Yeeesh...

For me the three E's in E3 2016 were, "Eh...?"  (Where are all the non-VR games?), followed by, "Eek!" (the Last Guardian), and finally, "Er..." (that's it?).  There sure was a lot of stuff for VR enthusiasts.  Sadly, I'm not one of them since my current living situation isn't compatible with VR.  Not just in terms of money and space, but time as well.  Whenever I sit down to play something chances are I'm going to be interrupted on a fairly regular basis.  Take House of the Dying Sun for example, it's a cool game that I'm sure looks even cooler in VR, but I really don't want to be pulling off all that headgear constantly because some machine is beeping at me, or someone wants my undivided attention.  Granted, House of the Dying Sun can be played in little snippets (seriously, the average mission is about three minutes long), but I think most VR games are going to demand more.  Needless to say I've been playing a lot of Stellaris and Hearts of Iron 4 as of late in large part because they allow ease of use with regards to multitasking.  Just hit the space bar on the keyboard and you're free to attend to other matters.  Anyway...getting back to E3...

I didn't see a whole lot to get excited about this year.  Last Guardian finally has a release date, but that's been a long time coming.  Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks nice, but the Amiibo stuff and NX cross-gen situation is kind of off-putting.  Trailers for Oxygen not Included, Tacoma, and Death Stranding looked mildly intriguing, but there wasn't all that much footage shown so all three remain largely unknown quantities.  Also, what is with all this "pre-order now!" garbage (not to mention "Fee-to-Pay" nonsense).  At the very least wait until the game is closer to launch guys!  Ordering now feels like a total sucker bet.  Obviously, the best thing to do would be to wait until after the game has come out simply because there are way to many buggy and poorly-optimized games inundating the market these days to justify the risks.

Maybe I fell off the E3 hype train at some point, or maybe real life events have been intruding on my fantasies.  That certainly is the case with Jim Sterling and his opinions about E3.  Either way I'm definitely no longer the target audience for this sort of event.  That's not to say I don't like trade shows...it's just that I would put GDC or even PAX well above the "merchants of cool" and their Electronic Entertainment Expo.