E3 2021 is over and we recap the highlights, highlighting the best and worst. It has been diluted for several days and luckily for Europeans, none of the broadcasts have lasted until late at night unless you want to see several indies.
Table of Contents
The best of E3 2021
Game Pass as the future of Xbox
Microsoft knows that it will never be the king of sold consoles and that at most the Halo franchise has a great flagship game. But your Xbxo Game pass is the Netflix of video games that many want. We are already assured of all the games from Microsoft Game Studios, which are not few; and a huge flow of games that come and go like the Yakuza can be and give us an opportunity to play them without a major investment.
And his conference already demonstrated how viable that model is. They may not be the top selling consoles, but they don't need it when they have Xbox Game Pass on Xbox and on PC.
Nintendo boosts the Nintendo Switch catalog by 2021
A new 2D Metroid, a new Wario Ware, a compilation of the best of Mario Party, Shin Megami Tensei V and the remake of the first two Advance Wars. Before the Nintendo Direct, a very weak 2021 catalog was expected for Nintendo, and this has raised expectations. Of course, all these games have decent sales epro none of them can drag a huge number of sales by itself and quite possibly whoever already wants one of these games already had a Nintendo Switch.
Despite everything, E3 has been exciting
E3 2021 may not have been very special in terms of announcements and programming. But even at its worst, it has managed to be a reason for conversation on social networks, many memes, complaints, a reason to meet on Discord with friends ... It is true that the main idea of E3 to be a show to show the press the news of video games It has become outdated, but it has earned that gap in the calendar as the OScars, the Superbowl, the Olympics, the World Cup or Eurovision. It is still that time of year in which video games are the protagonists of social networks and that is not easy.
The worst of E3 2021
Suddenly everyone wants to be the new Left4Dead or Octopath Traveler
For some reason, it seems like four-player co-op games against hordes of enemies have become all the rage. Left4dead at the time was a Valve smash hit with a sequel that hit the market very quickly, and not much has come out of it since. Maps from the first game were added to make it compatible with what's new, some new campaigns, and then nothing remarkable anymore.
The creators founded Turtle Rock Studio and now they are with the Back 4 Blood game. If it were just that, that would be fine, but we've seen a lot of four-player co-op games, including one made by Arcane, the makers of Prey.
Somewhat less notable is the case of Octopath Traveler copycats using pixelart sprites on HD backgrounds. At the time it seemed like a good artistic section, but it has quickly become a resource to make pixelart, but at the same time it looks like a game in high definition although the light effects collide diametrically with any artistic intention. This is going for the spiritual sequel to Suikoden and a tactical game, and we bet more size developers will follow suit.
The disastrous presentation of Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins
The Final Fantasy series is no stranger to spin offs of genres very different from the JRPG. You can pretty much do any type of title with the franchise and it wouldn't feel weird if you focus right. But Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins was an ad that has gone as badly as possible.
The idea of a Final Fantasy style Ninja Gaiden is very interesting, but the trailer with a very generic character who only says he wants to end Chaos does not inspire much confidence. The same with the launch of its demo on PS5 that was inoperative for a whole day. But after leaving, it looked very promising title, but the first impression could not have been worse.
Bandai Namco only shows one game and it's not the one that people want
Bandai Namco dedicated its entire streaming to talking about The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes, a horror anthology series with very disparate results. He could have talked in depth about the imminent Scarlet Nexus, Tales of Arise, Digimon Survive, new characters from Tekken 7 or Soul Calibur VI ... They had even recently shown a new trailer for Elden Ring. But no, they spent all their time talking about a horror game for which a new trailer was already seen at the Xbox conference.
Capcom shows three games about which there is already a lot of information
Capcom may have been the most disappointing presentation of E3 2021, but Bandai Namco already took that away. That does not mean that Capcom was very uninteresting. They talked about Resident Evil Village, which came out weeks ago, Monster Hunter Stories 2 that was going to have a new trailer in the Nintendo direct and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles that although it is a highly anticipated game, it only interests a very low number of people like to try to be taken into account in a space like E3.
Gearbox tries to be like Return and fails
The Devolver Digital conference, if you can call it that, is a strange experiment in which they turn their game ad broadcasts into a Davyd Lynch series. That characteristic style is what it seems to be what the Gearbox ones have tried to base for its broadcast.
Randy Pitchford, director of Gearbox who has been accused of diverting money to fund Borderlands; He tries to make boss friends with his employees in a series of scenes that are intended to be humorous. The result is a haunting valley. Regarding ads, Homeworld 3 is an equally niche ad and Tiny Tina's Worderlands, even without the factor that it was announced a few days earlier, shows that Gearbox is in a state where it can't or doesn't want to get out of the comfort zone of Borderlands despite Borderlands 3 passing quietly. And it does not say much in their favor that they are bringing the game Godfall, the first exclusive game of PS5 that was advertised.
The effects of the pandemic are already being felt
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the world last year, many predicted that we were going to feel the effects. Working from home is the alternative to paralyzing development, but the effects are being felt. Video games are a product whose development requires many interactions that the Zoom conversations cannot save without leaving consequences.
Developments have dragged on and so 2021 feels like there are hardly any high-caliber games coming out because games early to mid-development have been hit the hardest. This is why every major launch has been relegated to 2022, which will be the year in which the huge flow of major launches could return by summer.
An insufficient online portal
The idea of an E3 from home is tempting, with the possibilities of networking and if it is to attend virtual stands. But the reality is that the portal was in an extremely early stage where the best that worked was the default avatar maker. There was speculation about the possibility of playing demos from home using a streaming service like GeForce but in the end everything was left in a portal that even by the standards of the beginning of the last decade, would have been extremely empty and basic. We hope that by the following year they have managed to bring their idea to fruition.
The conversation of who wins E3 is still latent
We are in the year 2021 and there are still people who ironically or seriously continue with that narrative that E3 is a competition. But we have been at least five years in which all companies have put aside that false sense of competition between E3 attendees, as if someone won a special award for giving the best presentation.
That philosophy of thought is what has given us techniques such as the trailer for Killzone 2 that we were told was real, worse then it was only the goal of the developers, announcements long before their time that then end up being canceled or changed ... And all that without expect that it is unrealistic to expect that, no matter how large the companies are; Nowadays with the long production cycles it is impossible to have a long list of games ready for a conference fixed on the calendar.
