So, following on from last month’s article in a totally non premeditated 2 part Geeks and Gamers, E3 has been, come and gone, and now we know what the next 12 months of gaming has in store for us. I wonder how close my predictions were. Let’s see!
Starting in order of the conferences, we begin with EA. The biggest applause of their conference, of course came from Battlefield 1. We got to see some gameplay footage and it looks amazing! While Call Of Duty seems to be losing fans, due to lack of innovation and general laziness, Battlefield is finally about to take over as king of the shooters. We also got to see details and gameplay for Titanfall 2 (Titanfall being a personal favorite of mine) which promises more customization of your Titan, something greatly lacking in the first game, and it will also have a single player mode (something else missing from the first game). This time, it will also be available on PS4. We also got a glimpse of Fifa 17, which will feature a story/career mode. Otherwise, it’s just the same old Fifa.
Next up was Microsoft, who had an average but solid show this year. We saw more of Gears Of War 4, Scalebound, Recore, Sea of Theives,Dead Rising 4 and new announcements included State of Decay 2, Forza Horizon 3, Inside and a handful of other games. No big surprises, really. Their main focus was on Xbox Play Anywhere, which means if you buy a game on Xbox One, you also get to play it for free on Windows 10 machines. It’s a cool feature, allowing you to save games to the cloud and resume them on whichever device you next play on. They also announced the Xbox One S, a new, smaller Xbox One with a 2TB hard drive and 4k video playback capability. At the end of their show, they teased a glimpse of Project Scorpio, a new console which should be out at the end of 2017. The specs include six teraflops of performance (that’s A LOT) and true 4k gaming. They also announced a ‘Design your own controller’ program, which allows you to order a custom controller with any color schemes you like (over 8 million combinations), and also has your gamer tag written on the bottom.
Ubisoft followed, with one of their better shows in recent years. We got to see a lot of the new South Park game (coming December this year). As well as gameplay and story details, Matt Stone and Trey Parker (creators of South Park) were onstage talking about the game, and both it and they were hilarious. One I am personally looking forward to. We got to see more of the new Ghost Recon, Watchdogs 2, For Honor (looking amazing!), a new Star Trek game and a new I.P called Steep. Steep is a beautiful winter sports game, in the same vein as SSX or, for N64 fans, 1080 Snowboarding, but with an open world element, online functionality, challenges, co-op play and much more. Another one that I am looking forward to!
Finally, (and as an Xbox fan, it pains me to say this but hats off to them) Sony came out with the best show of E3 this year. One thing I like about Sony’s conferences, and why I stay up until 4am to watch them, is that they focus on games throughout their entire show and that’s what the average E3 view wants to see. This year, we saw new games and got updates on ones we already knew about. They opened with gameplay of a new God Of War game which blew everyone away. We saw more of The Last Guardian, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Call Of Duty, Crash Bandicoot (it’s being remastered!) and Final Fantasy. We saw games and gameplay for the upcoming Sony VR (which I am totally sold to, by the way). They showed off a Batman Arkham VR game, as well as a brand new and surprising Resident Evil (looking very much like the canceled Silent Hills game). New games shown included Detroit: Become Human (from the makers of Heavy Rain), Days Gone (a zombie survival thing, reminiscent of the movie World War Z) and Spiderman (made by Insomniac Studios, makers of Sunset Overdrive so it should be brilliant!).
Sadly, no sign of Rockstar, although they themselves had confirmed months ago that they would be at E3 ‘in a major way’. But everything else we got to see made up for it, and with most of the above due for release between September-December this year, it’s going to be a busy (and expensive) winter for gamers.
