they were back on their ships for interviews, sometimes. It was a complete mess of a show.

How anyone saw that as fit for human consumption, I don’t know. Nevertheless, we continued on and it all went a bit wrong, with Take-Two broadcasting their HR meeting and not telling many people about it, Capcom just gave updates to titles, and Bandai Namco showed off a bit for their horror property no one cares about. The whole thing was a mismatch of dire straits, waiting for Nintendo to save us on the last day with exciting games and announcements. It makes me question, who is running this ship? As I saw an iceberg after day-1.

Of course, you can’t pin this on one person alone. Different publishers/developers had different directors and editors carving up their pre-recorded shows. Which, much like a season of TV, can lead to different feelings being brought across in every show we sat down to watch. One thing that can’t be helped, no matter how much people moan about it, is the lack of crowds. Often bringing their own energy into a show, they can cause nerves to flare up in less experienced developers and producers on the stage. This is one of the many reasons I think it created a rather flat show from most of the presentations we were given.

I’d also like to hold the amount of preparation given to each of the individual presentations and presenters to the wall for its part in this year’s dry showing. Last year, everything felt a bit cobbled together and it had its charm. Spread out (as I said) it worked to make for a less stressful showing. This year’s proper Digital-E3 was far more prepared for, kinks were ironed out, and ultimately a lot of preparation had gone into every aspect. You could feel that the post-production, which most of E3 doesn’t have, was increased this year.

However, in talks over this issue, one question came up: COVID-19? It can’t be denied that in some small part, the COVID-19 pandemic which caused last year’s show to be canceled, and copious stay-at-home orders changed how we all worked. That resulted in a wide range of changes to how the development of games progressed, and plays into following years. Moreover, we saw a few delays come through the COVID-19 crisis. So it would be stupid to off-handedly dismiss this being, if not the leading cause, one of many. That’s why I don’t think it is the main cause.

Though it might not feel like it, we’re also in the midst of one of the biggest changes in the console gaming market. With the PS5 and Xbox Series X supposed to target 60FPS and/or 4K, there is a seismic displacement of what was established through the years prior. It would just help if someone told developers and publishers this sometime before 2020. Joking aside, the PS5 and Xbox Series X aren’t making the impact you’d expect with such a shift taking place. Sales of the PS5 are high, but demand is much higher. Meanwhile, your leading titles on the PS5 are Demon’s Souls (a remake), Returnal (a triple-A Rogue-like), and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart (a staple of future gaming). What does the Series X have?

This was the year that Microsoft (and Bethesda) had to pull something out of the bag, other than the disinterred corpse of the once-mighty Bethesda before Fallout 76 ruined that legacy. Despite this lack of anything meaningful to show for itself, fans that cling to franchises that crawl along the floor disemboweled from their own glory, heralded them as silencing the critics. Nah mate, Halo: Infinite looks like a cheap PS3 game made by two blokes in their bedrooms in two weeks. All the while, Forza Horizon 5 looks amazing, as all car games tend to when they have nothing else to render but “fast-car go zoom!”

Meanwhile, on the horizon, there seems to be a whole load of nothing that is first-party and raising the flag of either PlayStation or Xbox. As Nintendo stands in the corner with the underpowered Nintendo Switch outpacing them both with an Advance Wars remaster, Metroid Dread, and another Zelda all coming within the next 16-months. We’ve still to see anything proper of Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6 (“Skyrim 2”) has only had a logo shown, and Redfall looked like another Left 4 Dead with magic. I’ve got so many Left 4 Dead-likes I can wallpaper my office with them. Sony hums the God of War (2018) theme to itself waiting for another million people to ask about Ragnarok.

This year’s E3 has been the causality of several things, for which I don’t think one thing can be held responsible over the others. The shows being in completely the wrong order, the lack of energy, no crowds, copious amounts of polish, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the cross-generation gap all played their parts. Our expectations were set to be that of other years, where we’ve seen the hyped-up crowds, we’ve seen hiccups of a live show, and expect something big in a cross-generation year. We just lacked any of that and no one thought to temper those expectations. To take a now trite phrase from the wrestling world, we worked ourselves up into a shoot.