So I'm writing this on maybe four hours of sleep, and it's entirely Bethesda's fault.
Sunday night was the first E3 press conference Bethesda's ever done. Eleven years making some of the biggest games around and they never bothered with their own stage, they'd just do a booth and let Microsoft or Sony give them a few minutes on someone else's clock. That changed this weekend. Dolby Theatre, 7pm Pacific, which meant I was parked in front of a laptop at 10pm watching a Twitch stream that kept buffering right at the parts I actually cared about. Cool, cool, very normal, very fine.
The big one was Fallout 4 gameplay, first real look at it since that teaser dropped a couple weeks back. And it's a lot more than I expected honestly. Full voiced protagonist this time (male or female, your choice, which is new for the series), a dog companion named Dogmeat who apparently you can command to fetch stuff, a settlement-building system that's basically letting you construct your own little town out of scrap metal in the middle of the wasteland. They showed off a companion app too, this Pip-Boy thing that turns your phone into an actual in-game Pip-Boy you can glance at instead of pausing. Kind of gimmicky? Kind of great? I genuinely don't know yet. They also just said flat out, no more waiting around guessing: November 10th. That's the release date. Circle it.
But here's the part that actually ate my night. Partway through the show they announced Fallout Shelter was live, right then, free on the App Store. Not "coming soon," not a trailer with a vague date stamped on the end. Available. I had it downloading before Todd Howard finished his sentence and by 1am I had a vault forty-something dwellers deep and had lost three of them to a radroach infestation I definitely could've prevented if I'd been paying better attention. It's this tiny vault management sim, you're assigning people to power generators and water purifiers and sending them out to scavenge, and it should not have hooked me the way it did. I have a whole theory that mobile games work best when they're this specific kind of pointless-but-satisfying, and this one nails it. No timer nonsense shoving a purchase screen in your face every ninety seconds either, which, credit where it's due, that's rarer than it should be on iOS right now.
Dishonored 2 got its own moment too, with Emily Kaldwin as a playable lead alongside Corvo, which is a nice change from just being handed the same guy again. And id Software ran a Doom trailer that was properly, unapologetically violent in a way I don't think we've seen from a big publisher's E3 stage in a while. Whether that game actually ships anywhere close to looking like that trailer is a separate question I'm not going to pretend to answer.
None of this is really "tech" in the sense this blog usually means, I know. But the whole week's shaping up to be one long stream of press conferences, EA and Ubisoft are today, Microsoft and Sony later tonight, and if Bethesda's opener is any indication of the energy level everyone's bringing, I'm not sure my sleep schedule survives the rest of E3 intact. My one actual complaint, and it's a small one: whoever ran the stream encoding needs to hear from someone, because 480p on a 2015 press conference with this much money behind it is a little embarrassing.
Anyway. I've got a vault to check on, three dwellers to reassign off the water purifier they're clearly bad at, and a very strong urge to just close the laptop and take a nap before Sony's conference tonight. Probably won't. That's how these weeks go.