This is a landmark year for Bethesda Softworks.  While they’ve always attended E3, this is the first time they’ve actually saw fit to hold their own E3 briefing.  With an expensive venue and a lot of games to show, expectations were high when Bethesda’s E3 Media Briefing began.  But how did they ultimately do?

Press conferences, like most things in life, can be broken down to 3 categories: Good, Bad, and Ugly.  And that’s exactly what we’ve done!

The Good

Doom

There’s no two ways about it: Doom looks awesome!  One of gaming’s most important franchises is making a comeback, and it’s doing so in the best way possible.  Id and Bethesda look to be bringing the classic into the modern age, but at the same time staying true to what made Doom such a classic in the first place: gothic design, powerful weapons, quick movement, and lots of gore!

Fallout 4

This was clearly going to be here; after all, Fallout 4 is the entire reason Bethesda even had a conference to begin with.  The team clearly has a lot of passion for the Fallout universe, and it looks as though they’ve gone ahead and created the best Fallout game yet.  Bethesda showed us all the new features we can look forward to – very impressive ones, at that – and explained their overall vision of the game.  Oh, and the game being released on my birthday is one hell of a surprise.

The Bad

Dishonored 2

I’m not saying that Dishonored 2 is going to be a bad game.  In fact, if D2 is anything like the first one, it’s going to be a great game.  So why put it on the list?  In a conference where the two headlining games had actual gameplay demos that showed us what it will be like to actually play them, for Dishonored 2 we were shown a prerendered trailer.  Trailers like these are something we should be past in this day and age, especially when we’ve seen only minutes before that they can do so much better.

Dishonored Definitive Edition

If you love this generation’s current trend of remasters, then good on you.  Not everyone got a chance to play Dishonored last generation so it’s great that they’ll get a chance to; Dshonored is most definitely worth it.  However, saying “Here’s a game you’ve already played” as a headline announcement at your first ever E3 conference isn’t going to win you any friends.

The Ugly

The Elder Scrolls Legends

While they didn’t show much of the game, the impression I got from this Elder Scrolls inspired cardgame is that it’s basically just a clone of Hearthstone.  This is just one of those games that seems completely unnecessary and only exists as a way to hop on the bandwagon and grab some money from mobile users.  Not that there’s anything wrong with going mobile, but from the limited amount that Bethesda showed us it looks like a blatant ripoff, and we should really expect better from Bethesda.

Boring

A press conference doesn’t have to be wall to wall surprises and big announcements.  That’s an unsustainable and unrealistic hope, but at the very least it should hold your interest.  I found that Bethesda only really had two great things to show (Doom and Fallout 4) and that their show was bookended with the two great games.  But between that was nothing but filler, games that, while they may be good, either weren’t complete enough to be shown or just weren’t very interesting to look at to begin with.  It seemed like most of the conference was filled with these filler moments, and I found myself yawning.  The last thing an E3 event like this should do it leave you bored.

 

How did you feel about Bethesda’s E3 Press Conference?  Did you like what they showed, or were you a little bored by the smaller things?  Or did Fallout 4 trump everything else?  Let us know in the comments, and pay attention to Twitter and Facebook for more E3 updates as they happen.