The latest State of Play was big on spectacle but low on surprises
Sony’s summer State of Play showcase offered a first look at God Of War Laufey, Until Dawn 2, and many other games, so why did it still feel so safe and predictable?
With two more major showcases to go this week, and rumours of a Nintendo Direct on Tuesday, it was left to Sony to perform the opening salvo in this year’s summer showcase line-up. Back when E3 was still a thing, they always used to go after Xbox, benefiting from being able to change their plans at the last minute – which they did to famous effect following the Xbox One’s debut.
Nowadays, those kinds of machinations are no longer necessary and Sony often doesn’t seem to make so much of an effort anymore. They did on Tuesday night though, with a well-paced State of Play with plenty of interesting first and third party games, almost all of which looked impressive in some way.
What was absent though was anything in the way of surprises, with Until Dawn 2 being one of the only games that hadn’t already been rumoured to hell and back (and even then it had been hinted at). By comparison, God Of War Laufey had been known about in some detail for quite a while, but that wasn’t the main reason why it seemed so predictable.
Some of the God Of War rumours were so specific they now count as spoilers but the gist of them was that Laufey/Faye has a very different fighting style to Kratos, more akin to Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. Watching the footage on Tuesday night, that was exactly what the game seems to be and… exactly what you could’ve predicted before seeing it.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a disappointing or a bad game, or even that Santa Monica Studio had done anything wrong, it’s just that in 20 minutes of footage it feels like you can extrapolate out what the entire game is going to be, if you’ve played either of the previous two titles.
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
Marvel’s Wolverine had much the same problem, in that as impressive as the visuals are it all seemed very familiar, despite it appearing to have little in common with Insomniac’s previous work with Spider-Man (there’s no open world for a start) and Wolverine not having an established formula for his games.
This isn’t a Sony problem. The problem is that only the most surefire hits can ever justify the time and money needed to make triple-A games nowadays and that means that no matter their overall quality, predictability is now a prerequisite.
The other disappointment is that there was no sign of any kind of change in approach in Sony’s first party plans. To be fair to them, they’d given no indication there would be but after rumours of reviving older franchises, and moving away from PC releases, there had been a hope amongst fans that Sony might be moving back towards a style and frequency of releases more similar to the PlayStation 4 era.
That may well be happening, to some degree, but when high-end games take five or more years to make change comes slowly. This State of Play wasn’t a sea change moment but three first party releases (Marvel’s Wolverine, Until Dawn 2, and God Of War Laufey) is more than we’ve had recently, even if the latter didn’t have a release year and there was no sign of Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.
What also wasn’t there was Fairgames$ or any other live service game beyond Marathon. Despite rumours that Fairgame$ has had a name change it didn’t get a mention, and there’s still nothing to suggest it hasn’t been cancelled or put on the backburner. Horizon Hunters Gathering wasn’t mentioned either, in what was a very single-player focused showcase.
However, there’s a danger in just seeing what you want to see in these sorts of things. Most people want to return to the PlayStation 4 days, when new first party games were frequent and new IP was not unheard of, but there’s no indication that Sony does.
You can read the tea leaves in a certain way, to make it seem as if change is coming, but until we see multiple new games announced at once or, god forbid, Sony actually comes out and explains their plans, it’s all just wishful thinking.
If they were going to change direction then the launch of the PlayStation 6 would be the obvious time to do so, although when that will actually be, given the ongoing memory crisis, remains a mystery – and probably to Sony as well.
In the meantime, solid but predictable is probably going to be the watchword for not only future State of Plays but the rest of the not-E3 period, including the upcoming showcases from Xbox and Nintendo. The modern state of video game development just doesn’t lend itself to surprises or multiple reveals at once, and a great deal has to change for that to ever not be the case again.
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
