8 games you almost certainly won't see at E3 2015
8 games you almost certainly won’t see at E3 2015
If any of the following things are at E3, one or more VG247 staff members will physically consume a single item of clothing as determined by a panel of experts. Others might nod, wink and hint broadly that you should click a lot in the hopes of seeing one or more of these pop up under the masthead, but not us. This s**t will not be on show.
1. Beyond Good & Evil 2
To be honest we're not even sure we want this one to happen any more, since Ubisoft's triple-A design pillars seem to have leeched a lot of the distinctiveness out its properties. "Assassin's Creed but with a girl and a camera" is a compelling pitch, but you can bet your booties it would be all karate chops and probably even handguns by the time it had been run through the focus testing merry-go-round.
Michel Ancel may one day give in to his desires to make this on the kind of budget normally reserved for the Watch Dogs and the Far Crys, and let Ubisoft do what it wants with Jade and co. If he already has, then the reason you're still waiting for the reveal is that someone is sitting around puzzling out how to make management's demand that Jade be a gritty white male come true. There's no way they'll solve that puzzle by E3 2015.
2. Shenmue 3
It's never going to happen. It's so much not going to happen that Yu Suzuki is talking about Kickstarting it. Do you know how much it costs to make an open world action adventure game in the year 2015? More money than a crowdfunding venture will ever, ever raise (unless you are Star Citizen. What the f**k, Star Citizen). Okay, sure, yes, maybe a Kickstarter or similar could front enough money to garner publisher or private investor attention, but you know what else is enough to garner publisher or private investor attention? An established property with cult status like Shenmue.
And yet: nobody wants to touch it. Your only hope of this happening in the industry going arse over t*ts and having to completely rework itself sans massive triple-A development where games need to sell seventy bazillion copies to break even. In other words, after the singularity.
3. Prey 2
Whatever the hell happened between Bethesda and Human Head, it was messy. If we ever see Prey 2 again it'll probably be in an article entitled "Bethesda: A History", and published in 2047.
Bethesda is going to show us Fallout 4 and Doom 4, and very probably Dishonored for next-gen consoles, which is plenty to be getting on with.
4. Silent Hills
An alternate title for this section would have been “a new Suikoden” or “anything decent from Konami”. The publisher seems to have gone completely bonkers, or at least to have elected to back out of triple-A development so far it can’t even see the garage door any more. Lord knows what’s going to happen to Metal Gear Solid if somebody snaps up Hideo Kojima’s team.
As for Silent Hill, its destiny is probably a series of low budget mobile games – maybe Pyramid Head Slots, or something. It’s a tragic end for the franchise – or would be if 01) it hadn’t already gone off the rails spectacularly and 02) its fans weren’t so deeply averse to almost any attempt to do something interesting with it.
Silent Hills, as revealed through P.T., looked like the only possibly bright future for the series, and Konami has made it clear it’s deader than dodos. So.
5. Brothers in Arms: Furious 4
Or whatever it is Gearbox is calling this one. It turned up at E3 a few years back with Ubisoft at the helm, but Gearbox and Ubisoft quietly parted ways, and nobody else has picked up the project. Gearbox has made noises about reworking the shooter as a new IP, but unless it can sweet talk 2K into publishing on the strength of Borderlands' success, I wouldn't hold your breath. After that whole Colonial Marines thing, not to mention a snaffle of nasty lawsuits over Duke Nukem, Gearbox may have some ground to make up before anybody backs it for another E3 extravaganza - bar Borderlands 3.
6. The sequel to Red Dead Redemption
I'm not saying Red Dead Redemption 2 (or Red Dead Revelation or Red Dead Republicans or Red Dead Rhetorical Questions or whatever it will be called) doesn't exist, because I'm pretty damn sure that it does. I'm just saying Rockstar doesn't need E3. If it wants that level of attention from the press, the industry and from consumers, it just has to crook a finger and we'll all come running.
Was Grand Theft Auto 5 revealed at an E3? Nope. All Rockstar has to do is say it has something to say, and we all spend the next few weeks quietly changing our repeatedly soiled underwear. (That said, Agent might turn up at Sony's show, assuming it even exists and is still a platform exclusive. Ah ha ha! Don't place money on it.)
7. A decent Sonic the Hedgehog game
I can't even remember a time when the prospect of Sega bringing out another Sonic game wasn’t cause for stomach-churning dread.
That's not the Sonic game you want. You know, the one that plays up to your memories of Sonic as a cool, relevant hero and not the soulless, empty, focus-tested husk at the forefront of a series of generic action games.
On the bright side, every awful Sonic reinvention means a diminishment of the blue hedgehog's fandom, and that in turn means a slight decrease in the rate of production of weird fanfic erotica. Can't complain.
Still, I doubt we can even count on that – Sega is seriously creaking.
8. Half-Life 3
At this point Valve has blue balled us for so long we're filing for divorce. Maybe next year, after VR goes commercial.