Unfortunately this was the case and a large population concurs.
The problem with the Keynote was that there wasn’t anything massive there. This is a convention purely for Playstation, their time to show us the big guns and they didn’t. There was absolutely no news from First Party studios apart from some new trailers for Uncharted 4 from Naughty Dog, but nothing new. Sony has so many first party developers under its belt that have been quite for a very long time and there was bugger all. Worst of all, there was no news of being able to change PlayStation Network names. This is something that I fear will not be coming to the west for a very long time and has been asked for ever since PSN was started nine years ago … There is always the E3 prayer.
Don’t get me wrong, there was some cool stuff there, and they launched a couple games to the store right after the event.
It seemed that the focus for PSX this year was on the Playstation VR. I thought that VR would have more a focus at the Paris Games Week back in October because that is a more commercial gaming event and would have been a good time to market the hell out of it to the public. However, having such a big presence at PSX – where there are the hardcore Playstation fans, would be more beneficial because this is where Sony would drum up more support and interest. Have the hardcore fans come out and experience the demos that they have on the stage floor, for them to leave after the event and go home or post online and rave and rave about VR. This way there will be less negative feedback because those people that went to PSX are likely going to support everything that Playstation does (except the damnation of the Vita).
At the keynote they had a live demo of Playstation VR where two people played a Tron like game where they threw these disks at each other to score points. It didn’t work entirely because one of the players arms disappeared and then turned into a contortionist in the process. kudos to Sony though, because despite the broken arms, it did look pretty cool.
I found this to be the most interesting of the VR games, just because the Zombies look so ridiculous once they went into ragdoll in the footwell of the taxi.
Overall, it was a very lacklustre event and many people were on similar wavelengths. Perhaps they felt it wasn’t necessary to show of anything huge because they are in a comfortable position ahead of the competition. Whatever the reason, it left fans feeling very let down.