As the show wrapped up, let's see what worked and what didn't for me:
What worked
- Announcements: Sure, some of the stuff was leaked or teased already, but a new Marvel Ultimate Alliance out of nowhere? A new Mortal Kombat? A new post-apocalyptic Far Cry? Obsidian's new old-school-Fallout-meet-Borderlands RPG? Below and Ashen not only coming now but even part of Game Pass? The CTR Remake as a multiplatform game from the start, too? A new Dragon Age? Tons of exciting indies? Impressive, absolutely impressive.
- Something for all platforms: Looking at the announcements again, I feel like whether you own an Xbox One, a Switch, a PS4, a PC (unless you're a Steam devotee, heh) or are waiting for next-gen consoles, you kinda have plenty of things to look forward regardless, both in terms of exclusives and third parties. Sure, there were things missing (Metroid Prime, where art thou) but as someone who owns most platforms I walked away pretty confident about the next months/years of gaming after seeing these things, knowing fully well there's a lot of other things coming up we didn't see today (most Sony exclusives, Microsoft's long-term games like Halo and Fable, closer releases like Metro, etc.).
- The format: A pretty relentless barrage of announcements, awards, interviews and then some. Geoff held the stage well for most of the time, and the 3 hours runtime of the show felt definitely shorter given how action-packed it all was - and trust me, I would have felt if it was boring considering I woke up before 3am to watch this, so I was quite sleepy.
What sort of worked
- The orchestra: Having a full-blown orchestra doing classical renditions of videogame music is awesome and definitely adds value to the show. It's too bad they mainly preferred concentrating on the same refrains of the same games. I did not play RDR2 but by the end of the show I must have heard its theme song (or its most iconic song or whatever that is) like 5 times.
- Console war over?: Having some of the top men from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo on the same stage at the same practically finishing each others' phrases is quite the memorable and potentially important moment, but I felt that they haven't said anything particularly meaningful or impactful for it to really matter. They could have made major points about inclusiveness, cross-play and such, but it felt like generic "gaming's awesome" prep talk. Could have been better.
- Smash x Persona: I understand this is a big deal for Persona fans, but wasting a fake blackout announcement out of nowhere for a DLC character seems like a missed opportunity, such a slot could have been used for a huge reveal like that Obsidian game or something. Last time such a fake "hacking the scene" thing happened at a major event we had a world premiere reveal of Cyberpunk 2077, which was quite a bigger deal.
What didn't work
- Awards remain the least exciting part: When your big hyped blockbusters of the year scoop up 80% of the eligible awards again, it becomes far less exciting. There's so little chances for outlier wins in this show, which is too bad. It's like you could know what games were going to be picked for all major categories (bar a few indies like Celeste) without fail prior to their release: RDR2 was always gonna win half the awards, Forza was always going to be nominated meaningfully only as a racer and not as a "game", Fortnite and its streamers were obviously getting a huge advantage from the get go, and so on. Predictable and not particularly exciting.
- Forced gamer humor: When all your VIPs force the same Fortnite jokes or talk about their hardcore "gamer" past when they clearly have no fucking clue about what the consoles and games were called, it becomes rather obvious they're in this for some quick cash and have little to do with gaming. There are actual VIPs, sports players, celebrities who actively game, but apparently they preferred kinda faking it out instead. Too bad.
- Inclusiveness: They clearly tried hard to get some positive message across, but not only SonicFox's speech was trying a bit too hard, but even worse they decided to honour a mysogynist and toxic player like Ninja, plus showering RDR2 with awards where even an actual person who worked on it went on stage and "jokingly" reminded us that he worked late hours on many days for this title. When they so openly support toxic behaviours it comes off as fake and forced when they try and push positive messages unfortunately - too bad because there were some good ones, like the whole section with female devs or that disabled gamer (I'm sorry I don't know the name, I don't follow gaming personalities much).
Overall, this was a fine show. The awards were mostly predictable and straightforward, but even with the leaks Geoff delivered on his promise and brought us tons of exciting new games we've never seen before, which is not easy given how leaky today's industry is. The pace of the show was good, and while there were some questionable moments and choices, plus maybe a few disappointments based on odd rumors (good thing for me I care little about Metroid), I feel like it was one of the strongest live gaming shows I remember watching in this decade. There's definitely a lot to work on, especially to make the gamer culture feel less cringey on live TV, but I was entertained and overall satisfied. It was worth waking up at 3am and sleeping like 3 hours all night with work to do today.