This week was jam-packed with crazy news.
E3 is Canceled!
E3, the tradeshow event once revered as the Superbowl for video games where new projects, consoles, surprises, wins, and failures clashed across the LA convention center, is canceled yet again for 2023. For those who followed these events, the writing was on the wall. Companies over the past decade slowly shifted away from the potential of on-stage blunders and opted for pre-recorded video presentations on YouTube and Twitch, like Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom. Others also limited or outright removed their presence from E3. Some like EA and Microsoft hosted events outside of the LA Convention Center during the scheduled days for E3, presumably to avoid the fees associated with renting booth space inside of the convention center.
After 2020, the reliance on digital was universal across the industry. Companies announced their digital events, spaced apart from the rest of the major companies– though 2020 was a time of uncertainty on what could be shown due to a lot of working circumstances the Covid-19 pandemic caused. Through that desperation realized that the dependency on a trade show even one that feels like an amusement park that would only appeal to a few tens of thousands of people just might not have been the most necessary in a day when a game can drop from a tweet and sell just fine.
History was made in the halls of E3 for generations now, so the loss of the event was saddening, to say the least. The Electronic Software Association, the gaming industry's self-governing organization that put on the convention, wasn't confident in the future of E3, probably after being unable to appease the requests needed to keep publishers and developers attending E3 2023. This won't mean the spirit of using the summer to announce games isn't dead, as events such as Geogh Keighley's Summer Game Fest, PAX, and publishers will be hosting their events. Still, the excitement of a condensed number of days to show off and witness most of the major titles from almost every publisher being announced back to back will be missed by many.
Last of Us Part 1 PC released with poor reviews
Even after a delay from its original March 3rd release date to March 28th, The Last of Us – a game considered to be the pinnacle of the video game industry that has transcended into a successful HBO series, arrived in a terrible condition on PC for many. The problems are more apparent for PC rigs with lower amounts of VRAM. The PC version seems to be working on NVIDIA cards like the 3060, 3090, 4070 Ti, 4080, and 4090 since they have 12GBs of VRAM or more which is the same amount the PS5 utilizes out of its 16GBs of RAM. AMD cards from the 6700XT and higher all have an adequate amount of VRAM. However, that doesn't mean any combination of products won't find faults in this port. Read up on our opinions on The Last of Us Part I's PC port on GamesRevealed.
Early this week the producer of The Legend of Zelda, Eiji Aonuma announced that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has finished development. While similar to its predecessor, the sequel to Breath of the Wild seems to be catching the imaginations of fans with its inclusion of new fusion mechanics that allows users to combine props throughout the environment like logs into functional boats, and turn two weapons into one bigger weapon.
The upcoming Avatar game from Ubisoft had a gameplay image leaked. Unfortunately, the image was pulled from Twitter due to a copyright claim– further proving the images to be real. The image depicted a first-person shooter-style video game and depicted fights against one of the mechs seen in the Avatar movies. Read our impressions and reactions to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Asus ROG is it a-lie?
As many know, April Fool's Day was this past Saturday. Many companies and content creators took to Twitter to announce fake products. What wasn't initially clear was whether the ASUS ROG Ally (a lie) was either an over-produced April Fool's joke or proof that ASUS' marketing department needs a calendar.
The ASUS ROG Ally even had a Best Buy product page to try to sell the lie even more. However, even the Head of Product Management at ASUS confirmed the lie on Linkedin.
Take a look at our reaction to the ASUS ROG Ally on YouTube, where we thought ASUS was trying to trick everyone with an April Fool's joke.
As it turns out, the ASUS ROG Ally is a real product. You can find out more from today's video.
Giveaway
