E3 2018

[SkyPikachu]

Limited Run Games have announced a Press Conference at 12pm PDT 1 hour before the Ubisoft conference.

[SkyPikachu]

So pretty sure EA didn’t announce any new AAA games other than a title and setting for the new Star Wars.

No skate 4, too much time on anthem, too much time on a mobile game.

Unravel 2 looks fun though.

Overall pretty meh conference though (as expected) I skipped over anthem as I didn’t have time to watch it right now. So maybe that will change my mind but I doubt it.

Onto Microsoft and Fable IV hopes.

[The Shoemaker]

I expected meh from EA and received the same. Still, not much there for me, personally. Skate 4 would have been hype.

[SkyPikachu]

Where to begin.

If Microsoft doesn't win E3 I'll be stoked and Playstation or Nintendo put on a ripper show.

The bad
Halo trailer tbh sucked and showed nothing
No Fable IV sucked
Closing on Cyberpunk trailer with no gameplay sucked shocked they didn't end with gears. (especially after trolling)

Otherwise I loved it.

The good
Ori looks greats
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice could be cool need more details though
Captain Spirit looks cool
Crackdown 3 trailer was the most memorable moment
Kingdom Hearts release date kinda sorta revealed (even though it was yesterday)
Forza Horizon 4 looks awesome
Microsofts new studios isn't a big deal to me especially as i didn't really know who they were but it's good going forward nonetheless
Sessions better be what i want from skate 4
Dying Light 2 wow the trailer didn't really do it for me but the demo did it sounds really cool
Battletoads hahaha
Gears 5 troll was great
Halo coming to gamepass
Fallout 4 i might try again
TUNIC IS ADORABUBBLE OMG OMG I remember it at the PC Gaming Show last year.

[Kong Wen]

So far I'm pre-ordering Metal Wolf Chaos and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, both on PS4. If it turns out the Vesperia remaster is available on PS4, I'll order that as well.

Barring any surprises, the only thing I'm looking out for now is some Monster Hunter: World expansion/G-Rank news.

Adding Vesperia to my possible order list, as well as Zone of the Enders, Dragon Quest XI, and Octopath Traveler if Best Buy includes them in their 30% off pre-orders. Won't find out until they get their stock updated after all the announcements.

From the Nintendo direct: Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I really hope this is one game and not three separate fucking carts.

[The Shoemaker]

So far I'm pre-ordering Metal Wolf Chaos and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, both on PS4. If it turns out the Vesperia remaster is available on PS4, I'll order that as well.

Barring any surprises, the only thing I'm looking out for now is some Monster Hunter: World expansion/G-Rank news.

Versperia is coming to Xbox, ps4 and Switch, not sure about PC.

I think Xbox objectively had a good show, but there was very little that I actually cared for there. Tunic and Ori look great. Halo told me nothing, and I won't be getting into Gears or Fortza.

Fallout 76 looks pretty cool, I imagine it will be pretty fun to mess around with friends. It's a maybe so far. New DOOM game will be fun.

I'm thinking Sony and Square Enix might have more third party announcements up my ally.

[Jordan]

My hot take.

Ea:

Ubisoft: Some cool games. Super Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Starlink, Just Dance 2019, DK x Rabbids and an amazing looking new pirates game which I don't recall seeing before. I'd say they did pretty well for themselves.

Bethesda: They also did well, but I'm tired of this meme of "Let's announce this game which isn't coming out for several years" (Elder Scrolls VI in this case). Are they trying to be Square-Enix now? Speaking of which...

Square-Enix: . They had such a low bar, and they couldn't even reach it. KH3 got spread out among all the other conferences for some reason, which kinda hurt Square-Enix here. But Square-Enix also had to show something about the FF7 remake and failed to do so. They're hurting their brand significantly with their overly long development times. They didn't really show anything new either. I really expected more from them.

Microsoft: Wow. I honestly think they won this year. Knowing my personal background, this is actually amazing. I've never been an MS fan at all. Here they showed tons and tons of games, including some real surprises like Battletoads. In some ways they had the highest stakes because they've kinda been falling behind the PS4 and Switch. I think they really made their case this time.

Sony: This was a mixed bag, with some real gems and some real .

Let's start with the . Kojima's game is to the 10th degree. I've never seen anything hyped up so much with so much letdown. His game looked absolutely horrible, and made The Last of Us 2 look like a heavily gameplay focused game by contrast.

I can't get into games like The Last of Us 2, so I won't evaluate that as because I know some people like it. But I think we can all agree that the long stretch of talking after that trailer was . Sony also had some questionable presentation decisions, like having that white guy put on one of those rice hats and play that horrible flute music for several minutes before the Mongol Invasion game trailer.

Justin Roiland's game looked pretty lame as well.

The Good: The Japan vs. Mongol game looks like it has potential. I'm still a little bit unsure about the gameplay. It kinda reminds me of Way of the Samurai, but with more of a budget behind it. Spider-Man game looks fantastic. Ni-Oh 2 looks fantastic. Everything else looks at least decent.

Overall, Sony did pretty well, but I feel that Microsoft edged them out this year. Microsoft did have an advantage in going first. This gave them a little bit more punch, even with games that were otherwise multi-plat.

PC Game Show: This wasn't bad at all. We got confirmation of several neat games like Yakuza 0 and Tales of Vesparia.

Nintendo: Like Sony, this was a real mixed bag. There was no trash, but there also wasn't as much good stuff as in Sony's conference. Also, the presentation was not done very well. They should have spent less time on the minute details of Smash and more time showcasing some of the many games that are coming to Switch. The presentation left me scratching my head at the end, because it had a lot of content which just wasn't delivered well. They could have spent at least 5 minutes showcasing some of the bigger reveals like Paladins, DBZ FighterZ and Ninjala.

For me the real win in this conference was the Fire Emblem trailer. I know that this conference was supposed to be focused on Smash, but I think Fire Emblem stole the show. The trailer they showed looked absolutely gorgeous and showed off some really interesting new features in a concise but effective way. Their Fire Emblem trailer was an example of what I consider to be a trailer done right. They managed to find the perfect mixture of cinematics and actual gameplay to present. We now know that there will be troops, formations and a little bit of open third person exploration. We know the "Three Houses" and the main characters in each one and we know what the game looks like. We even know some little things like how weapon durability is going to be a thing.

At the start, they also showed a mech game which looked like it had potential. I'll need to know more.

The Smash Bros. part of the presentation was done well...at first. But then it dragged on way too long. They should have shortened it to two major points. A.) We're bringing everybody from the series back. EVERYBODY. B.) We're adding Daisy, Ridley and Inkling. They really did not need to get into the nitty gritty of specific character changes. They could have maybe covered the major changes like the visual change to Zelda or the gameplay and visual changes to Link.

Nintendo's conference had a lot of omissions which probably pissed people off, but it wasn't bad. It just did not use its time well. It spent too long talking about Smash and not enough time talking about 20 or so games that were shown off for only a few seconds. I think it was maybe equal to Sony's this year, but I'm very biased in favor of Fire Emblem.

Overall: This was a better E3 than usual with no losers among the big 3. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all did surprisingly well this year. The market seems more competitive than it has ever been, which is great for the industry. EA was the biggest loser and Kojima is confirmed to be an Inafune tier hack.

[SkyPikachu]

Idk why my other post didn't show up but summary.

Square Enix - Short and nothing much shown that excited me (other than KH3)

Ubisoft - The rabbids song troll was a jerk move and a huge tease. Assassin's Creed could be good, Starlink will probably suck but worth keeping an eye on, Beyond Good and Evil 2 showed little to no gameplay.

Sony - So the big 3 games didn't get release dates or release windows. There was a huge gap between TLOU2 and Ghost of Tsushima and then the crap at the end making Dreams and that VR game feel less important was DUMB. Ghost of Tsushima looks cool though.

Onto Nintendo and well Nintendo's conference sucked. It may as well have been a smash direct.

Super Mario Party was the only new announcement outside of Ports.

Fire Emblem was delayed like we expected.

No Yoshi like WTH.

TWEWY was barely shown

Smash was over shown and over explained during the direct that stuffs better for the treehouse also Inklings and Ridley are the only new characters so far which is a bit of a downer.

Other stuff got like 5-60 seconds of air time but looked meh.

No Metroid Trilogy Port, No Metroid 4, No Pokemon 2019, No Zelda DLC, No Mario DLC. Just honestly nothing at all. Honestly the direct earlier in the year (the one with all the ports that I hated) was waaaaay better than this direct.

Microsoft has easily easily won E3.

Rankings

EA - F (Literally one of the worst conferences I'd ever seen)
Microsoft - A (Fable IV would have bumped it up to A+ otherwise a fantastic showing)
Bethesda - C (Hard to rank them as I don't like Bethesda games much)
Square Enix - C (Kingdom Hearts III, Just Cause 4 look fun)
Ubisoft - D (Beyond Good and Evil didn't get a date and little to no gameplay. The DK song with no announcement was rude, wasted time again with Just dance while they showed off more cooler stuff than Square Enix the time wasting and trolling ranks it lower)
Sony - D (No release dates or windows, huge gap between segments, fake dumb looking IGN/Gamespot desk talking up the game and shafting dreams like that + no release date sucked)
Nintendo - E- (It was plain and simply a Smash Bros Direct. Not going to cut it when you have a successful console it worked with BOTW in 2016 because we were waiting for the switch but now it's just offensive. Where's Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Metroid details, Other AAA games, What's Retro working on, Where was Yoshi that's coming this year. just wow)

Edit - Overall a fairly average E3

[Jordan]

Fire Emblem being delayed was a disappointment, but I think that their honesty about the release date is a little bit better than Sony in some ways. Sony didn't really give clear release schedules, like you said, so for all we know their entire release schedule could actually be worse than Nintendo's. It could be that the big four or five or so games they showed off don't come out till 2019 or later.

I agree with you completely that Nintendo wasted too much time on Smash Bros., but I think that some of the ports and games they showed off were notable enough to be worthwhile. DBZ FighterZ, Paladins and Fortnite are big gets. Ninjala looked interesting and I wish they had showed off more of it. It looks kind of like the art style of Splatoon but possibly a more battle royale style game, but focused on bubble gum? It really looked zany and interesting. It would have been nice to have seen more than a few seconds of it.

Overcooked 2 and Killer Queen Black looked at least decently fun.

I mostly agree with the order of your rankings but I'd probably be a bit more charitable to Sony and Nintendo. I'd give them at least a C each, if not higher. They each showed off some good things and some mediocrity. I didn't think this was a bad E3 personally. Microsoft definitely did slay this time around, which I never would have expected.

Super Mario Party was the only new announcement outside of Ports.

In fairness, there's also that mech game they showed at the start. I'm also not sure if Ninjala is an exclusive or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxPlBdk4HXY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anIpkQ3H5S4

[SkyPikachu]

Fire Emblem being delayed was a disappointment, but I think that their honesty about the release date is a little bit better than Sony in some ways. Sony didn't really give clear release schedules, like you said, so for all we know their entire release schedule could actually be worse than Nintendo's. It could be that the big four or five or so games they showed off don't come out till 2019 or later.

I agree with you completely that Nintendo wasted too much time on Smash Bros., but I think that some of the ports and games they showed off were notable enough to be worthwhile. DBZ FighterZ, Paladins and Fortnite are big gets. Ninjala looked interesting and I wish they had showed off more of it. It looks kind of like the art style of Splatoon but possibly a more battle royale style game, but focused on bubble gum? It really looked zany and interesting. It would have been nice to have seen more than a few seconds of it.

Overcooked 2 and Killer Queen Black looked at least decently fun.

I mostly agree with the order of your rankings but I'd probably be a bit more charitable to Sony and Nintendo. I'd give them at least a C each, if not higher. They each showed off some good things and some mediocrity. I didn't think this was a bad E3 personally. Microsoft definitely did slay this time around, which I never would have expected.

Super Mario Party was the only new announcement outside of Ports.

In fairness, there's also that mech game they showed at the start. I'm also not sure if Ninjala is an exclusive or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxPlBdk4HXY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anIpkQ3H5S4

Totally forgot about Daemon x Machina it looks really interesting.

Also Sony conference rated low mainly due to time wasting.