Bethesda Recently had their E3 2019 press conference right after Microsofts’s and boy was it something. We at gaming instincts will tell you about what we thought overall about Bethesda’s press conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLRSip6tyvw
Elder Scrolls Blades
After starting off with a video that shows the company’s dedication to the community and how they are able to take the criticism and turn games into things that gamers want, Pete Hines then gets on stage to preview the games that are up and coming news-wise, after introducing Todd Howard to own up how badly Fallout 76 the game launched, he introduces Craig Lafferty, Project leader of Elder Scrolls Blades and Matt Carofano, ESB’s Art director to talk about the future of Blades by porting it to the Switch.
The reveal is just introducing the update that adds new jobs, solo arena battles, jewelry system, and a Dragon questline which came out the night of announcement for free. As the game is free, they also mention an update coming in fall that will feature pvp, guilds, and visiting friends towns. Additionally, Elder Scrolls Blades will be coming to the Nintendo Switch in Fall 2019. It features everything a port of a mobile game could use as the game is crossplay with the mobile version with progress carry-over, which is a cool features more mobile games should take advantage of.
Fallout 76 Updates
After that, the lead developers of Fallout 76, Tom Mustaine and Jeff Gardiner introduce the game’s new upcoming updates Wastelanders and Nuclear Winter. Wastelanders is their biggest update yet and includes something very unexpected, human NPC’s with full dialogue trees and full fledged quests to introduce them. This seems to be a step up from what we’ve gotten recently from Fallout 76 updates so far and what’s next pretty much surprised everybody.
Nuclear Winter is the Battle Royale update where players compete to become the Overseer to Vault 51. 52 players will be able to fight through the wasteland as the ring of fire closes in. We don’t know what becoming the overseer of the vault does or even if the vault itself is a place to even hang out with other players. We do know that the free sneak peak for the free trial is happening from June 10-17 so new players can try it out. The Battle Royale is pretty neat but I don’t think the idea will really win fans over.
Ghostwire Tokyo
While there’s no news of Starfield or Elder Scrolls 6 as Todd leaves, Shinji Mikami, executive producer at Tango Gameworks is able to show off a trailer for his new game called Ghostwire Tokyo with the help of his overly-excited Creative Director, Ikumi Nakamura. The game is apparently about an event happening in Tokyo where people are seemingly dissapperaring out of thin air and these spirts around Tokyo are to blame. It’s said to be a new action adventure game where we get to experience a new type of horror. Only a CG trailer was shown but the game looks interesting at the very least.
Elder Scrolls Online and Commander Keen
After showing b-roll of Bethesda fans, the show continues to talk about the new Elder Scrolls Online update that will continue the ongoing storyline with the new Dragonhold Expansion which coming in November while a smaller-scale DLC will come in August.
After that, a new Commander Keen game gets announced with a charmingly-animated trailer. It’s free to play mobile game which will soft-launch for the IOS and mobile devices in the summer. Kira Schlitt, Creative Director of Commander Keen explains how the game works with as much charisma she can muster, however the actual gameplay in the backgrounds doesn’t actually seem to be all that great. The characters move really slow and the overall gameplay looks sluggish.
Elder Scrolls Legends and Rage 2
Then Elder Scrolls Legends mobile card game gets announced a new Moons of Elsweyr expansion. Then afterwards they announce that new forms of insanity and fun will be added to Rage 2. In a charming sitcom opener our character, Walker shows off many new forms os mayhem including cheat codes, new mechs, enemies, and vehicles. Along with that the Rise of the Ghosts expansion will be added. Gameplay showing the new features, cheats, and gameplay modes are shown and is announced to coming sometime this Summer.
Wolfenstein: Young Blood and Deathloop
Next up is Wolfenstein: Young Blood. More information is revealed by Jerk Gustaffson, executive producer of Machine games announces this along with Wolfenstein 2’s Cyberpilot VR which will become available in July. He then continues to talk about Wolfenstein: Young Blood as you play as the daughters of BJ Blazkowicz who must enter the Nazi-occupied Paris in order to find him. It will be co-op and will have more weapons and mayhem to fight the Nazis with. The trailer seems to be in the spirit of Wolfenstein as you’ll be fighting the nazi threat with a friend together in the game. The game is then revealed to release on July 26 and it moves on to Arkane Studios’s new game Deathloop.
Deathloop is revealed to be a game about two characters named Colt and Julianna who are desperately trying to kill each-other in order to decide the fate of the Black Reef. A short and stylish trailer is shown off where the two constantly kill each-other only to end up in a time loop. No gameplay footage is shown but I think it looks promising.
Orion Cloud?
So then Orion gets introduced by Chief Technology officer of ID Software Robert Duffy and Director of Publishing at Bethesda James Altman. Orion which will be used to optimize game engines for performance in a cloud environment and will improve use of xCloud and Stadia. Game content will be able to be streamed 20% faster per-frame which leads to latency reduction. It also uses 40% less bandwidth. Streaming games will basically be faster with orion as the normal populous will be able to stream games with max graphics. No information on how exactly this system is used, but this leads into the Doom Demonstration.
Doom can be streamed through Orion at 4K resolution at 60 fps, which is impressive to see from a streaming tool, that supposedly makes you use less data. In fact the game is demonstrated to stream through an Orion-enable cloud service that makes Doom 2016 look great on a mobile device.
Doom Eternal
This then leads to the Doom Eternal reveals which is honestly pretty much what we expect from DOOM as a whole Doomslayer must fight the wrath of heaven and hell in order to save all of humanity using all new melee weapons, guns, and maneuvers. From what they’ve shown, we’re going to have a lot of fun with the game. I just want to have the game in my hands but at least it’s coming out on November 22nd and comes with a cool pre-order as well with a wearable helmet.
They even announce a new battlemode where one Doomslayer fights two player-controlled demons, and as the gameplay looks cool, I’d rather have the entirety of Doom: Eternal be co-op as well. If not we can probably expect tons of new level-editing features for the game.
Conclusion
Well as you can see, Bethesda had huge announcements for their games mainly Fallout 76 with two whole expansions, Wolfenstein: Young Blood reveals, and Doom Eternal. The Fallout 76 reveal was honestly interesting with the addition of human NPC’s with dialogue trees. The Nuclear Winer gamemode on the other hand will probably rub people the wrong way. Especially since there’s no way people will play Fallout 76 for just a new Battle Royale mode.
Young Blood simply looks like an amazing shooter as well, killing Nazis with a friend seems pretty fun, and hopefully we can save BJ as well. Also Doom Eternal is simply amazing to look at and I hope it plays well when it comes out.
The only other real title that was worth really mentioning is Tangoworks’s Ghostwire Tokyo which, knowing the company’s past, will be a truly interesting action/horror adventure. Also both Shinji Mikami and Ikumi Nakamura were both very charismatic and enthusiastic about the new title as well, so that gives me hope that it’ll be a good game.
I also have high hopes for Arkane Studios’s Deathloop which looks to be a cool, stylish, and surreal action-shooter where time loops after the main characters die. Unfortunately some gameplay would’ve been good to show off as well.
The rest of the games shown off like the Elder Scrolls Blades reveal and Commander Keen were lackluster at the very least. Also Commander Keen’s gameplay looks very unappealing.
Also, Bethesda we appreciate you showing b-roll of all of your fans, but it all around didn’t add anything to the conference and leaves me wanting to see more gameplay footage of any of the games shown.
Otherwise it seems that Bethesda didn’t have a whole lot to show, even when the big reveal for new content for Fallout 76 appeared, I felt nothing since a fair bit of time with the game and disliking it. It probably would’ve helped the conference if they had something to show for their upcoming titles, Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield, but this just wasn’t the case.
Bethesdsa I give your conference C.
As much as I love Bethesda, their reveals for their new games like Deathloop and Ghostwire could’ve used some gameplay footage and they just seemed to play it safe with the showing s of Wolfenstein Young Blood and Doom Eternal. Also the lack of any Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield news just made the conference feel a bit empty.
Pros
- Doom Eternal
- Ghostwire Tokyo
- Wolfenstein: Young Blood
Cons
- Weak Fallout 76 reveal
- No Elder Scrolls 6
- Underwhelming announcements
- Not enough gameplay
