It’s hard to criticize Gamescom’s Opening Night Live showcase without accidentally firing off shots at games that probably don’t deserve it, but that was a pretty miserable showcase. Geoff Keighley hosts the biggest English-language video game showcases of the year, and the Germany-based presentation is typically the one that feels the least curated. This year, it also feels like the format is serving very few games on the stage.
If you were to pluck most of the trailers in the two-hour show out of the event, you probably could find a lot to be excited about. But the lineup at Gamescom hurt a lot of these games, as so many of them had such similar vibes, gameplay loops, and aesthetics that they all kind of blended together and painted a pretty stultifying picture of the months ahead. I just wrote our recap for the showcase, and found that about midway through I was running out of things to say about every dark fantasy game, edgy shooter, or anime-inspired Hoyoverse-esque game as it came and went without a moment of impact.
Obviously, Keighley had a few major games up his sleeve to act as the headliners, but Final Fantasy VII Revelation’s appearance was all too brief after we’d endured nearly two hours of games that couldn’t hope to meaningfully differentiate themselves from all the others. The night’s final reveal, a remaster of The Witcher 3, was probably the biggest surprise of the show, which is kind of anticlimactic note to end on, as it’s an 11-year-old game. At least it’s getting a hefty expansion next year so there’s something new on the horizon.
This is the same struggle that shows like Wholesome Games have run into, in that they’re so curated around a specific theme that showing too many games at once runs the risk of them all bleeding into each other, and the longer the show goes on, the less time anyone gets to process something that looks cool before their short-term memory is overwritten by the next not-distinct-enough game.
This year’s Gamescom felt like the also-ran of Keighley’s shows. Summer Game Fest has taken up E3’s usual place as the summer show that everyone pays attention to, and the Game Awards has prestige to chase as it positions itself as the video-game Oscars, which leaves Gamescom in this awkward spot of sometimes feeling like a place for Keighley and crew to dump all the miscellaneous games that aren’t quite big enough to headline one of the glitzier showcases. And while some of these games will surely benefit from being featured here, it doesn’t do them any real favors to get overshadowed by Final Fantasy VII.