Bethesda

Now that the Bethesda event is done and over with, let's talk about that very underwhelming Bethesda conference this year

Well, that was something. I remember when Bethesda said that they wouldn’t come to E3 unless they had something big. Of course, money and marketing will always win out over all else in the end. I live on the East Coast so I had to stay up till midnight to even watch it. I was just overall really disappointed with the whole thing. If you just wanted a clip show of things we already knew were coming out, then yeah watch it. It did feature two new things the first was an expansion for Dishonored 2 and the diamond in the rough Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.

I feel like Bethesda had more, but something may have happened backstage. Pete Hines seemed to be tired and a little worn down. He appeared briefly to open and close the show in a very flat tone. At only the thirty-eight minute mark I was sure he was going to pull something and have one last big reveal, but I and many others were mistaken.

My biggest low came in the form of the creation club. After the backlash from their paid mods fiasco a few years ago they seem to be trying the idea again under the guise that it will have Bethesda actually working with the creators and releasing it as official add-on content. To be honest this just seems like a way to siphon money off the backs of people who put so much love into creating mods for their favorite game. I hate Bethesda for this because we know if it’s successful everyone from EA to Ubisoft will try to copy and tweak this model. Imagine if an EA releases a game for sixty bucks or more with a thirty dollar season pass then charges an additional amount for either a subscription of paid mod model. Not to mention they could probably tack on micro-transactions on top of all that so an initial investment on a game could end up being two hundred dollars; theoretically. For all the joy, Fallout 3 alone gave me it would be worth that investment, but to tack on prices to things like this just dampens the experience as a whole.

On to something a little more positive. Wolfenstein looks great and I love how the characters were portrayed. My favorite thing about the lackluster Turning Point was its concept and location. Now we get a chance to have that experience with a trusted developer helming the project and having big money behind it. The gameplay looked like everything we loved from the first game cranked up to eleven. I still haven’t played the Old Blood expansion that followed so I am not sure if it's important, but this definitely makes me want to go back and replay those awesome games before the release of New Colossus.

Dishonored looked like a game I would love and I did purchase it, but it was also a victim of timing so I haven’t played it or it’s sequel. Death Of The Outsider looks amazing. One of the things that appealed to me most was the gritty atmosphere. I can’t speak too much on the character you play, but she is apart of the main story in Dishonored 2.

While those are the high and low notes of this years Bethesda's E3 conference there will be follow-up articles on these games going into greater detail. I’m not saying any of Bethesda’s upcoming games look bad or I am not excited for at least half of them. I am just saying I was disappointed with it because there wasn’t anything there to surprise us. Most everything they showed was stuff they had been announcing for a while. If there is one thing we can all be thankful for it’s that everything we saw will be released this year.