So about that Gearbox conference...

And at the tenth circle of hell...

At the start of it's life, E3 was a trade show made for huge video game publishers to flaunt their upcoming projects for the health of their company. Simple as that. It was just an opportunity to say "hey everybody, this is what we're working on and I think you better start squirrelling away some disposal income for our day one sales, what do ya say?" As the years went by and the industry shifted, the event has largely retained that purpose whilst slowly adopting a bit of 'celebrating the artform' thrown in there for good measure. Still, in it's current iteration E3 is the flagship event of the year for gamers as it marks the time when we can sit down and cross our fingers as all the biggest games of the year are going to be announced here first and foremost. Well, that is unless they are booked for the VGAs. Or if they wind up as part of the independent showcases that all the console developers are doing now, such as 'Nintendo Direct', Sony's 'State of Play', and Microsoft's 'Everybody shut up and look out of live stream with the games and everything'. Or they just decide to have reveal whenever the heck they want to because we live in an open digital age now. Okay, so E3 doesn't hold the monopoly over the gaming industries news that it once did, in fact a lot of the time the rigidity and archaic practises of the event are widely, and rightly, mocked. But the expectations are still there each and every year; because we gamers just want a time of the year to come together and see the games.

They could have at least thrown in some new screenshots...

This event for showcasing games has gone through drastic evolutions throughout the years as the art of game marketing has shifted and changed to meet consumer demand. Once upon a time we'd see swathes of CGI trailers that ooh and wow, but didn't really show anything about the game in question. That's a practise now mostly frowned upon, especially as it's seen as a waste of resources that could have gone to the game itself. We used to see unbelievably grandiose composite gameplay that oversold what the final product would play like, but that's been stamped out for the large part by annoyed gamers who were burned one time too many by one devotee of this practise in particular. (Here's looking at you, Ubisoft.) And announcements would come out for projects years down the line, until enough cancellations and broken promises made companies realise that it's better to wait until the thing is at least likely to be out before the next E3, else you get stuck with another 'The Last Guardian' on your hands. 

These are just some of the many rules that go towards hosting a successful E3 conference, and as the industry event has begun to open up and allow many more companies to hold their conferences in this space, these expectations have bled onto them. We don't cotton to the pathetic 'Epic Store excuse' of "Oh, well it took those guys decades to get their ducks in a row so we should be allowed some decades of our own!", no we expect developers entering the position of being able to host their very own conference to hold themselves to the high standards we set upon everyone. That doesn't mean they always do, and right now the problem of "Showcasing when you only really had a single game to show off" is starting to permeate the practise and its becoming a struggle to insist to these companies that taking a year off is completely fine if this conference is going to a dry wasteland. Because at the end of the day we're not here for your quirky little comedy bits, or your 'personality'; we want games. Plain and simple.

As long as you stick to those rules, there's not really many ways you can go wrong. Which is why when you go out of your way to systematically break all of them, you'll do far more than just disappoint your audience; you'll utterly confuddle them. Thus was the case with this year's Gearbox E3, which I believe was the very first solely Gearbox headed conference that they've ever done. (I know they did their own event thing for the Borderlands 3 announcement, but I think that was actually independent of E3 as I remember.) Personally I heard about the existence of this conference and was struck with some immediate pause as I never really considered Gearbox as a studio large enough to warrant an E3 conference of their own, but then I thought about all the games they had under their belt, Borderlands, BOA, Duke Nukem, Homeworld, etc. And I figured this might not be a total waste of time. I can now saw that I was very wrong about that assessment.

How about we start with the big one, the thing that everyone wanted to see. In the leadup to this event, Gearbox had come out of nowhere to announce the very first standalone spin-off game to Borderlands called Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. A fullblown fantasy spin-off title in the vein of her Dungeons and Dragon's themed DLC for Borderlands 2, but expanded into a fully fleshed out and realised world space. Of course, that's fantasy with guns as well as magic, because Borderlands has a brand to maintain and swords ain't gonna cut it. What we'd seen for that announcement was a single CGI trailer and we wanted some actual gameplay come E3 time, and you know what we got? We got the same trailer... and then they talked about the game. Or rather, a single developer answered two surface level question atop gameplay of the aforementioned Borderlands 2 DLC... Huh...

That was perhaps the biggest letdown of this event, seeing as how a reveal of Wonderlands gameplay would have made for a perfect showstopper event, (If they didn't have any gameplay ready, then why did they even announce the thing?) but Gearbox don't do things in half measures apparently. Why upset us just a little bit when they can go all the way? Homeworld 3 was spoken of during this event, but to a degree even more insignificant then Wonderlands was. We got little vignettes between panels of developers proving they still knew what Homeworld was, all in the brief 20 seconds they had before the 'important' parts of the conference rolled through. Okay, so what was it that Gearbox wanted us to see more than the sequel to that beloved classic RTS game?

Godfall. God, I forgot Gearbox published that. How bizarre that someone could just excrete something as rank as Godfall out for Christmas and then drag it infront of audiences to show them how proud you are of it for E3. Whatsmore, they invited a developer for the thing to talk about it on zoom call, which is essentially just providing a target for all of those disillusioned fans and saying "This here, this is one of the guys responsible for taking your money to pay for this mess!" Godfall is a bad game, and the fact that it got the second most amount of screen time in this conference is an absolute crime. Whatsmore, it was the only game of this conference that got new footage! At least I think it was new. (This game's architecture and design intent is so bland that it's hard to differentiate the new from the old.) The only amount of entertainment I managed to get out of this panel was at the game's expense, given how aside from some DLC announcements, the big reveal for Godfall was the upcoming PS4 port. A port you say? For the game you personally advertised as only possible on Next gen? That's quite some crow to eat there, Gearbox my lads.

And of course it gets worse. How could it possibly? With the pinnacle of cringe, of course. You see, one of the most interesting tidbits that has been floating around Gearbox of late was the feature length movie adaptation of Borderlands. It's coming up, it has an allstar cast, and I think it's pretty sensible to be excited about that prospect. And if you're the CEO of Gearbox, Randy Pitchford, you're clearly a little too excited about it. Due to what I can only assume were explicit demands from the man himself, half of the time for this conference was taken up by panels of Randy on the set of the film and plodding around a soundstage like a wonderstruck child. Clearly this has been a childhood fantasy for him, and I'm starting to think the only reason Gearbox had a conference at all was so that Randy had an excuse to broadcast all of this. (For bragging rights, I guess?)

If you came to E3 looking for games then I'm sorry to disappoint you, this conference here became the Randy show with regularly scheduled interval updates featuring nothing more than his gormless face desperately trying to snake around this soundstage whilst showing of literally nothing cool whatsoever. (because he clearly hadn't bothered to ask the movie studio for some sort of exclusive tease that would make all of this tedium at least somewhat worthwhile) But where does the cringe come in? Well aside from watching a grown man waste our time for his own selfish amusement in the middle of a ludicrously expensive advertising slot, there were the 'interviews'. (see 'ambushes' in your textbooks.) I know for a fact that all of this footage was all off-the-cuff, and that's not from the couple of times they had to literally cut away for fear of something actually interesting (and under NDAs) coming into frame. I know because he dragged several key members of the crew in front of the camera to ask breathy, uninspired questions that one might expect a teenager to devise when put before a film crew. These poor victims always looked surprised and unprepared for these encounters and thus provided whatever answer would get Randy away from them as soon as possible. This was crowned, of course, by the one celebrity he managed to get into the shot: 'Kevin Hart', a man who sounded genuinely annoyed when Randy went knocking on his trailer for another adlib interview. For unintentional cringe comedy gold, I'd actually recommend watching a supercut of these clips because they seriously give 'The Office' a run for it's money at times.

So that, in a nutshell, was the Gearbox conference, and can I just say; why did you hold that, Gearbox? I mean, I know why you held it; Randy Pitchford was giddy as heck about his visit to a soundstage and wanted an excuse to show off his terrible footage to the world; but why did you humour him? Where are the investors to clap Randy around the ear and tell him to leave well enough alone? Without them, we've now got a contender for worst conference of E3 2021, and I personally believe it wins the gauntlet. There was another event which showed off just one, already announced, game, (Bandi Namco) but that one wins points for being short, Gearbox's was utterly excruciating. Let this be a reminder and prime evidence that no one company needs to hold an E3 conference if they don't have something to show. Else you wind up so caught in asking whether you could that you never stop to think about whether or not you should. (Thank you for another timely and timeless summary, Jeff Goldblum.)