We’ve had some little news drops over the last week or so, like the Fallout 4 trailer and the Smash Bros. Nintendo Direct, but with Bethesda’s press conference last night, E3 2015 has finally started.  And what a start!  Bethesda threw a lot of footage at us, a lot of which looked pretty great, and a few little surprises, too.  So let’s take a quick look at what we saw.

First of all, Bethesda employees get a lot of cool t-shirts.  I want all of them.  But anyway, the games.

The show kicked off with a pretty in-depth look at Doom, and it looks like a lot of fun.  Doom is not looking to reinvent the wheel; this game is aimed straight at people who loved the original Doom and Doom II in the early 90s.  Doom is a game about flying chunks of flesh, geysers of blood, double-barreled shotguns that reload in a fraction of a second, slicing through demons with a chainsaw, and exploding barrels.  The trailers Bethesda showed us – there were four of them – had buckets and buckets of that goodness.

It’s easy to criticize a game like Doom for not bringing anything new to the table, for not really innovating.  But there are tons of shooters every year.  Let someone else come up with bold, innovative gameplay mechanics that give you a first-person shooter experience unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  Doom is a game for when you want to rip the arms off a demon and then beat that demon to death with them.  What Bethesda showed off last night looks like it’s going to nail the gory, comically over-the-top, fast-paced gameplay that Doom fans are thirsting for. Continue reading Bethesda E3 Conference Impressions →