Tuesday 19 June 2018

The Horror Games of E3 2018 Round-Up


So I try and do one of these blog posts every year after the annual E3 video game show has been on. Now my body seems to have forgotten how to get rest from sleeping for the past few weeks and so I am exhausted, but I decided this year I would do twenty blog posts a month and so I find myself doing one tonight which may appear to be filler. In past years for E3 I have headed to the Wikipedia page to do a round-up based on the list contained there. To be different, and due to the aforementioned tiredness I am only going to mention the ones I personally saw at the press conferences I watched on the internets, so excuse me for missing anything too important out!

Before I begin I should also mention this will probably a scattershot approach to these rather than covering them conference by conference. So there is to be a new Fallout game titled Fallout 76. This was revealed before the event and initially I was excited for this is to be a prequel to the other games set around 30 years after nuclear Armageddon hit the globe. This time around the setting is West Virginia and it is reported to be four times the map size of Fallout 4's game. That is where the excitement dies for me though as this is going to be an online only game that is apparently a blend of base building and survival. While I like the idea of there being actual story missions in the game I don't like the idea of random strangers constantly killing me, and I found the base building aspect of Fallout 4 to be as dull as dishwater.


On the subject of sequels there were many revealed this year including Halo Infinite which didn't get much more than a teaser trailer. I heard a rumour this is going to also be an online only game. Gears of War 5 is coming, this time around it seems you will be playing as a man and a woman who have headed off into the wastelands for some sort of personal quest. Truth be told I haven't got around to playing most the series, I loved Gears of War, I didn't really enjoy the second game and so despite owning the third and the prequel I haven't touched them yet. I do mean to remedy that (and play the fourth one) so maybe if I do them in time I will get some excitement for this. Metro: Exodus was shown off for a second year in a row, this is a sequel to Metro 2033 (excellent) and Metro: First Light (a bit disappointing). For the third game you are going on a grand adventure above the surface of the nuclear wasteland of Russia. The claustrophobia of the tunnels, and the poisoned surface requiring you to wear a gas mask were both very cool concepts before, while this looks fantastic I hope there is still plenty of suffocating horror here.

Yet more sequel news now and an unexpected one in the form of Dying Light 2, a sequel to a game I never thought would be made. This one seems to take place in the near future in an apocalyptic looking ruined city. While this was great news I was a bit concerned that the demo shown off didn't seem to actually feature many zombies, I fear that they only appear at night as the super zombies now, with it just being gangs of hostile humans during the day. Also unexpected was the news that Prey was releasing some DLC in the form of Mooncrash which as the title might suggest takes place on a moon base. Apparently this DLC is slightly roguelike in that the layout changes each times you play it giving plenty of replay value. A sequel to the most recent re-boot of Doom got a teaser trailer, this one is called Doom Eternal and looks set to be set on a demon infested Earth. Doom 3 is one of my favourite games of all time and so while I didn't like the emphasis on action over plot that the re-boot went for this is still a game I am hyped for. The same goes for The Elder Scrolls VI that got announced. I loved Skyrim at the time but got sick of it after the million re-releases, however I have been playing The Elder Scrolls Online for over a year now and love that so would be very interested to see how this one turns out.


A gameplay demo for The Last of Us 2 was shown, it seems to be more of the same for sure but I am most certainly on board for this. It appears that Ellie will be the main character this time around, the demo showed her stealthing around a bunch of goons in a forest. A demo was also shown for Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The first game in the latest reboot was a stunning piece of survival horror adventuring, but the sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider ditched the horror part to just be action. It is hard to say at this point if the horror will return or not so I am not too interested in this currently.

I will end this splurge of news on Resident Evil 2 the remake. This had a really cool demo which looks astounding. Rather than be a straight up remake this is instead a re-imagining with a different feeling of playing, based on the over the shoulder view of the later Resident Evil games rather than fixed camera angles. It looks like it is going to be very atmospheric and bloody and so I am hyper excited for this one.  I thought this years E3 was not bad at all, while there wasn't any announcements which really blew my mind it was good to get a deeper look at some of the games I'm excited to play.

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