Sony at E3 2016 – Short, Sweet and to the Point
Sony’s E3 2016 conference was the short one, and for once short was the compliment. No house band, no long walk to a podium, just games — a few of them enormous — and a room that was allowed to get to the point.
God of War opened the show like a door being kicked. Kratos, a boy, a new weapon, a colder world. It could have been a brand restart nobody asked for. The footage made it look like a brand restart people will queue for. Horizon Zero Dawn, already shown before, looked even better out in the grass, machines moving like they had somewhere to be.
The PlayStation VR stretch did the job without pretending a headset is the only future. A handful of games, a price and a date you can actually plan around, then back to the television, which is still where most of us live. A conference that spends forty minutes on a peripheral is a conference that has run out of games. This one had not.
Spider-Man swung in and the internet made the noise you expect. Insomniac on a proper Spider-Man game is the sort of sentence that does not need a paragraph of caveats yet. We will write the paragraph when we have played it. For now the trailer is enough to pin above a desk.
Not every sizzle reel from the hour will survive contact with a release date. That is E3. The point is the shape of the show. Sony did not try to be a variety hour. They tried to be a shop window with the lights already on. It worked, and people were still quoting it on the way out of the hall.