Great Microsoft Conference: Sony Has Done Anything Up To The Task

After the great Microsoft conference, Sony’s was eagerly awaited, which took place this past morning in Spain. At E3 last year, most considered Sony the winning company of the fair with the presentation of PS4. This year I can’t say that Sony has done anything up to the task.

With a really promising start, the Sony conference has been deflating at times, reaching some tedious moment and only picking up right at the end, to leave us with honey on our lips with one of the most anticipated PS4 titles. But let’s recap and see what have been the most important moments of the Sony conference at E3.

Solid Snake, Nathan Drake and Grim Fandango, the most notable names

Destiny has been the title chosen to open. After showing a new trailer for the Bungie title, it has been announced that this coming Thursday PS4 users will have access to the alpha version of the game and that the beta will be available on July 17. To this we must add that Sony will launch a special PS4 package with Destiny that will include a white version of the console, the game and a 30-day subscription to Playstation Plus. The pack will be available from September 9.

A string of trailers have followed this announcement, highlighting the new gameplay of The Order: 1886, Entwined, a puzzle and skill game already available, and Infamous: First Light, a stand-alone DLC (that is, it is not mandatory to have with Infamous: Second Son) that expands on Sucker Punch’s gameplay with a new protagonist and new scenarios. The latter will be available in August.

Little Big Planet 3, whose previous installments were PS3 flagships, is coming soon to PS4. Through a nice demonstration, the new characters that will debut in the franchise have been discovered, each one of them with a new design and specific abilities. But the great announcement of the game is that all the levels created so far for Little Big Planet 1 and 2 will be compatible with this third installment.

One of the most celebrated moments of the conference came when the trailer for Bloodborne was presented, a new title from the Japanese studio From Software, creators of the idolized Dark Souls saga. Due out in 2015, the game features a truly ghoulish design sure to please Souls fans. It will be necessary to discover if the great difficulty of these will also be present in Bloodborne.

Another title that was expected to see was FarCry 4. Its trailer with gameplay has not disappointed and has shown a very interesting feature of the Ubisoft game, cooperative multiplayer mode. Apart from that, the trailer has reminded a lot of the great FarCry 3, taking mechanics already established by the saga such as the conquest of enemy camps.

Another lot of trailers have carried the common thread of the conference, with titles like Dead Island 2, with a much more humorous look than its first installment, and Battlefield Hardline, whose closed beta for PS4 and PC is already possible to register. Hurry up or you will stay without trying it.

The next segment of the conference has been focused on smaller studios, emphasizing the games that the public wants. Several titles from the distributor Devolver Digital ( Hotline Miami 2, Broforce ) will make their appearance on Playstation systems, as well as Magicka 2, a continuation of the fun cooperative game that has given so many hours on PC.

But the big surprise as far as small studios are concerned, has been given by Double Fine. And it is that Tim Schaffer’s studio has announced that he will develop a remastered version of Grim Fandango for PS4 and PS Vita. Without a doubt, no one expected it, but it is more than welcome news for all fans of this great graphic adventure that broke the mold 15 years ago.

Let It Die is the title of the new game created by Suda51, a famous Japanese designer famous for going three nuts too many in his titles. This new game, exclusive to PS4, promises a lot of violence in its first trailer, which has made no bones about showing crude deaths.

But the beauty has returned to the conference with No Man’s Sky, one of the most anticipated titles and that promises the player the possibility of visiting countless worlds created in a totally procedural way. So each player will find a totally different world from the rest. As if this were not enough, it will be possible to travel between worlds in a completely simple way. Its impressive gameplay shows it perfectly.

It has been from this point on that the conference has caused interest to wane. For a few good minutes, hardware (with Playstation Camera and Project Morpheus) and multimedia services have been the protagonists of the scene, although few developments have been presented in this regard. The main announcement has been the future launch of Playstation TV in North America and Europe.

This small device, which will come out at a price of 99 dollars, will allow you to receive streaming from your PS4 so you can play it from another television, as well as enjoy PS Vita, PSNow and PSN games. Playstation TV will go on sale next Fall.

The public has not reacted too enthusiastically to the various announcements that Sony was making at the moment, until the big names have come to light. A couple of open secrets were the remastered versions of The Last of Us and GTA V, which are due out this summer and fall respectively. Logically the first will be exclusive to PS4 while GTA V will be released for PS4, Xbox One and PC. An important detail of this new version of GTA V is that it will allow us to import the online characters that we have on PS3 and Xbox 360, so we won’t lose anything from our journey so far.

As the end of the conference approached, it was when Sony has already released the heavy artillery in the form of trailers and gameplay. The first has been Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, with a video very similar to the one seen previously, so Kojima has not surprised with any new information.

Those who have surprised us have been Rocksteady with a spectacular gameplay of Batman: Arkham Knight in which we have finally been able to see what it will be like to play with the Batmobile for the first time in the Arkham saga. Just fantastic.

And how to close a conference and leave people wanting more? With one of the most anticipated games for PS4, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, the new installment of the wonderful Naughty Dog franchise that has only shown a brief cinematic with a bruised Nathan Drake that showed its greatest realism achieved to date. We will have to wait until next year to see if Uncharted is once again one of the games of the year.

On balance, Sony’s conference could have been better. Titles like Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearths 3 or the now defunct The Last Guardian have been missed, on which there was some hope of seeing resurrected. Even so, the good news is that many of the games presented already have a release date and will not go to 2015. Let us trust that Sony works better at its conference next year.