That sound you heard is me breathing a sigh of relief. There’s no more events. I don’t care if there are any more events, to be honest; for me, there’s nothing left. It has been five full fucking days of watching hours of video game trailers, and you know what? I just want to go read a book now. I don’t want to play anymore.
But I managed to get through two more events today that really reminded me of old E3: the Ubisoft Forward event, and the Capcom Showcase. And as one final fulfillment of obligation to you, the seven or eight people who have been reading these increasingly deranged posts over the past week, I will tell you what I saw, how I felt, and what we can make of it one last time.
Ubisoft Forward 2023
It needs to be said: Senior Ubisoft leadership, including CEO Yves Guillemot, have never taken accountability for the pervasive culture of harassment and toxicity in the workplace across their studios. The fact that their rank-and-file employees are still struggling to unionize is despicable, and the fact that numerous accounts of harassment and abuse were barely addressed, much less remedied, by leadership is a continuing blight on this industry. Yves Guillemot resign, bitch.
Anyway, let’s talk about video games~.
The first thing I learned today was that there is an Olympic Esports series. The second thing I learned is that Olympic Esports Week is in nine days. The third thing I learned is that Just Dance is an official Olympic Esport. All of this new information hit me in the form of the first real game trailer and special performance of the event, for Just Dance 2024.
This information barely had time to process before the next assault on my senses arrived: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. From Massive Entertainment, this open-world action-adventure game features a new cast of characters, including our protagonist – a Na’vi child soldier who had been abducted and forced to fight for RDA until she was placed into cryogenic storage for 15 years. Is this going to be like Far Cry? Probably! Do I already hate this premise? Absolutely!
We also got more information on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a game that continues to look really good. I still want to check this out.
The only other really interesting thing was learning that Shohreh Aghdashloo is going to be playing the Assassin’s Bureau leader in Assassin’s Creed: Mirage. Everything else I could take or leave, including the Forza: Horizon ripoff The Crew: Motorfest and Adi Shankar’s mindnumbing new mashup cartoon.
Finally, some footage of Star Wars: Outlaws:
…this is definitely, definitely the zombified remains of Beyond Good And Evil 2, isn’t it?
Capcom Showcase
This event was markedly shorter than I thought it was going to be. From my first post until the very end, the whole thing only lasted about 40 minutes, and a good chunk of it was updates to already-existing games, like Street Fighter 6, which recently came out, and Resident Evil 4 VR, which PlayStation 5/VR2 owners will get for free if they own the base game.
Shu Takumi came out on stage in an extremely dapper hat and thanked the audience for caring about Ghost Trick, which is getting a remaster out soon. We also learned that Capcom will be putting out the Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice trilogy next year. So that’s pretty cool. I do want to play Ghost Trick.
Exoprimal is a game about a guy who invents mech suits to harvest fossil fuels direct from the source: hordes of dinosaurs he has transported from the extremely distant past to be slaughtered by mercenaries wearing his technology. It also appears to be a live service? I don’t know.
Finally we got confirmation that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is, in fact, a video game you can play at some point in the future. Thanks for that, Capcom!
Okay. Let’s take a deep breath. The last five days have been stressful, monotonous, agitating and downright detrimental to my health. But I feel like I got something valuable out of the experience:
I know without a doubt that I will never do this again.