E3 2017 Conferences Recap, Part 2

Last week was E3, one of the largest video games expos in the world, which is held annually in the Los Angeles area. One of the highlights each year are the press conferences held by several of the major gaming publishers, and I, like many others, took the time to watch them and enjoy the spectacle that is E3. Yesterday and today I’ll be giving brief, bullet-point style overviews of the things I saw that caught my eye during the conferences I watched, which were the ones from EA, Microsoft, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Sorry, but I didn’t watch the Devolver Digital presentation or the PC gaming show. Today I’ll recap what I found notable about the Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo conferences.


Ubisoft
* Ubisoft conferences have frequently been wildcards at E3, and this year I think they put on a pretty good show, even if only a few of their games interest me.
* The legendary Shigeru Miyamoto came out on stage during the reveal of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom. The game itself looks sort of like XCOM set in a Mario universe that’s been populated with Rabbids.
* We got a bit more of Assassin’s Creed: Origins with another trailer for the game. At this point I don’t need to see any more of this game. It’s been long enough since my last Assassin’s Creed game and I’m ready to jump back into the series.
* Trailers and game details for The Crew 2 came next, followed by trailers for the next South Park game and a VR game called Transference.
* A new game called Skull and Bones was shown that, from my perspective, looked like Ubisoft was taking some of the naval elements of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and turning them into a full-fledged multiplayer game.
* No surprise, another Just Dance game is coming out this year. I never hear about Just Dance games outside of their annual announcements at E3, but I guess they must be selling well enough to warrant new editions each year.
* The extreme sports game Steep is getting its first expansion later this year. Even though I’m not a sports guy I did seriously think about messing around with Steep when it got announced last year. Whether or not I actually do play it remains to be seen.
* A new trailer and a gameplay demonstration for Far Cry 5 came next. Far Cry is a series that I feel somewhat guilty about, since I really liked Far Cry: Blood Dragon, but I’ve never played a numbered entry in the series. This Far Cry takes place in America and has the player liberating a fictional county in Montana from a cult that’s moved in and taken over. I’m going to make a serious effort to get to this game, though, as with most games, it will likely be about a year after its release when I finally play it.
* The Ubisoft conference ended with the reveal of Beyond Good & Evil 2. Even though this means nothing to me, I know it’s a really big deal because the first Beyond Good & Evil is a beloved game to so many people and fans have been waiting since 2003 for this announcement.
* As the conference closed, the CEO of Ubisoft brought onto the stage members of the development teams from the games that were shown in the conference. Ubisoft has done this for the past several E3’s if I remember correctly, and this is actually something that I really appreciate about Ubisoft conferences. Normally game developers slave away for years on the games they build and don’t always get the recognition they deserve, so it’s nice to see Ubisoft CEO bring them out for the gaming world to see and applaud.

Sony
* This year’s PlayStation conference wasn’t quite as strong as the previous two years, but they still had some good things. Interesting, Sony showed a lot of stuff just prior to the start of the conference, so there was a lot more announced than what you might think if you only watched the main presentation.
* Kicking off the conference was a new trailer for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. I’m a big fan of the Uncharted games and this looks to be more Uncharted goodness, so I’m already sold on it.
* Horizon Zero Dawn is getting its first DLC. I really want to play Horizon Zero Dawn, but I’m wondering if maybe I should wait to see if the game gets anything like a definitive edition that includes all DLC. Good thing I’m a patient man.
* A gameplay demo for Days Gone came next. I’m on the fence about this game, as it looks interesting, but I don’t really like the zombie genre (yes, I know the “zombies” in Days Gone are not actually zombies). Still no release date on this game. My guess is Fall 2018.
* Monster Hunter World was announced. From what I understand, the Monster Hunter series is hugely popular in Japan, but I don’t know how well it sells in the West.
* The single biggest moment for me of the PlayStation conference was the reveal of a remake of Shadow of the Colossus. When the trailer first started I thought it was announcing that the PS3 remaster was being ported to PS4, but after a few seconds it was clear that this was not a remaster. The trailer looks stunning and I hope that this remake does the game justice.
* Call of Duty: WW2 got a multiplayer trailer, but kind of an odd one. It wasn’t clear at first whether it was for the game’s singleplayer or multiplayer and some of the animations in it looked strange. I can’t help but feel that Call of Duty isn’t as big of a behemoth as the series used to be. Call of Duty used to command a spot as one of the biggest games shown each year at E3, but now it just seems to be one among many big games.
* A lot of PSVR games were shown. I don’t own a PSVR and probably won’t be getting one until the second generation of PSVR comes out, so I’ll be skipping all of these.
* God of War’s new trailer was shown and it got a release date of early 2018. Being such a significant departure from previous games in the series, I’m really curious to see how it turns out.
* Detroit: Become Human’s gameplay trailer showed some of the choices players can make in the game. We still don’t know when we’ll be playing this tale of androids “waking up” and rebelling against their human masters.
* Destiny 2 is going to get some exclusive content on PlayStation. I was already planning on playing Destiny 2 on PlayStation, so now I have more reason to do so.
* The PlayStation conference closed with a gameplay demonstration for the new Spiderman game. Though I personally would have preferred the conference to end with a big announcement of a new game, the Spiderman demo was still enjoyable.

Nintendo
* Unlike the other major conferences at E3, Nintendo had an entirely prerecorded presentation instead of a live show. Nintendo hasn’t done a traditional E3 conference in several years now, but the fans seem to be ok with that.
* At just under 25 minutes, the Nintendo presentation was the shortest of the E3 shows that I watched.
* Rocket League is coming to Switch and will have Nintendo-themed items in the game. I played Rocket League way back at PSX 2015 and can understand why it’s so popular. It’s no surprise that people have been wanting it to come to Switch.
* Next was a series of game announcements and trailers that mostly mean little to me, but I know are a really big deal to the Nintendo fanbase. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 got a release date, a new Kirby game is coming out next year, a core entry in the Pokemon series is in development, Metroid Prime 4 was teased, and a new Yoshi game is being released next year. Of all of these, the one that I’m interested in is the announcement of Metroid Prime 4. I played and enjoyed Metroid Prime 3 on the Nintendo Wii, and I might give Metroid Prime 4 a try when it comes out. No release window was given, so I’m guessing it will be at least two years before the game is released.
* After those big conference moments came two seemingly smaller ones, namely a trailer for Fire Emblem Warriors and details on the next DLC pack for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but then Nintendo concluded their presentation with an extended trailer for Super Mario Odyssey This new Mario game looks to be Nintendo’s big title for Fall 2017 and I don’t doubt that it will be a fantastic game. Hopefully it recaptures the same magic I felt when I played Super Mario Galaxy.