[The following is a transcript of my unscripted thoughts on the XBOX Developer Direct which I recorded soon after it aired.]
Should I be worried about DOOM? I know that’s a weird thing to say, but Xbox did this Developer Direct recently, and showed off DOOM The Dark Ages, and of all the games they showed it look the least interesting, frankly. But maybe that’s because the rest of the games look good! So why don’t we get into those…
The first thing they showed off was Ninja Gaiden 4. I’ve never owned an Xbox until last year and the Koei Tecmo games have flown under my radar. I have vague memories of playing the NES game at some point, but the 3D ones I think I’ve only tried out once in a store somewhere, and promptly got my behind handed to me. They’re legendarily hard games, even before the Souls-likes came into vogue. This one looks really good. It looks like a return to that PS3/Xbox 360 era of character action games: fastpaced, flamboyant, all over the place, and of course it has to be, because Platinum Games is involved. I love Platinum, I’ve loved them since playing Vanquish. They have a signature action game DNA, and more power to them that they continue to make games for all sorts of developers. I love that. I love that in some ways that’s also kind of a throwback. Nowadays you have developers who are only known for their own franchises, or working for studios in a certain way. Platinum just does everything for everyone. I’m so happy to see that. I think because, with Platinum more than any of the Ninja Gaiden IP, I’m really looking forward to this one.
But also they shadow dropped–I think is the correct term–right now, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, which is an Unreal Engine 5 remake/remaster/reimagining of sorts of Ninja Gaiden 2 from the Xbox 360 days. This also looks fantastic in very different ways from Ninja Gaiden 4, which is more stylized–and I love stylized–but this is more of your kind of, well, I don’t want to call, say, Standard, but yeah I guess the standard good-looking game style thing. I’m tempted to try this out. I wish there was a demo, because you know hard games and me don’t mix, but yeah this one also looks really solid. This was a great way to start off the Showcase, with two games that were completely not on my radar and now totally are. I think I would love to check both of these out. Maybe I’ll just go back and play the old ones on the Xbox 360 through backward compatibility, because now I have access to an Xbox.
South of Midnight is the reason that I tuned into this showcase, because I’ve been watching the trailers for now, I think, the last couple of showcases. It still looks great. I think maybe it’s showing a few cracks here and there in terms of just the mundane scenes that they showed, but once it got into the action and the actual gameplay side of it, it has charm, it has strangeness, it’s got that kind of trendy animated on two’s thing that people love from the Spiderverse movies and all, but in limited ways. Every aspect is not choppy, some things are really smooth. Environments thankfully are really smooth. Some of the characters are done in this sort of more stop-motion way. It does look a little strange, I mean it in a good way. I mean it has character, it has, well, for lack a better term: soul! Which is hard to find in games these days, and harder even to find in these high gloss showcases, where everything is polished to an Nth Degree.
In fact that was kind of my experience with the whole showcase. It was very well produced almost to the point of seeming absurd. I think that’s par for the course for these big studio publisher behemoth showcases. Even the Sony ones are like that now, and these Microsoft ones, even when they were talking to the developers. It is very well produced. As someone who kind of dabbles in video production I know how much work that takes, but also how you can kind of kill the the straightforwardness and earnestness of it all.
But this this game looks solid. It looks like it has some heart behind it. This was the one that I wanted to be good out of all of these ones here, and yeah it still looks really good. I don’t know quite what the game is really, beyond just being character action with magic spells and whatnot. If the world is good and the story is good, I don’t mind at all. This looks good.
As does Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an intriguing world–it’s so intriguing I think they’ve already sold the rights for a movie–and good for them because it has a lore that is already intriguing. It’s about this fascinating world where anyone over the age of a certain number dies because of this supernatural phenomenon, and there are these Expeditions that go out and you’re the 33rd expedition. It’s very much invoking the style of 90s JRPGs, but it also looks very French, and very of itself, and it just looks bonkers. Reminds me of early 2000s PC gaming in terms of the style, of just how much art and weirdness go into it. There’s that very European style, it’s mixed in with Japanese aesthetics here and there, but not too hard. I’m glad that they did not go in a total anime direction. This thing is very European while also being International, and it has a solid voice cast. It has developers who seem to really know what they’re doing, and it’s amazing what small studios or seemingly small studios–this is I’d say more AA than you know quadruple for sure–it’s amazing what they seem to be able to pull off these days with these newer engines and newer hardware. I’m so glad that people get to realize this stuff. I’m happy for all the pixel art indies, but I’m also really happy to see things like this.
Which brings us finally to DOOM The Dark Ages, or the Dark Age–I can’t quite remembe–but this is a prequel to The reboot DOOM 2016 series, and this one looks a little weird. I’ve tried the DOOM 2016 game and really enjoyed it. I haven’t tried Eternal, and from whatever I heard Eternal was kind of a mixed bag in terms of reception. Some people really liked it, some people did not. This one I think might be playing it a little safe. There was mention of being able to set your own pace and set your own tone in terms of how fast or agile the gameplay is. But it also just didn’t seem to have that DOOM feel, that even someone who’s kind of a casual fan of DOOM like me is used to seeing, where you know there are so many firstperson shooters these days, even in this type of genre I don’t know.
I think the Developer Direct in general was a pretty solid performance, and DOOM I’m cautiously optimistic about. I think a lot of the stuff they’re throwing at the screen, it kind of gives me maybe some hesitation. Maybe they are trying to just do a bit too much and not make a decision. Doom Eternal certainly was divisive but it seemed to make those decisions but yeah the developer direct looked good looking forward to most of the games and looking forward to the surprises too.
-VKB