God of War Laufey and Wolverine return PlayStation to a bygone era

There was a time in the early 2010s when you couldn't go to an E3 press conference without watching a lot of people getting stabbed in the neck. This was the primary image the video game industry chose to project into the world back then, through series like Assassin's Creed: a stealth takedown ending in a blade slicing into a throat and a fountain of gore. Over and over and over again. I've got no moral objection to violence in video games, but the repetition got disorientingly gross, and I sat in those sweltering Los Angeles theaters wondering what the hell we were all doing.

I thought of this when watching the Marvel's Wolverine footage that formed the opening salvo to Sony's PlayStation State of Play showcase this Not-E3 week. Thankfully, video gaming's projected self-image has got a lot more diverse since then, and Logan's fantastically bloody exploits — including some neck stabs and standard-issue dismemberments, but also a number of gruesome face stabs — were, if anything, refreshing. There was something old-school about it. This kind of edgy, violent, adolescent idea of a mature posture for video games has been part of PlayStation's brand image since day one. Maybe it's good to have it back? Or kind of reassuring, anyway.

It's a mistake to read anything too cogent into a summer games showcase, especially these days, when they are less the centerpiece of the entire PR year and more one beat among many. Their shape is dictated by what's on the slate, what's ready to be shown, what deals can be struck, and the big first-party plays are fewer and further between. Nevertheless, I felt I could detect an attempt on Sony's part to turn back the clock and pretend the last five-to-eight years never happened.

Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Part of it was the presence of a number of familiar names with decades-long associations with PlayStation. Look, here are PS1 stars Rayman and Lara Croft, looking like shinier versions of their old selves in nostalgic retreads of their glory days. Here are Onimusha, and Silent Hill, and Dynasty Warriors, and Ace Combat: some changed, some not at all, but all hailing from Sony's longest-serving Japanese partners, and all conjuring a sense-memory of browsing the spines of preowned PS2 games in your local game store.

Part of it was the comforting familiarity — and similarity — of the big first-party bookends, Wolverine and God of War Laufey. This is the PlayStation we have known since Naughty Dog more-or-less invented it with PS3 launch game Uncharted: Drake's Legacy: purveyor of third-person action-adventure games with cinematic storytelling ambitions and handsome production values. This kind of thing has been Sony's bread and butter as a publisher, and a load-bearing pillar of PlayStation marketing, for the best part of 20 years.

Despite some recent changes of emphasis that I will get to, that has never really changed. But as these productions have gotten ever more difficult and expensive to mount, and as Sony teams like Naughty Dog have gotten steadily less productive, sales of Sony's first-party exclusives have slumped, and the PS5 has seemed, fairly or not, to lack enough compelling reasons to exist.

Image: Sony Santa Monica/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Sony knew that for this showcase, just one of these games would not be enough. It also needed them to be tangible prospects, not cinematic vaporware. God of War Laufey may not have a release date yet, but 20 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay sends a clear message (backed up by reporting) that it's not too far off. Sony may not be able to magically make itself capable of publishing two of these things a year any more, but it can make itself appear to be capable of it.

Also, these games will be exclusive to PlayStation consoles only. Sony never made a big deal of its PC publishing initiative in State of Play showcases, but this week there was a pointed reference to Wolverine being "built to take full advantage of the PlayStation 5 consoles." This came shortly after another, just as pointed, description of Wolverine as a "single-player action-adventure game featuring a focused, story-driven experience." Got it? No live-service gubbins here. Maybe not even an open world! All aboard the Uncharted action train!

Sony's live-service initiative may be drastically scaled down, but it hasn't been abandoned. There was a trailer for Marathon's season 2 launch this week, and another for fighting game Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls. There were some online games from partners, like RuneScape: Dragonwilds, No Rest for the Wicked, and the exciting co-op action game Kemuri.

Image: Unseen Inc.

But it was funny that — for the purposes of this showcase and a new PS5 version — Funcom is reverse-engineering its Dune: Awakening MMO into a single-player game via a new solo mode. And it was notable that there was no mention of Fairgame$ (if it's even still called that) or Horizon Hunters Gathering, a massive project for developer Guerrilla that Sony chose to reveal in the lower-stakes setting of a February State of Play. Sony hasn't abandoned live-service completely, but it has learned the hard way to handle it with extreme care. Part of that is knowing your audience; the June showcase faithful is not it.

Overall, the State of Play showed Sony in full retrenchment mode. The company has clearly made mistakes it is eager to correct, and allowed some dilution of the PlayStation brand that it now wants to distill back to its former potency. As far as it goes, it worked. And in any case, PS5 is sitting pretty, as the main beneficiary of what is certain to be a huge Grand Theft Auto 6 bump later this year.

But time travel isn't real. We can't go back to a time when PlayStation 6 might be remotely affordable, when countless talented artisans hadn't wasted years of their lives on cancelled live-service boondoggles, or when it took Rockstar or Naughty Dog less than seven years to make a single new video game. But we can pretend, right?

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