Geoff Keighley’s Summer Feighleys 2022 Day Four: “My Good Friend Todd Howard”

Folks, we have reached the end of our journey together. After I press “publish” on this post, I will be free from the world of video game industry presentations. Am I aware that there is a Final Fantasy VII Remake presentation on Thursday? Yes I am. Will I be watching it? Absolutely not. “What about the Nintendo Direct?” Fuck Nintendo, frankly. The bottom line is this: I can feel my remaining humanity drain every time I watch another trailer, and I am already a husk of a person. The worst part is, I can’t even go outside, because the heat index reached 110 degrees today and I simply would melt.

So what was it like in the Gamer Trenches today, Sunday, June 12? Well, we only had two presentations, but fuck me running were they both big. First up was the Xbox and Bethesda presentation, which ran for about 90 minutes; then we had the PC Gaming Show, which was another two-and-a-half hours long. We saw many, many trailers for the fourth day in a row, and most of them (even today!) were new games that had not yet been announced. That being said, because the presentations were both beefy and the former one was essentially for one megacorporation, we had more opportunities for breaks and respites in between trailer inundations.

So look, Microsoft is the home (or future home) of some shitty, abusive game developers. Sisi Jiang at Kotaku just published a piece pulling back the curtain on workplace abuses at Bethesda during Fallout 76 development on June 8. Activision/Blizzard is a fuckshow of abuse, harassment, and misery. Yet during this presentation we were supposed to pop for Starfield, Elder Scrolls Online, new Fallout 76 content, Overwatch 2, and Diablo IV – regardless of whether the companies and subsidiaries in question had done any soul-searching or materially improved their conditions even a little bit.

And I mean, it is what it is. It’s hard to maintain even basic ethical standards in the most-capitalist industry. But I do think it’s important for games media to recognize and reiterate these things as we cover them, otherwise we’re just acting as more free marketing for companies that frankly don’t deserve it.

But hey, what am I doing complaining? I agreed to participate in this half-week bacchanal of consumptive shenanigans. I agreed to uphold the artifice of being hyped for video game trailers. We’ve been deep in the shit since Thursday, so might as well finish strong.

We start with Redfall, a game about shooting vampires with pink shotguns and little fucked up Boston Dynamics robots, made by Arkane Austin. Redfall looks fine, a little close to Deathloop, but I suppose it can’t really be helped after that game came out. Redfall makes way for a genuine surprise and the first of a few moments where I thought the Gamers were gonna lose their shit: Hollow Knight: Silksong is coming to Xbox Game Pass day one. The thing about that is, we still don’t know when “day one” is going to be. This was immediately followed by High On Life, a game I am utterly repulsed by, and will not talk about, before stopping at their second major announcement: Riot Games is coming to Game Pass later this year, with League of Legends, Runeterra, Valorant and more showing up with all of their heroes and characters. Riot Games has had its own history of fucked up dev treatment, abuse and harassment, and this Paste Games piece has a great timeline of the situation at that particular company.

After another trailer for A Plague Tale: Requiem, we got a deep dive into the new Forza Motorsport game, and I think it’s very funny that we’re at the point where driving game developers have long since solved the driving and racing part of the package, and are now focusing on what is essentially set dressing. But hey, come on with engine ray tracing and hyperreal grass textures. As I said on twitter, maybe this whole photorealism kick could be better served in a game like Microsoft Flight Simulator, but we got something better than hyperphotogrammetry or whatever: we got a Halo jumpship in an upcoming MFS patch. Video games!

After this, Actiblizz reared its ugly head. Overwatch 2, a game that seems kinda broken, is coming to consoles in early access in October. And I guess they’re getting a new hero (before the game even launches? okay).

This was soon replaced by announcements for: ARA: History Untold (with a trailer narrated by Shohreh Aghdashloo), a new Elder Scrolls Online expansion (High Isle), new Fallout 76 content, Forza Horizon 5 x Hot Wheels DLC content (with a trailer featuring ME FIRST AND THE GIMME GIMMES lmao), Vin Diesel on a dinosaur in Ark 2, Minecraft Legends, and a mech farming game I am genuinely hype for, Lightyear Frontier.

breathe

Jesus Christ that was a lot. I promise I won’t do that for the rest of the piece. The presentation went at that pace for a while, with stops at these major announcements:

• Diablo IV, where we learned about the last added class: Necromancer, and the game’s identity as a “shared world” MMO-lite live-service game.
• Persona 3, 4 Golden, and 5 Royal are coming to Game Pass later this fall.
• Hideo Kojima is making an Xbox exclusive video game.
• Todd Howard has not changed clothes in 20 years.

On that last point, Howard gave us an extended look at Bethesda’s new game, Starfield. And while watching is not really the same as playing, I don’t know that my first impressions of this early gameplay vertical slice from Starfield were all that great. I saw a lot of stuff ripped from other games – like No Man’s Sky, Destiny, Mass Effect, Elite: Dangerous, etc. – desaturated, and turned into a generic video game ass video game. When Todd announced “over 100 [explorable] systems” I could not help but think about No Man’s Sky‘s promise of a full procedurally-generated galaxy (a promise they largely made good on). I also had occasion to be pointed to this blog by Emily Short, on 10,000 bowls of oatmeal:

I think procedural generation, textual or otherwise, can be used to reinforce that sense of agency and presence in the world, rather than to make it feel as though nothing matters. But it isn’t a substitute for designing content. It’s a way of designing content — one that is often at least as labor-intensive as other ways, and that also demands a strong capacity for abstraction and the ability to characterize one’s aesthetic goals.^[1]Short, Emily. “Bowls of Oatmeal and Text Generation.” Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling, 21 Sept. 2016, https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/.

Starfield, at least right now, almost a year away from launch, doesn’t seem to take this into account. But a year is a long time, relatively-speaking. Who knows – maybe it will look like a banger in a year.

What about the PC Gaming Show?

There were some interesting announcements here as well. Citizen Sleeper announced a new content roadmap, with free DLC coming in July, much to my great excitement. Soulstice gave me intense “We can no longer wait for Final Fantasy VII Remake Part II so we are going to make it ourselves” vibes. The Invincible had some intriguing aesthetic sensibilities, but it remains to be seen if they could stick the landing on their premise. Alters asks an important question: what if the movie MOON, but you were seven clones of the same Russian guy? And I am very into it. System Shock and Welcome to Nivalis got new trailers. And Doug Bradley (Pinhead from Hellraiser) narrated a new, gruesome gameplay trailer for Scorn, the HR Giger im-sim. The TWO HOUR presentation ended (ish) with Dave Oshry at New Blood Interactive running a wrestling promo on PC Gamer before showing us all a new Gloomwood trailer. And then I blacked out until about 30 seconds ago.

And that’s it. That’s all. Video games happened again this year, and it seems that they will continue to be happening. I feel genuinely worse than I did on Thursday morning. There is still no escape. Until next time, I have been Kaile Hultner, and this has been the Summer of Games recap series.

Good night. No seriously. I’m going to bed. I can’t wait until work in the morning.

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While we’re here, you should go buy the Queer Games Bundle. It’s $60 for nearly 600 games and such, and it’s got a lot of quality shit in it. Click here for more information.

If you enjoyed this post and want to pay for my funeral costs now that I have expired after sustained exposure to Gamer Bullshit, consider buying me a coffee. I would appreciate it.