This Could Have Been an Email (Thoughts on Unneccesary Presentations)

     Hey friends! Did you see the Mario Kart direct last week? I did, and I felt like I learned almost nothing about it that hadn't already been revealed save for two or three different tidbits here and there. Today, I'm going to talk about how companies can sometimes botch game reveals, or at least the hype around them can be affected in some way. There's something to the concept of "Leave them wanting more," but this is a bit different, it was a strange presentation, and then I'll talk a little bit about the announcement of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered which was just announced as of the morning of me writing this (April 22). I don't have a ton to cover about this, so let's just get into it.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.

    For those of you who aren't aware (which I completely understand, this isn't everyone's cup of tea), the Switch 2 had its full Nintendo Direct a few weeks ago where they finally released all of the information on the system and a few games. Along with these games was Mario Kart World, one of the games launching the same day as the console itself. While we learned a lot from this presentation about the game, we were told that there would be another direct in about two weeks that would be only on Mario Kart, so we should expect to see some cool stuff there. Obviously people were excited for it, they had just gotten finished with a pretty lengthy explanation of different mechanics that you would be able to do in this new title, and then the two days after the direct, we got a lot of direct gameplay from the Nintendo Treehouse Live presentations. There was lots of hype, potential buzz about a single player campaign or something that we hadn't been shown yet. The day of this Mario Kart specific direct arrived, and it revealed almost no new information in the 15-ish minutes of runtime, save for the addition of P-Switches which would activate new challenges around the world map, and a few collectibles spread here and there. I have to ask, what is the point? In the last several years, Nintendo has made a habit of making overview trailers for almost all of the games that they put out, hitting on the most interesting aspects of the game, maybe hinting at some bigger systems that we don't know yet, but you won't have to wait long, because the game will be out soon anyways. I bring this up because this direct really felt like one of those trailers. It was nice to see some new footage, I'm not going to say that it wasn't, but also, when you announce a direct in the way that they did, it makes it seem like there's some new feature that has been added that's worth talking about for an extra 15 or 20 minutes, instead of being essentially the same content that was shared a few weeks ago. I don't think people should have been shocked or upset about the direct, because it was some kind of presentation and we got a little more information about the upcoming game, but I can understand feeling underwhelmed after watching that presentation.

    If anything, it was more of a presentation for the group of people that hadn't seen the Switch 2 Direct, and maybe were just into Mario Kart without caring about the new hardware necessarily. I don't understand that line of thinking, I don't think anyone was tuning in as a casual fan of video games that hadn't already seen the larger Switch 2 Direct, especially since they announced this new direct at that one. It's just very weird and I'm not sure how much thought went into the decision. Now to talk about something a bit different, but still in the same conversation topic in a way. A game has been rumored and leaked to death for the last several weeks or months, and now we have the official release!

    Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was a massive success for Bethesda Game Studios in the year 2006, and of course became the prequel to Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which was first released in 2011, and has since been re-released at least four times over the last 14 years. A few weeks back, a reported remaster was in the works for Oblivion and more and more news sources corroborated this story, to the point where it seemed like any day now, there would be an official word that Bethesda was working on this remaster. That day ended up being this Tuesday. There was a 20 minute presentation where they revealed a trailer for this new game, and then talked to some developers, Todd Howard, and some other people who were instrumental in creating this game nearly 20 years ago, and the presentation ended with them shadowdropping the game.

    This was a dream come true for so many, but I don't really care about any of these games, so I was able to look at this presentation and dissect it in a way that most fans wouldn't be able to. For a large portion of this showcase, they weren't actually saying anything about this newly remastered title, but more about the nostalgia that goes along with the game. There was one developer who showed up and just said "People really... really like this game!" Many people shared that they were surprised that so many still felt very fondly about this game, and it was cool to hear a few of the development stories for the original title, but I feel like the show time could have been handled much better. Microsoft has done major reveals in larger presentations before, but this one announcements had 20 minutes completely to itself. It really felt like a waste of time as many of the people who were really interested in this game are already familiar with the landscapes they were showing off, and if the plan was always to shadowdrop the game, I don't understand why you would sit around talking about the hype around this game and the community around it. We understand the impact of Oblivion, and in my opinion, there was absolutely no reason for this presentation to be anywhere near as long as it was. It could have easily been a post on Twitter or something, though I suppose this was a way to get more eyes on it without tucking it into a larger Partner Showcase.

    In short, I am happy that we've gotten so many presentations and so much news recently, but also, I feel like there should be some rule about having presentations when you don't have much to say about whatever the product is that you're presenting.

    Thanks for reading this post, friends. I don't know why I felt the need to talk about these, but there was just something about these presentations that really bothered me about both of them. I thought I'd take some time to go into detail of what these posts had going for them, and just why I didn't feel like they were necessary. I hope you're all having a good week, and I'll talk to you again soon! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed critic, and I'll talk to you again soon!