21 June 2015
Sony
Quite unbelievably The Last Guardian opened Sony's show. A game that's not be seen at E3 since 2009. It was another great moment from the crowd, as Shawn Layden said "our first game tonight has been long anticipated by the gaming community". That gave it away instantly as gasps quickly turned to cheers. As for the game itself it doesn't really appeal to me. It is very Japan Studio - styled exactly like Ico, which I enjoyed, but that was originally a PS2 title highly praised for its poetic gameplay and huge scale. I could appreciate this even from playing the HD remastered version. So this sort of game has skipped a generation in the console timeline and I do wonder if the same aspects that made Ico great can work with The Last Guardian on PS4.
The only new IP announced at Sony was Horizon Zero Dawn, and thankfully this does look very cool. A single player RPG set in a 'post post apocalyptic' world with Tomb Raider-esque gameplay combined with giant mech robots! Seeing a gameplay demo was awesome and another 'hats off' to Sony and Guerrilla Games for keeping this under wraps. The fight scenes look epic where a bow and arrow can be used to dislodge robot limbs, and then you're able to use their parts to destroy them. I'm very intrigued to see and hear more about this game.
No Man's Sky hasn't progressed much since last year's E3 but it is a super small team at Hello Games, and we were reminded of the insane scale of the game. Gun gameplay was a first, along with police patrolling sentinels and destructible environments which look great. The disappointment though was still no release window let alone a date.
To much surprise we saw barely anything of Project Morpheus (2 minutes 20 seconds according to Greg Miller). RIGS was the game shown off which looked good as a robot/vehicle sport with a focus on multiplayer but I wanted to see more. I guess it's still near impossible to demo the VR kit to a crowd plus an internet audience. The true experience can only be had by wearing the device.
Quite a few people expected Sony to open with Black Ops 3 as it's a guaranteed top seller, and more significantly is the first Call of Duty title where PlayStation is the favoured console i.e. will receive DLC packs first. This is a big scoop by Sony, which ties into their other Activision deal with Destiny, but I do feel Call of Duty has had its heyday so Microsoft could let it go. As for content shown off for the new game, it was great to see campaign and multiplayer demos at E3. Previously it has only been the former, and even this was new showing campaign co-op gameplay for the first time. Still I wasn't amazed by this trailer as it was too similar to the previous games. The guns sound the same and there is still an element of jump boosting. The multiplayer trailer was much better, the highlight being the player chaining kills with the Crysis-esque bow.
Last but not least was Uncharted 4. The showpiece to end Sony's event and after showing a beautiful busy market, Nate just didn't move! I could hear the crowd muttering away thinking what's gone wrong!? But after restarting the demo Nate finally moved and we were in for a treat of a gameplay trailer. It was great to see Sully back in action again, but the new aspect I took away from the demo was the different routes available in the driving scene. I hope this is a re-occurring feature in other missions. Naturally there was a spectacular ending to the demo and I can't wait for its 2016 release. I actually don't want to see any further gameplay as I feel it would spoil it - I'd rather wait to play it firsthand. This was many people's game of the show, and it would sit comfortably in my top three.
Nintendo
Finally there was Nintendo, and repeating last year they didn't show up and simply released a 50 minute video they like to call their digital event. This was poor. I don't know what they were hoping to achieve with the muppets characters, it just wasn't funny. Nintendo fans weren't even happy with the game announcements, there was nothing huge to shout about.
However this is certainly not the end of Nintendo at E3. I believe they'll be back for a live stage conference when their new console, codenamed 'NX', is ready to be unveiled along with gameplay footage of Zelda for Wii U.