It’s that time of year again, where the ever-increasingly pointless and petty ‘console war’ tags start to get thrown about – and I am absolutely living for it.
Now that Sony has hosted its ‘Future of Gaming‘ event after Microsoft’s ‘First Look Gameplay‘ livestream all the way back in early May, we’ve had our first glimpse at what the next generation has to offer. That can mean only one thing: Let the ultimately useless comparison of two quarantine-forced, online-based gaming press conferences, commence!
I know I said useless but please don’t leave – read on, it’ll be worth it. I do touch on ‘Assassins Creed-gate’. I’ll even use a homemade GIF at some point. I promise.
The SHow Opener
An important staple of the video gaming conference, the show opener usually looks to wow and amaze the audience, creating a spectacle and an atmosphere that has you craving more. I don’t think that Sony really thought this part through when they chose to announce that Grand Theft Auto 5 would be spanning yet another console generation. The initial false sense of hype that was created by the Rockstar logo was swiftly crushed by this disappointing revelation. Not the best way to set expectations.
Yes, the playstation conference did quickly move on to display the extremely exciting Spiderman: Miles Morales – which if anything, the initial introductory disappointment made even better. But I cannot include that as ‘the show opener.’
Microsoft on the other hand, absolutely blasted the doors of the hinges as they displayed the most “oh my god what the f*ck is this” gameplay trailer they could find in Bright Memory: Infinite. The stunning graphics set in a stormy scene synced up with the fast-paced Titanfall-like gameplay as the player character danced around cyberpunk themed enemies, before fighting some sort of mecha-roman imperial soldier? YEAH! GET SOME! Then you find out this was all made by one person? WHAT!?
Ultimately, this absolutely insane introduction unfortunately did not set up the rest of what was to come. But I’m not rating that here, so, that’s a win for Xbox.
The quantity
Yes. This is just important as quality. I won’t hear anything else about it. More games equals more things for me to get excited about. Or… Disappointed about, I suppose. Let’s just dive into it and see what happens.
Xbox returned true to form with their oversized ‘WORLD PREMIERE’ banner, which appeared on eight of the thirteen games shown during the event. Now, I have a problem with this. I always thought that the point of these large-scale games conferences was to show off games that have not yet seen the light of our multiple screens. Or at least something never-before-seen from an existing title? The fact it’s the first time we’re seeing this shouldn’t really need to be announced. It annoys me and weirds me out a little bit.
When you compare this against the TWENTY SIX different games that Playstation managed to preview without sign-posting that you hadn’t seen it before – it starts to look even worse. The most that Sony placed in their trailers was a quick snippet of the ‘Playstation Studios’ logo on nine of the entries; Something far more subtle and does not interrupt the flow of conference.
The more recent event also clocked in at over double the time of its Xbox counterpart, without feeling like it was dragging. It managed its momentum perfectly, with no unnessaccary lulls in content whilst not overwhelming the audience.
It’s all Playstation here. The numbers say so – and we must obey the numbers.
The Quality
It’s not a good sign when you cannot recount a single video game shown in a press conference until you rewatch the entire livestream a month later and repeatedly think to yourself: “oh wait, this is what they announced?”
This was my experience with Xbox. Even the utterly crazy opener I previously mentioned, was completely forgotten about. It’s not good when everything that you’ve attempted to promote leaves no lasting impression. Every single game that popped up was just a bit “meh” to me.
Upon rewatch, the mechanical symbiotic birthing simulator of Scorn made me feel uncomfortable and repress the H.R. Giger nightmare right to the back of my brain, alongside that one memory of one tiny embarrassing thing I did I-don’t-know-how-many years ago.
Titles such as Dirt 4, Madden 21 and the lengthily-titled ‘Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2’ all sort of just sunk into the background for me. I didn’t even realise that Second Extinction had already been announced when I was watching it during IGN’s Summer of Gaming, until I watched this conference again.
Also, the so-called ‘gameplay‘ of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla sent me into a sad rage – but more on that later.
I know the Sony event was more recent, but I reckon I could recount almost every single game from that list. That’s because (almost) every single title that got announced built more and more hype, and that allowed the viewer to have an memorable experience.
The Playstation conference felt more like a spectacle. It was more like an actual event. The sort of event you would invite friends over to have a few brewskis with and watch. All the while I still cannot do that during this lockdown and for how much I miss my friends, for a brief moment it returned that wholesome and nostalgic feeling back to me.
I don’t even need to name the winner in this category, just the obligatory logo:
The cringe that I crave
No conference is complete without a “how do you do, fellow kids” moment of cringe from a myriad of middle-aged cool corporate characters, and we were so close to not getting one this year. Then up stepped Microsoft. Oh thank you so very much Microsoft.
It wasn’t much, almost a ‘blink and you’ll miss it moment,’ but my saviour, Damon Baker, Head of Global Portfolio at Xbox, uttered the words: “Until then I’m going to have to live out that fantasy via custom backgrounds in Microsoft Teams.”
“YES! Come on Damon, don’t fail me now,” I thought to myself – and fail me he did not. Bad-ass Baker proceeded. “How about I try a few now. Maybe we’ll go into the world of scarlet nexus, or maybe I could tear up the streets in Dirt 5,” He exclaimed as he switched between the correlating game backgrounds. This cringe culminated as the Global Portfolio Head switched to a background of the aforementioned Scorn, smarmily joking: “Here’s a quick view of Phil Spencer’s home office.” HAH.
He finishes his cascade of cringe with the statement: “Oh! Wait a second, we’ve got an inside look at the next Assassin’s Creed game,” and that’s where I’ll leave this before I get mad again.
Playstation offered nothing even remotely similar to this premium-grade content. Their conference was too sleek, too clean. It was almost surgical in its precision and professionalism. In its own right, that is very impressive, but I’m afraid that is just not what we are looking for here.
Damon Baker saves this one for Xbox.
The closing statements
OK we are here. We have reached the stage at which I can finally speak of my disdain for how Microsoft fed us a great lie about this year’s viking flavoured Assassin’s Creed.
I have always enjoyed Ubisoft’s neck-stabbing series; I even stuck with it through the bad times (looking at you, Unity). I poured hours of my life into Odyssey, until the DLC tried to force a romance on me in a choice based game – But I really enjoyed the rest, nonetheless. So, when Xbox announced that we would be seeing ‘WORLD PREMIERE‘ gameplay footage of the then recently announced ‘Valhalla’ I was entirely up for it.
We were then endlessly teased and reminded about the gameplay we would be seeing, throughout the conference. It would pop up in caption boxes between reveals and each talking head would mention the spectacle we would surely be witnessing. Even my new hero, Damon Baker, promised me ‘an inside look’ at the Norse iteration. Damon wouldn’t lie to me, right?
Well, Damon did lie to me, alongside everybody else that promised me ‘gameplay‘, because there were probably around two seconds of what could possibly be perceived as ‘gameplay‘ in that sh*tshow. In-game footage, I would have accepted, but this just was not the gameplay demo that everything had alluded to.
This also meant that instead of ending on a bang, the Xbox livestream just steadily declined into a whimpering fart of a conclusion. At the end of the day, this doesn’t inspire confidence in Microsoft, and Sony ended their conference with a console reveal. So, Playstation takes this one too.
Who Won?
It was closer than I thought it would be – but using my flawed and untested system, with a score of three out of five wins, I can determine that Playstation may wear the crown of ‘best first-look press conference 2020.’
BTW @Sony if you would like to reach out to me to accept your award and rehearse some sort of winning speech, I’m not going anywhere. I’m still trapped in my house.
NostalgiaCore 