E3 2018: PlayStation Goes for Quality Over Quantity

Jeremy Ray
Games PlayStation
Games PlayStation

Sony has been hitting us with great exclusives in this console generation with the recent God of War, as well as Nioh, Bloodborne, The Last Guardian, and more.

Its recent E3 2018 press conference was dedicated to everything coming up, and after what we just saw, we can strap in for another strong year.

This press conference was quality over quantity. One stunning trailer after another. Just a long string of amazing upcoming games without too much stuffing around in between. Where Microsoft showed 50 games, Sony had very little filler.

Here’s everything we saw.

The Last of Us Part II

The conference kicked off with a look at what almost everyone wanted to see. There was a cutscene and a section of gameplay, all of which centered around Ellie.

At a town dance, we saw a nervous Ellie watching friends dance. One friend mentions some of the patrols that still need to take place, and another friend steals her for a dance. After a nice kiss, we’re teleported to a much more stressful moment.

Ellie is in a forest, around halfway through slitting a man’s throat. She seems to be on the run from a hostile group of uninfected humans and makes her way through the town. The combat is very intense and cinematic, and we see Ellie reacting to things like being shot in the arm by grabbing at the specific wound as her body twists with the force of the bullet.

The Last of Us Part II is still very much a stealth game and she uses her environment to the fullest, silently taking out enemies with arrows and putting them off balance with a thrown bottle.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

It seems like this style of combat was made for Spider-Man. The way he can contort himself to strike enemies at any angle or distance, acrobatically launching through their legs and around their attacks, Spidey is right at home here.

It looks button-mashy, but for Spider-Man, these fights when he’s surrounded by henchmen are supposed to be easy.

We see in the trailer Electro releasing many classic enemies of Spidey’s. Rhino, Vulture, and Mister Negative. But they talk about someone organizing them all, and we’re not yet sure who the big baddie is. But we can speculate.

Marvel’s Spider-Man has some fast-moving sections that looked great but seemed to play out a bit like a quick-time event. Not the most popular kind of interactivity in games, but handled well in short stretches it can be okay.

Death Stranding

Wow.

Hideo Kojima’s new opus put out yet another extended trailer and somehow managed to leave everyone with, still, very little idea of what this game actually is. It still looks amazing though.

While it wasn’t explicitly stated, it looked like we were seeing actual gameplay. The protagonist — modeled after The Walking Dead‘s Norman Reedus — states he’s a delivery man, and we see him trudging across varied lonely landscapes with huge packages on his back.

Walking through these vistas seemed like an amazing game by itself. But then came the beasties. We still don’t know much about these other than the fact that they’re invisible, float, and can hear you.

A few more characters are introduced, and a conversation with someone else over radio reveals that you can “come back,” implying some kind of resurrection. A female character adds, “a cryptovial a day keeps the time fall away.” Whatever that means.

Death Stranding looks incredibly unique, and the more they show of this one the more interested we are. But those landscapes in particular wowed us in this trailer. We’ll take a game just walking around in this world. Everything else is a bonus.

Nioh 2

Team Ninja is revisiting this franchise after the success of the first. The original Nioh is a Souls-like game set in feudal Japan, as gunpowder is just making its way to the country. It was, for some people, their game of the year. It nailed the formula that much.

This trailer doesn’t reveal much about what’s new in the sequel other than you’ll still be fighting demons. The first Nioh was great. Sony doesn’t have to do much convincing to get us on board for Nioh 2.

Control

This was brand new for us. We see a woman who seems to have some sort of telekinetic control of her environment, throwing objects into enemies. The world itself shifts incessantly — like Inception multiplied by 10 — and it’s all very psychological.

The crowd cheered when they saw Remedy and 505 Games were involved. This is the “P7” game we were hearing about, and many were expecting Alan Wake 2. As good as Control looks, we don’t think any Alan Wake fans will really be complaining.

Ghost of Tsushima

My, my, doesn’t this one look good.

We see a Mongol invasion of Japan in this third-person action game. You are a samurai fighting off the invaders, and in the demo, our protagonist tries to save a monk from being tortured.

Fighters have a moment of studying their opponent before they strike, and each slash can be deadly. The choreography and animations in Ghost of Tsushima stood out to us — each fighter makes fantastic lines with their body as they strike.

Graphically it’s quite impressive, too. But this combat has us very interested. The moment of study is slow, but striking is fast. It’s very reactive. We can see this being very intense as you wait for some sort of telegraphing from your enemy.

Resident Evil 2

The announcement of this remake had the crowd cheering probably the loudest of the whole conference.

We can expect Resident Evil 2 on the 25th of January, 2019.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 showed some of the new maps it’ll be offering, and Sony announced that Black Ops 3 will be on PlayStation Plus on the same night.

Everything Else

Trover Saves the Universe is a game coming from Justin Roiland, co-creator of Rick and Morty.

Kingdom Hearts 3 showed some more footage of new universes, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Monsters Inc, and more.  The all-in-one package of several Kingdom Hearts games will be exclusive to PS4. The game comes out January 29, 2019.

That rounds up PlayStation’s conference — a shorter but more laser-focused affair. Pretty much everything we saw was looking very nice, and there’s certainly no clear winner between the two console giants this year.


Trade in your old games and pre-order the Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Pro Edition now, only at GameStop.

Jeremy Ray
Decade-long games critic and esports aficionado. Started in competitive Counter-Strike, then moved into broadcast, online, print and interpretative pantomime. You merely adopted the lag. I was born in it.