Jonathan's E3 2017 Adventure

Join Jonathan as he describes his experience exploring E3 2017, the expo all about computer and video games.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in text with technology with tech Stuff from half
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm a senior writer with
how stuff works dot com and today I'm flying by
the seat of my pants, which is, you know, not

(00:24):
nearly as efficient as flying on a seven fifty seven,
which I did recently, as I have returned from Los Angeles,
the city of Angels where I attended the two thousand
seventeen E three conference formerly known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo,
and E three, for those who do not know, is

(00:45):
all about video games and computer games in all their forms,
whether they are console, PC based, handheld VR. All shapes
and sizes of games are represented there and typically A
three as a place where various game studios will get
together and show off games that are in development. Typically

(01:06):
they tend to be pretty close to going live, going
gold as they say, and giving industry industry folks and
and media people a quick early look so that they
can get an appreciation for it and then hype up
the games. It becomes a big marketing push for these companies.

(01:29):
UH this year was a little different, had a bit
of a change and that the organization that throws E
three decided that for the first time in many years,
it would open up the conference to the general public.
Now you had to purchase a ticket to go, but

(01:49):
for the first time in ages, the general public was
allowed to buy tickets to attend E three, and obviously
a lot of people were very eager to do because
it meant getting that head start on everybody else on
the coolest games and gear that we're right around the corner.
As a result, E three was crazy busy, y'all. I mean,

(02:15):
they had sixty eight thousand, four hundred attendees. So let
me describe what a typical E three is like, and
then try to describe what E three is like. A
typical E three is crazy, busy, super crowded, partly because

(02:35):
I think some of the people who are attending there
as industry attendees. Our industry attendees only if you stretch
your imagination pretty far, like their job descriptions and their
job there were duties and responsibilities may only tangentially be

(02:55):
related to video games and computer games. So as one
from the media who is there to try and cover
the event, it was always challenging because you had a
lot of people in a limited amount of space. It
takes place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which is
a quite large building, but still a limited space, and

(03:17):
you would have to wait, even as media for a
while to get one on one time with various game titles,
new pieces of equipment. If you wanted to talk to
a developer or someone in marketing, it might take a
little while because they're just a lot of people there.
Opening it up to the public meant that there were
even more people this year. And I don't want you

(03:40):
to think that this is just Jonathan complaining that there
were a bunch of commoners all around me as I
regally stride through the Los Angeles Convention Center. I don't
mean to say that at all. They had paid for
that privilege and they had every right to be there.
It did make my job more challenging, but at the

(04:00):
same time, I was glad that so many people got
to experience something that excited them and brought them happiness.
People who are very avid gamers got that chance to
do something that we in the media can do fairly frequently,
and to me, that is a valuable experience. So I

(04:21):
don't want to take anything away from it, I think
that they had every right to be there based upon
the rules. I don't know if the rules were necessarily
the most intelligent thing to do. If you it depends
on what the goal is for your conference. If the
goal is to allow these various outlets, these various media
outlets access to video game studios, it makes it more difficult.

(04:46):
But if your goal is to drum up excitement in
general for video games, it definitely did that. So while
there were negative aspects in the sense that it was
harder to get access to the people thing and games
that I wanted to uh, on the flip side, people
are having a good time, so I can't really complain

(05:06):
too much. Also, there was way more programming at this
year's E three than you typically would see. Normally, when
you go to the E three conference, you have press
events that precede the show floor being open. That's when
big companies like e A, Bethesda, Microsoft, Sony, Ubi Soft, Nintendo,

(05:30):
they'll hold these enormous events to announce gear and video
games and various news items to the press. Following those
press days, you then have the exhibit floor open, and
that's where you get to have the hands on time
with the various demos that are available, and not every

(05:50):
game has a demo available. Sometimes all you get to
see is a cinematic that gives you an idea of
what the game is about and what it's game play
might be like, but in many cases there are demos
available for you to try out. Uh this year they
also had the E three Colosseum, where there was ongoing

(06:13):
panel discussions about game development, the rise of VR, how
augmented reality is poised to make a big impact on
the gaming world, where four K resolution is becoming a
bigger deal. So it's a lot more information going on
around the conference than you would typically see. On top

(06:35):
of that, you had a lot of media outlets that
had a consistent presence on the show floor itself. Game Spot,
for example, had their own stage, I g N had
their own stage. YouTube had a stage, and they were
presenting content pretty much throughout the entire conference, with specific

(06:55):
interviews and hands on time with lots of different titles,
so there was no shortage of information and for the
larger outlets, it probably wasn't that much more difficult than
a normal E three, except if you had to go
do a tour of a specific booth. You then had
to try and move through these masses of people that

(07:17):
UH didn't move particularly quickly and were challenging to get around. UH.
If you were the lucky type of person who was
at a stage and people came to you, life was awesome. I, however,
was on my own. I didn't have a crew with me,
so I was just one little person walking around big
rooms filled with lots of other people, both little and

(07:39):
much bigger than I am. And UH, it was impressive.
It's always an impressive experience. There are a lot of
studios that end up making very elaborate booths to draw
you in. UH. One of the big titles that was
on display was Shadow of War, which is the sequel
to Shadow of More Door. And I'm a huge Lord

(08:00):
of the Rings fan. I have a Lord of the
Rings tattoo on me for goodness sakes, and I was
drawn to it anyway, but I was extra drawn to
it when I saw they had an enormous dragon sculpture
outside and they were allowing people to get on a
saddle and have their picture taken on the back of
the dragon. And while I did not stand in line

(08:23):
to play all the different demos, I did stand in
line to get my picture taken on a dragon. That
tells you where my priorities are. I'm not a proud man,
so I would argue I'm just a boy. But I
was a boy on a dragon and it was awesome.
So let's talk about some of the stuff that came
out at E three and some of the things I

(08:44):
did while I was there, the stuff I was specifically
checking out. One of the big stories was that Microsoft
announced the Xbox one X console. The one X console
is the most powerful console on the market, at least
according to Microsoft. It is uh This was the one

(09:07):
that had been codenamed Project Scorpio, and it has some
pretty hefty specs. It is largely designed to be a
four K gaming machine. Four K meaning four K resolution.
This is ultra high definition resolution. This is both cool

(09:28):
and somewhat perplexing. Maybe not perplexing, but problematic, and that is,
you cannot take advantage of four K resolution unless you
have a four K television set. If you have a
regular HD TV set ten a D resolution, you're not
gonna see the benefit of four K streaming because your

(09:50):
television is physically incapable of displaying an image at that resolution,
you would have to go out and buy a four
K television set, which, to p upon the brand and
the size, could get pretty expensive. We're talking more than
a thousand dollars in some cases, So there's that you
would have to buy that set in order for you

(10:11):
to be able to take advantage of these consoles. Right now,
there's not a huge amount of ultra high definition content.
So if you're buying a TV just for playing four
K games and you've got the cash to do it,
that's awesome. You can go out buy a four K
set and buy the Xbox one X. By the way,

(10:32):
the one S also does ultra high definition, it's just
not optimized for it the way the four X is
or the one X. I should say, Also, Microsoft, what's
with the naming convention? We have the Xbox, the Xbox
three sixty, the Xbox one, the Xbox one S, and
then the Xbox one X, which I argue looks like
the Xbox one ten with ten as a Roman numeral.

(10:58):
I know that you have trouble unting because Windows went
from Windows eight to Windows ten, but let's get a
handle on that, shall we. And I'm saying this is
an Xbox fan Anyway, the one X is really geared
for this four K gaming experience. If you don't have

(11:18):
the four K television, there's not a huge number of
compelling reasons to get the Xbox one X. And my
question is, doesn't make sense to go ahead and buy
an Xbox one X, which is going to be sold
for about fos starting November seven. Does it make sense

(11:40):
to buy one of those and then either buy a
four KSE television or wait until you're ready to replace
your existing TV and then buy a four K television
and considerate future proofing, or by the time we see
gamers start to have four K television sets as their default.
Because most of us aren't replacing our TVs that frequently,

(12:03):
it's an expensive thing to do. If you're like most
people and you're not replacing your TV regularly, does it
make more sense to just skip the Xbox one X
until four K TVs become the new default, just like
h D t V is the default. Now wait until
four K becomes the new default. By then it could

(12:25):
be possible that Microsoft will have another generation of console out,
So in other words, the one X might be a
stop gap and that you would buy it and it
would only be the newest, hottest thing for a couple
of years before the next true generational change and Xbox happens.

(12:46):
Or are we approaching peak console performance and therefore the
one X is just as good a purchase as anything
else because we're not likely to see an enormous leap
in technologgy beyond what the one X is capable of doing.
These are difficult questions to answer. The one X will

(13:06):
also support some VR stuff potentially in the future, so
that's really cool. And uh, you know, I'm not against
the Xbox one X, but I'm not. I'm not completely
sold on it being the be all, end all of gaming.

(13:27):
So Microsoft's press release where they're talking about the one X,
I I thought it was neat, but I don't know
that I'm going to jump out and just buy it immediately. Uh.
It does have some pretty impressive specs, not as impressive
as a dedicated gaming rig. If you look at the

(13:47):
Xbox one X, it's got an eight custom core micro processor.
It's based off the X eight six architecture that Intel creates.
It's clocked at two point three giga hurts. That's fast.
It's not as fast as what you will find in
premium gaming rigs. On the PC side, it's faster than

(14:08):
the PlayStation PlayStation has eight Jaguar core processor at two
point one giga hurts um, and it has it has
a a GPU that's clocked at uh one tho seventy
two mega hurts as opposed to nine hundred eleven mega
hurts on the PlayStation four Pro. It's got twelve gigabytes

(14:29):
of g d d R five RAM, again compared to
the PlayStation four Pro that has eight gigabytes of g
d d R RAM, and it's got a memory bandwidth
of three hundred and twenty six gigabytes per second, which
is pretty impressive. It's also got a one terabyte hard
drive and it can play four K u h D
Blu Ray video. So it's definitely the most powerful console

(14:56):
available right now, but that may not be a it
it can claim for very long. There's always going to
be other people working on the next big console. My
other question for people would be, doesn't make sense to
invest in a four K television set when there's not
much other content for four K out there. You can
get four K for Netflix. You can get some four

(15:17):
K YouTube content, assuming that you have a fast enough
Internet connection to pull that four K content in onto
your screen. There are only a few four K optical
discs out there, so that if you wanted to buy
physical media and watch it in four K, there are
a few examples of that, but it's not widespread at

(15:39):
the moment. So if there's very little content out there,
does it make sense to make that investment or would
it make more sense to just go ahead and invest
in a true gaming rig where you're building a gaming
rig from scratch which can already play at four K
resolutions depending upon the monitor, the display you have and

(15:59):
can bed are ready, and also they're customizable. You can
choose which options you want for your gaming rig. You
just have to make sure that you're making that you're
picking everything that's compatible with each other, because not all
processors are compatible with all motherboards, for example. But as
long as you're being careful and you're picking all the
right components, you can build a really incredible gaming rig

(16:23):
and potentially end up spending about the same amount of
money you would if you were buying an Xbox one
X plus a four K television set. So it just
ends up creating questions about where are your priorities as
far as UH games are concerned. That being said, I

(16:44):
thought that the games that were playing on the Xbox
one X looked very pretty. I didn't get a chance
to get a lot of hands on experience with them,
and I'm also wondering what some of the games are
actually about. Like there's BioWare's game Anthem was shown off
a little bit with a couple of videos, but we
didn't really get to learn very much about it. It

(17:06):
does look kind of neat, and it looks like you're
gonna be able to play as sort of a super
human like character wearing a power suit. The power suit
is what appears to give you extra abilities, and it
does look pretty, but I don't know much about it.
I'm excited about the Player Unknowns battleground sport that's coming

(17:27):
to the Xbox one X. So for those who don't
know what Player Unknowns Battlegrounds is, it's like the movie
Battle Royal or if you prefer hunger games, where as
a player, you are put into an environment with up
to an other players and your goal is to be

(17:47):
the last survivor out of all one hundred and you
run around looking for weapons and equipment on a map
where you get an increasingly smaller amount of area to
play in. The area gets restricted over time, and if
you don't get to the safe zone, then you start
taking damage until you die. Well, this has been out

(18:08):
in an early build for PCs for a while. It's
not a fully finished game yet, but it's been available
on PCs for a while. Now, it's going to be
available for the Xbox One, and um that will work
not just on the Xbox one X but the other
Xbox One consoles as well, So I'll probably try it.

(18:30):
I'll be one of the bullet sponges that dies like
I'm sure i'll be in the first ten percent to
die on any given day. If I don't die in
that first ten percent, it will only be because I
lucked out and landed in an area that did not
have other players in it, and I was still pretty
close to the safe zone. That's the only way I
can imagine not almost instantaneously dying in this game. However,

(18:53):
I'm still gonna play it. One of the stories I
thought that was hilarious was that Minecraft is getting a
four K upgrade, And if you've ever played Minecraft, you
know that it's a blocky game, and to think of
a super duper graphics pack giving four K capability so
that you get very high resolution blocky games is somewhat hilarious,
but it does mean the textures and the reflections from water,

(19:16):
those sort of effects are gonna be much more interesting. Uh.
There are some other cool games that were shown off
at the Microsoft conference. Crackdown three was looking good. See
if Thieves looks good, especially if you like pirates like
I do. Um, And then you know, we saw some
other stuff that's again not not exclusive to Xbox, like

(19:39):
Assassin's Creed Origins. I'm not a huge Assassin's Creed fan.
I think that the art is amazing. I think the
gameplay is fun, but the games are so long that
the gameplay gets really repetitive. And this is true for
every single version of Assassin's Creed. The only one I
played from start to end without taking a break was

(19:59):
Black Flag because it was a pirate game, and as
I've already asked made made clear I love pirates. So
Black Flag was the only one I ever played all
the way through. Origins looks pretty, but I don't I
don't think that will be one that sells me on
the Xbox one X. I don't think seeing it uh
in that that style is definitely gonna get me on

(20:20):
board Shadow of War, maybe because I do like the
Shadow of more door games. Sony. Meanwhile, their press conference
was a lot different from Microsoft's. Microsoft was traditional where
people come out, they talk about games, they show a clip,
maybe they show a second clip. Some other people come out,
they talk about games, so on and so forth. Throughout

(20:42):
the press conference. Sony's was essentially an hour long series
of trailers for different games. Uh. They did have a
couple of different surprises in there's, including the fact that
they were going to have, um a a sequel two
or not a sequel, I'm sorry, A reboot of Shadow

(21:04):
of the Colossus, a very popular game for the PS two.
This one's gonna be a re re remastered version of
Shadow of Colossus. So if you really like that game
on the PS two, good news. It's gonna be available
on the PSU four Pro and it's gonna looks super pretty. Um.
You know, we saw some other stuff like a God

(21:24):
of War game, which kind of falls in that same categories.
Assassin's Creed. In my mind, it's a game that is
fun initially but tends to get really repetitive. Um, that's
maybe that's just me. Maybe it's just that the action
games don't have enough variety in them for to keep
my attention, but they tend to be pretty linear levels
with pretty repetitive gameplay. We saw some more about PlayStation

(21:49):
VR games VR in general at E three was a
big big deal. There are a lot of different companies
showing off VR experiences. Bethesda, for example, showed off VR
experiences for Fallout four as well as for Doom, and
both of those looked really cool. I wish I could
have had a chance to get into the Fallout four
VR demo because I love the Fallout series and the

(22:14):
VR part looked pretty neat. But PlayStation's VR is probably
the the bargain entry way of getting into virtual reality.
So many people already have a PlayStation four that that
part's not terribly expensive. The uh, you know, it's still
costs quite a bit to get all the VR components,
but it's less expensive than buying a gaming rig capable

(22:36):
of running VR plus all the peripherals you would need,
like an HTC Vibe or an Oculus Rift. Uh. The
question is has the PSVR experience improved enough so that
it doesn't seem quite as jankie. Because out of all
the VR dedicated VR sets that I've heard about, the

(22:57):
most common complaint I hear about PSVR, it's just that
the actual experience of playing it can be a little rough.
The tracking is not as accurate as on other systems.
I do hear that it's more comfortable to wear than
a lot of other systems are, but that's less accurate,
and that's problematic from anything that's a virtual reality game. Uh.

(23:22):
We saw a PlayStation for exclusive that I actually think
is interesting enough to possibly make me buy a p
S four, which is called Detroit Become Human. This one
I like because it follows a plot that I find
very interesting, the idea of an android based revolution. Androids
that feel that they have been mistreated and they have

(23:44):
no representation are rebelling against their human creators. This is
a theme we see throughout science fiction. I mean, you
can watch the movie Blade Runner and you can get
a feel for this kind of thing. But it looks
really nice. I don't know how it plays, didn't get
my hands on it. And spider Man. Spider Man for
the PlayStation four looks amazing and I'm I say that

(24:06):
as someone who cautions people against licensed games, because often
those games tend to be not great. Like we get
some good ones. The Batman Arkham series is legitimately a
lot of fun. Most of the Lego series are legitimately
a lot of fun, at least for a while. But
for all of those, you get nine versions of Superman

(24:29):
sixty four, which is legitimately the least fun a person
can have while playing a console, except for maybe if
they're playing ET, which was also a licensed property and
was terrible. So that was Microsoft and Sony. I got
more to say about E three, but before I jump
into all of that, let's take a quick break to
thank our sponsor. None of that covered Microsoft and Sony.

(24:59):
Let's talk about some of the developers that were out
there and some of the stuff they showed off. So
one of the big ones would be UBI Soft, and
I've talked a little bit about some of the stuff
Ubi Soft showed off because they were also featured in
the other press releases. But one of the moments of
E three that I thought was really entertaining is that

(25:20):
E three is a place where video game producers can
become like rock stars. And one of the rock stars
that got a huge ovation was Shi Ghetto Miyamoto, who
is the guy behind Mario. I mean, Miyamoto is beloved

(25:41):
in gaming circles, particularly fans of Nintendo love Miyamoto, and
Miyamoto came out during Ubisoft's press event. In fact, he
was the He helped kick off the event to introduce
a game called Mario plus Rabid Kingdom Battle, which is

(26:03):
a mash up between the Nintendo Mario series and the
Raving Rabbits series. And Rabbits are sort of these chaotic
little critters that have this tendency to enact cartoon violence
on one another. And uh, this is going to be

(26:24):
a turn based strategy tactics game, so similar to something
like a Final Fantasy or a really even more similar
to something like x Com actually, but it's obviously much
more cartoonish than than that. And it looked ridiculous. Whether
or not I would ever pick it up, I don't know,

(26:45):
but it definitely looked like, um, a silly idea, and
I'm all four silly ideas. I'd like to see that.
We got to see a a virtual reality game called
Transference with Elijah would as part of the game, UH
promotion Elijah Wood saying that there they were trying very

(27:07):
hard to create a VR experience, and this was supposed
to allow, like It's the world is supposed to be
in a world where people's thoughts and experiences can be
recorded and then allow other people to experience it firsthand. Again,

(27:27):
this is an idea and science fiction that we've seen
quite a few times. Uh, there's some movies that essentially
follow this line of logic where you can replace someone
else's memory and experience it firsthand. In fact, you could
argue that the Assassin's Creed series is ultimately a variation
on this theme. But that's about all we know about Transference,

(27:50):
apart from the fact that it's supposed to come out
in the Spring of and it's supposed to be available
for all the major VR platforms. We also saw a
showing of Skull and Bones, one of the games about
pirates that I'm very excited about. Skull and Bones is

(28:11):
based off of the Assassin's Creed Black Flag ship combat,
so in some ways it looks like it's a little
limited because it's based off of leading crews of pirates
on a ship against other ships. So really you control
a ship you are able to you know, fire upon

(28:33):
enemies that kind of thing. But as far as I
can tell, that's the extent of the game. Like it's
it's tactics and arcade based. It doesn't have any other elements,
like as far as I can tell, you can't board
another ship and have sword fighting in it, for example,
at least not the stuff I saw. But it did
look kind of neat um. It looks like I'll have

(28:55):
a competitive element where you can have leader boards about
who are the Gray as Pirates on the Seven Seas,
and I'm sure that will become a very competitive space.
But that one also caught my attention, and one that
I forgot to mention. Another game that uh, I think
looks really dark and compelling is Far Cry five. The

(29:17):
Far Cry series tends to be very excessive and over
the top, but this most recent one is going to
be set in a rural part of Montana, and apparently
the enemies you go up against are a militant group
of separatists who have their own essential arsenal and are

(29:42):
in control of this area of Montana. And there are
several people who do not like that. They can't they're
they're essentially being repressed, and your job is to resist
against this group. It looks pretty dark, and I'm very
curious to hear how reviews portray it, because playing a

(30:06):
game that dark and politically charged, I think it has
some potential hurdles to overcome. That being said, the Far
Grave games are pretty well designed. I enjoyed them. I
like big sandbox games. Um it would be soft surprised
everybody with a sequel to a game that originally came

(30:26):
out in two thousand three, so it was a long
time coming to get a sequel fourteen years the original
game being Beyond Good and Evil. So now we have
Beyond Good and Evil too, And we saw a little
c g I trailer of this, and it is almost
impossible for me to explain what Beyond Good and Evil

(30:47):
is all about. So I recommend if you have not
seen the trailer to go check it out. See if
you can track down the trailer to be Beyond Good
and Evil too, so that you can get a bit
of a feel for what that was all about. Bethesda
would be another big name that was there. Bethesda, of course,
is the game company that is behind stuff like the

(31:09):
Elder Scrolls series, the Fallout series, both of which are
uh my favorites. I love both the Elder Scrolls and
the Fallout series. They're some of my favorite games of
all time. The we did not see a new Fallout game,
nor did we really see a new Elder Scrolls game.
They are bringing uh the Skyrim chapter of Elder Scrolls

(31:32):
to the Nintendo Switch, which I normally wouldn't even comment
on except for the fact that it does have within
the game the ability for you to find an outfit
that is essentially Link from the Legend of Zelda series.
It's not quite enough to convince me to go out
and buy a Nintendo Switch just so I could play
Skyrim for like the fourth time and dress up as Link,

(31:56):
but it's darn close. They also showed off a uh uh,
like I said, the Fallout four Virtual Reality Experience, which
looks amazing. I would love to play a Skyrim version
of of VR, but I guess I'll have to wait
for that. We saw Wolfenstein Too. That was one of
the most popular games on the show floor. The line

(32:19):
for Wolfenstein Too was more than three hours long. While
I was walking around, I did not get in line
for it. I had to do a lot of other things,
but I got to see it, uh, and I hope
that all the people who were in line had a
chance at playing it, because that's a long time to
wait for anything. They also announced that the area of

(32:45):
their their Elder Scrolls universe, marrow Wind, would be coming
to Elder Scrolls Online, and they showed off an expansion
that allows multiplayer combat where it's team based and it
would be teams of four, so you could have three
teams of four, four versus four versus four playing in
object oriented game types on the Elder Scrolls platform. And

(33:11):
so I got to try it, and that was one
of the few games I had a hand held experience with,
like I actually got to sit down and play hands
on experience, I should say, uh. And it was fun,
mostly because my team won because it was captured the
flag and the other teams all thought of it as deathmatch,
so they just ran to the middle of the map
and started shooting everybody whereas I ran around the edge

(33:32):
of the map, picked up flags and brought them back
to my base. So it turns out that I am
elite Elder Scrolls Online player as long as no one
is paying attention to what the actual objective is of
the game. Once they pay attention to the objective. I
am no longer a contender, but for a brief while

(33:53):
I was on top and it was glorious. Another company
that had big event, in fact they had the earliest
one was e A, where we got to see stuff
like battle Grounds one DLC, which would put you in
the Russian theater for battlegrounds, and that's kind of neat

(34:15):
new maps and new weapons for battlegrounds if you are
into that massive multiplayer competitive approach. Uh. They showed off
some sporting titles, which is par for the course for
e A, and I used part for the course correctly. There.
It's a sporting term, y'all. Including a story mode for Madden.
So if you were just always wanted to pick up

(34:37):
a copy of Madden but you felt like there wasn't
a strong enough single player campaign, I guess that's the
solution for you. Uh. It's not really my thing, so
I guess I shouldn't get too snarky. They also showed
off Anthem. They showed off the fact that you'll be
able to play as characters from all three of the

(34:58):
trilogies of Star Wars in Battle Front to the first
battle Front focused on the original trilogy episodes four through
six for those keeping count, but the Battlefront two game
will allow you to play as units and characters from
all three of the series. So if you were just
dying to control a battle droid for the prequels, first

(35:21):
of all, I don't even know you anymore, But second
of all, you'll be able to do it in Battlegrounds
two or battle Front two, I should say, not Battlegrounds.
That's the other thing about these games, y'all is that
the names started getting real confusing, especially if you are
sleep deprived and on East Coast time but trying to
deal with West coast schedules. I found that to be

(35:43):
rather challenging. Uh So those were like the big press events.
Nintendo had a pre recorded event that was not officially
part of the three. They've they've kind of pulled away
from E three for the last couple of years, but
they did announce some stuff like Rocket League is coming
to Switch. Rocket League is a fun car game where

(36:05):
you're essentially playing soccer but with the rocket cars. Uh.
It's gonna come to the Nintendo Switch and it's going
to be a cross platform game. Just like Minecraft. These
are cross platform games that will allow people on different
platforms to play with each other. So if You're on
a Nintendo Switch and I'm on my Xbox, we can

(36:26):
each play Rocket League against each other even though we're
using different platforms. Same thing with Minecraft. The only group
to stay out of this is Sony. Sony did not
agree to do cross platform gaming, and there the reason
that they gave was that they didn't want to subject
their players to harmful gaming experiences, essentially saying that the

(36:52):
people playing Minecraft are young and they didn't want them
running into all the ne'er do wells who are on
Xbox Live. But if Nintendo is cool with it, and
Nintendo is super protective of their users, I am very
curious if that's actually PlayStation's strategy or if it is
as I suspect a different reason for not getting into

(37:15):
cross platform, which would be Sony wants to lock people
into their platform and their experiences because one of the
most valuable tools you have selling any sort of console
is what do your friends have. If all of your
friends have the PS four, then you're more likely to
buy a PS four because you want to be able
to play with your friends. So that's what you need.

(37:38):
If everything's cross platform, you could buy whatever console you want,
and if you don't want a PS four, you could
go out and get an Xbox One or a Nintendo
Switch or a PC and you can still play because
the games you're playing across platform. Sony not playing ball
with that tells me that maybe they want to try
and hold onto exclusivity and keep their ecosystem closed so

(38:00):
that they can maintain a market advantage that way. That
only works for so long, because eventually gamers will say,
I want to be able to play with my friends
no matter what they're on, and there's a chance that
Sony could lose uh some market share because of that.
One way to combat that is to come out with
really good exclusive games, and Sony is really good at that.

(38:21):
A lot of the exclusive titles for PlayStation are very
compelling games that you cannot get anywhere else. I mean,
that's what exclusive means, and that helps Sony maintain its
position in the market, even if these other decisions are
more questionable. Getting back to Nintendo, they announced some more
of the titles you would expect, stuff like Kirby and

(38:44):
Pokemon and Metroid and a Yoshi game. Uh. So a
lot of stuff that you would you would totally anticipate
from Nintendo, including some stuff that I didn't necessarily anticipate,
like downloadable content packs for Legend of Zelda Breath of
the Wild. Uh. I'm not familiar with Nintendo releasing that

(39:06):
many DLC packs. That's something I I'm used to for computers,
for Xbox and for Sony, So to see Nintendo get
into this game is interesting. I don't know how long
they've been doing that. Um, I have not been keeping
track of them as much as I should have. But
these DLC content packs are going to be part of

(39:26):
the nineteen dollars and nine nine cent Expansion Pass, so
you get the Master Trials on June and the Champions
Ballad uh and then that will be Champions Ballot will
be sometime around the holiday season. And they showed some ambo's,
so if you're someone who collects ambos, you can totally

(39:47):
get your amibos. I'm not an Amibo person. I don't
I don't have a lot. I don't have an active
Nintendo system right now. The last one I had was
the original WE and I haven't had it hooked up
to my television for a very long time. So it
was an interesting, uh presentation, but it didn't have a

(40:07):
whole lot of applicability to me. Now I've got more
to say about my specific experiences at E three, but
before I jump into that, let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. Alright, So, like I said, I

(40:30):
didn't really get a chance to get a lot of
hands on time with the various video games while I
was there. So what did I do? I mean, I
was out there for several days, right, I focused a
lot on hardware. So one of the things I wanted
to do was meet up with people to potentially talk
about developments in hardware and maybe even line up some

(40:51):
chances for future episodes of tech Stuff where we'd have
a deeper dive on things. One of the first companies
I went to was alien Ware, which is a division
of Dell Computers that was acquired by Dell UH more
than a decade ago, and last year alien Ware celebrated
its twentieth anniversary. The company has been around, obviously for
twenty years, building gaming rigs for people that have a

(41:14):
certain aesthetic, and that aesthetic is flashy and showy, and
they also have some pretty beefy gaming rigs. Arguably, you
could build a machine just as capable or faster than
an alien Ware machine, but you're not going to get
that same aesthetic, and you're not you know, you're gonna

(41:35):
have to do a lot of that work yourself. So
if you have the money and the desire and you
find the alien Ware aesthetic pleasing, it's an interesting approach
and I like the alien Ware designs. So I went
there to talk with some of the executives over at
alien Ware, and we just kind of had a discussion
about where the company has come from, where it's going.

(41:57):
And my hope is that in the near future will'll
be able to have an interview and do a a
history or story of alien Ware episode. Uh. The big
machine they were showing off was the alien Ware Area
fifty one, which was a monster. It is a triangular
based case with a huge computer inside of it, and

(42:19):
it was triangular partly to allow for better airflow for
the cooling purposes of the machine, because obviously with real
powerful gaming rigs you've got advanced GPUs and a blistering
fast CPU in there. All of those things generate heat,
and the more heat they generate, the more, it can
negatively impact the various components inside the computer, so you

(42:40):
have to have a very effective heat management system. And
part of it was just the design of this case,
which also just made it a little like nothing else.
I mean, it's a big triangle. Uh. Alien Ware in
general was pretty cool. They also came out with some
gaming keyboards, some gaming mice, some displays, so this was

(43:00):
the first time they had come out with some peripherals
in quite a few years. Uh. And the peripherals were
kind of neat too. So I had a good time
over at their booth, and I'm hoping I can do
an episode specifically about alien Ware in the not too
distant future. I also got a chance to check out
some interesting work in motion capture or mo cap. Typically,

(43:23):
if you're doing mo cap, the way it has normally
been done is you go into a big sound studio
and you outfit a person wearing a costume that has
a bunch of points of reference on the costume itself.
So if you've ever looked at behind the scenes footage
of stuff like Lord of the Rings or Planet of
the Apes, you've probably seen this where actors are wearing

(43:45):
these suits with lots of different uh dots usually or
little balls on them to act as points of reference
for the camera. The camera records the actor's movements and
that information gets sent to a computer that analyze rises
the movement of all those individual points of reference and
then translates that into an animation that you can apply

(44:07):
to a different kind of character. So, for example, with
Lord of the Rings, Gollum, who was portrayed by Andy Serkis,
would was a computer generated character that was animated based
upon the actual movements of Andy Circus as he moved
around inside this motion capture suit. Well, the motion capture

(44:28):
suit I got to see at E three doesn't use
cameras at all. It's not an optical based system. Instead,
it uses magnets and magnetic fields, and it measures the
fluctuations of magnetic fields to track movement and thus be
able to capture movement. And one of the biggest challenges

(44:49):
that these sort of systems have is that while they
are cheaper and more accessible than optical based systems, you
don't need an enormous studio in order to capture that
information shan because they're magnetic and magnetic fields can interfere
with one another. You could get errors in your data collection,

(45:09):
so you get stuff like drift. Drift is when, as
you are holding a position, your magnets start to assume
that other magnetic fields are actually the Earth's magnetic field.
It would be like having a compass. If a compass
is sitting by itself and there's no magnetic field that's
interfering with it, the needle is going to point to

(45:32):
magnetic north. That's the purpose of a compass. But if
you bring an actual magnet close to the compass, as
it gets closer, that magnetic field is strong enough to
deflect the needle so that it's pointing towards your magnet,
not towards magnetic north, and it quote unquote assumes that

(45:53):
the magnet you're holding is magnetic north. The same thing
is true of magnetic motion capture. That these different components
on the suit itself, plus things that are in your
environments such as metal girders or a steel ladder, can
affect what they consider to be their orientation, so the

(46:14):
animation could come out looking really weird. A person's pelvis
might be facing front and back instead of left and right,
for example. Because of this drift well, the company had
talked to had developed software that helps correct for those problems,
so that while the technology itself still works the same,
on the software side, it can be reinterpreted so that

(46:37):
you don't get those errors. I'm hoping that I can
talk with them for a future episode as well to
really talk about the design and challenges of magnetic motion capture,
because it's a really cool technology and I want you
guys to learn more about it. I also saw a
lot of fabric computer interfaces, things like gloves that you

(46:57):
could put on and through just your control you could
have interactions with various types of software. This is not
that different from again, optical based systems, where you have,
say an infrared camera pointing at yourself. You wave in
front of the infrared camera and it's able to interpret
your motions and put that as commands within a video game.

(47:18):
But in this case, you're talking about using actual fabric
that has sensors woven into it that we'll pick up
all that information all on its own. The advantage to
that is that you don't have to worry about a
camera facing in on your gaming area all the time.

(47:39):
There are certain concerns about privacy when it comes to
these optical based systems and how much information is actually
being transmitted and who can see it. If you're using
something that's using an actual physical piece of fabric as
opposed to a camera, then whenever it's not in use,
you don't have to worry about it sending data somewhere

(48:00):
that you don't know about. You don't have to worry
about being in a intrusion on your privacy. So it's
a just your command system. And you might argue, we've
already got solution for that, but it's a different approach
to that solution, and I found that really interesting. I
also had a chance to talk with one of the
organizers of Child's Play, which is a charitable effort from

(48:24):
the Penny Arcade expo folks that tries to raise money
to provide games and game systems to hospitals to help
kids who are in for therapeutic treatment, who are you know,
have been hospitalized. And the research has gone beyond just
let's raise money to throw an Xbox or p S

(48:46):
four or something at these hospitals. It has reached a
point where they're actually looking at therapeutic games, games that
have been shown to help lower a child's anxiety levels,
so that the child doesn't experience pain as much or
is able to calm down before going in for a

(49:06):
surgical procedure. I found that fascinating, So I hope to
have a future episode with the organizers of Child's Play
to really talk about the evolution of that program and
how people can get involved if they're interested. So I
had a lot of opportunities to explore technology and meet
with really interesting people, and to explore elements around gaming

(49:33):
that were not directly tied to a specific video game title,
and that to me was invaluable. It was a really
interesting experience, and I have to say that the people
at E three are probably my favorite part of any
of those conferences. It's the chance to have a conversation
with really smart people who are dedicating their intelligence in

(49:57):
innovative and interesting ways that apps you never would have anticipated.
That was my favorite part of the three. But that
might be because I never got to play a pirate game. Anyway.
That's the Jonathan Strickland E three two thousand seventeen experience.
If you are interested in learning more about what happened

(50:18):
in the three, well, they're about a billion different websites
out there that have covered it. Extensively. Some of them
include things like The Verge or Polygon, which is really
the gaming arm of the Verge, or YouTube has hours
and hours and hours of footage of developer interviews, hands

(50:42):
on time with games. You can check all those out
I g N did a huge amount of work out there. Really,
your outlet of choice probably has an enormous supply of
E three information. If you want to get more specifics
on that. If there are any elements about three or
video games in general you would like me to cover
in a more focused episode of tech Stuff in the future,

(51:05):
get in touch with me. Tell me what you want
to hear, whether it's the story of how Microsoft got
into the Xbox business, or the birth of the PlayStation,
or the evolution of a character like Donkey Kong, whatever
it might be, let me know. Send me an email.
My address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,

(51:28):
or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to
handle at both of those is tech Stuff hs W.
Remember you can watch me record these shows live, and
if you're lucky, you might even see Ben Bolan accidentally
burst into my studio and then curse and then run away,
which totally happened today, but you didn't hear it because
we edited that part out, But to see that, you

(51:50):
need to go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff.
I stream on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can go to
twitch dot tv slash tech stuff to see the sched
jewel there and I'll talk to you guys again really soon.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, is

(52:12):
a how stuff works dot com