Sony’s much anticipated E3 style preview event was full of new games but few of them were by Sony and none of them stole the show.
Although they’ve had some smaller State of Play livestreams in the interim, it’s essentially been two years since Sony had a major preview showcase, of the sort they used to hold around E3 time in June. The PlayStation Showcase on Wednesday night was implied to be a return to those times and in terms of its structure and the number of announcements it was, so… why was it so underwhelming?
One of the most obvious problems was the heavy reliance on pre-rendered footage, with the vast majority of trailers starting with the dreaded phrase ‘not actual gameplay.’ That’s not uncommon for Sony (or Microsoft) but usually fans let that slide because it accompanies the announcement of a major new exclusive, but the only new games from Sony themselves were PvP (and probably live service) titles like heist game Fairgame$ and Bungie’s new Marathon.
The only big name first party game of the night was Spider-Man 2, which still didn’t get a release date, and there was absolutely no sign of The Last Of Us multiplayer, Ghost Of Tsushima 2, Twisted Metal, or a new Astro Bot – and that’s just the games that are known to exist. We still have no idea what studios like Bluepoint, Housemarque, and Santa Monica are up to next. There was no way all of those were going to be revealed at once but the fact that none of them were is hugely disappointing.
Once again, you have to question whether Sony is purposefully holding itself back for the sake of monopoly investigators and their opposition to the Activision Blizzard acquisition, since if Sony’s reveals too much they could inadvertently prove to the world that the buyout is no threat to them. Since we’ll never find out for certain if that’s what’s going on though it’s really not much more than a conspiracy theory.
So why isn’t Sony announcing more? Why do they seem to be going out of their way to say as little as possible at every opportunity? Earlier this week they were trying to pretend the PlayStation VR2 wasn’t a flop and yet they haven’t announced a single new first party game for it since it launched in February, with the headset only getting a mere six minutes of airtime in the showcase – during which the highest profile game was the already announced VR mode for Resident Evil 4.
Unless Sony developers have secretly been on strike for the last two years there must be a dozen or more titles in a state where they can at least be shown off with a pre-rendered trailer, let alone gameplay, and yet we got nothing. One of the few exceptions was something called Concord, from developer Firewalk but that is also known to be a multiplayer game and so very probably a live service title as well.
Sony has said it wants to diversify its portfolio and that can only be a positive but not announcing any new single-player games and instead having nothing but multiplayer titles is just swapping one type of oversaturation for another.
This doesn’t mean there was nothing exciting during the showcase, but apart from Spider-Man 2 all of the good stuff was from games that had nothing to do with Sony and in many cases were multiformat. At first, it was difficult to tell which these are, until you realised that the phrase ‘Coming to PS5’ was a euphemism for ‘also on other formats.’
Some of these games looked great, with the Chinese-made title Phantom Blade Zero being one of the most welcome surprises, with a nutty action vibe that seemed halfway between a FromSoftware joint and a Platinum style over-the-top action game.
There was also confirmation of the already leaked Metal Gear Solid 3 remake and a remaster collection, plus a better glimpse at Alan Wake 2 (and an October 17 release date) and Assassin’s Creed Mirage (out a week earlier on October 12).
Also of note was the first trailer for Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, which didn’t make it obvious whether it was still using the pawn companions of the previous game, but which the PlayStation Blog has confirmed it is.
There were also a ton of interesting looking indie games, even if many of them had been seen before. Ghostrunner 2, with its F-Zero style motorbike sections looked good and so did Sword Of The Sea from the creators of Journey and The Pathless.
Neva from the creators of Gris also impressed, even if the debt it owes to Princess Mononoke was a bit too obvious. The Plucky Squire has definitely had trailers before, but it was arguably the most visually appealing game of the night, with some fantastically imaginative artwork and a mix of 2D and 3D worlds that seemed very Nintendo-eseque.
We really liked the look of Towers Of Aghasba too, which seemed a compelling mix of city building and Avatar style exploration. Although the terrible name, that nobody is ever going to be able to spell seems a terrible choice. (EA’s Immortals of Aveum can take the runner-up prize there, so it’s not just indie developers that are rubbish at naming things.)
In the end, the biggest announcement from Sony was its new Project Q remote play controller, which looks like a DualSense controller that’s eaten a Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, it and the new ear buds had already been leaked months ago and, in any case, it’s hard to get excited about a portable device that’s designed solely for remote play.
‘Hard to get excited about’ sums up the whole showcase, which accentuated all Sony’s worst tendencies and left disappointingly little that was brand new to get excited about. With all the talk of a ‘second phase’ for the PlayStation 5 many expected this to be Sony finally closing the door on Xbox’s hopes of competing this generation, but instead they’ve left it wide open.
Having their showcase two weeks before Microsoft’s event implied Sony were supremely confident about their line-up, but if they are it’s hard to understand why. If this was an ordinary event it’d be put down as a minor disappointment – handwaved away as a transition year – but after so many long months of silence Sony still had surprisingly little of interest to say.
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