Well E3 is now officially over. Let’s run down the remaining three press conferences and the games shown off in them!

Ubisoft

Ubisoft had a surprisingly strong show, but I’m interested in only a small subset of the games. I was glad to see that they didn’t linger too long on known quantities like Assassin’s Creed Origins… Assassin’s Creed Snoreigins, more like! I hate this franchise. I’ve never had any fun with it except for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – y’know, the pirate one. The premise is really cool and I like the historical settings in theory, but the characters all suck, the controls suck, the mission design sucks, the open worlds suck, and the self-serious tone sucks.

The show began and ended with big stuff – that’s how you do it, Bethesda. Even though I don’t really know what Beyond Good and Evil is, I know there’s a excited fanbase out there for the game who were very psyched to get news about the sequel. So well done in that regard, Ubisoft.

Mario & Rabbids Kingdom Battle

Initially I was repulsed by the idea of putting Mario & Rabbids together. The Rabbids are something I have no prior experience with, but I look at the characters and all I think of is Minions from Despicable Me.

But you know what? This presentation won me over. It’s a great looking art style. The clash of goofy Rabbid characters with Mario playing the straight man seems ripe for physical comedy. The gameplay is tactical turn-based strategy that reminds me of XCOM. And they brought Shigeru Miyamoto on stage which is more than we’ll see of him in Nintendo’s presentation ironically.

Yeah, I might actually get this game. This looks weird and goofy and cool. I hope the gameplay is as solid as it looked from the short demo.

I also love this interview with the XCOM creative director regarding the similarities between the two games.

The Crew 2

Wisely this presentation focused on gameplay. The story of The Crew is not only completely forgettable, it’s annoying. It gets in between the player and what they actually came to do which is drive around the smooshed up little United States open world. I thought the sequel might go someplace else. Europe, England, Japan, Australia (except Forza Horizon 3 just did that…). Nope back to America again. That’s fine by me, actually. I’d like to see a take two.

The Crew 2 adds boats, planes, motorcycles, and other vehicles to the mix. It’s kind of like what Steep did with winter sports. If they can manage to make a better game around that core, I might be interested.

Skull & Bones

The pirate video game market is apparently more crowded than I thought. Skull & Bones looks like a sequel to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (a.k.a. the only good one) with the on-foot stuff stripped out and a renewed focus on the ship-to-ship combat. In Skull & Bones, teams of players will square off using different classes of ships to fulfill various tactical roles in their fleets. Players can also turn on each other to get bigger payouts. After all, what’s piracy without the ability to turn on each other?

I am skeptical that team-based ship combat can sustain an entire game, but maybe there’s more to it than was shown or maybe this won’t be a full-priced release.

Far Cry 5

Much like Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ubisoft showed shockingly little of this game. That’s probably because we already know what it is – mostly. It’s another open world sandbox of mayhem where your mission is to shoot all the crazy people who have taken the land from the non-crazy people.

Like I said in my pre-E3 post, I don’t appreciate the overtly Christian imagery mixed with the white supremacist stuff. This brief trailer added a bad guy singing “Amazing Grace” to the mix. Ugh.

The game looks gorgeous and fun otherwise though.

Sony

Sony’s conference was a bit of a sleeper this year, honestly. It was a strange show. Only one person walked out on stage for two brief speeches; the rest was trailers accompanied occasionally by actual live things happening the theater like live music or performers dangling from the ceiling.

The games on display were mostly underserved by the presentation’s lack of context. Only two games that I recall got extended gameplay demos that gave us some semblance of an idea how they might actually play.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wastes

I like Horizon a lot. I’ll play more of it! It’s coming this year too. I wonder if this will continue the story and follow up on the sequel bait at the end of the main game or if it will be a new side story. As much as I hate it when games “finish” their stories in DLC, I would kind of like to have the dangling story thread resolved.

Days Gone

Days Gone and all zombies games must overcome the question “do we really need another zombie game?” Days Gone looks very okay. At least the extended demo gave us an idea how the game plays. Will this be heavy on story like The Last of Us? It’s hard to imagine the narrative being anywhere close to that good. So what’s the hook of this game? I’m still not seeing it. It looks very well made though.

God of War

I never played any of the previous God of War games. Character action games aren’t my thing and I never owned a Playstation 2 or 3 anyhow. The new God of War (irritatingly and confusingly just called God of War even though it isn’t a reboot) looks to be changing the style of gameplay to something I could maybe get behind. It also seems to be putting the emphasis on a family story of Kratos and his son.

AND THERE’S FRIENDLY (maybe) SEA SERPENT! THAT THING IS COOL.

Destiny 2

Destiny is a really, really mechanically solid shooter that released without enough content and way too much grinding. The shooting felt great, but the game built around it was questionable. That’s far from an original opinion. I happen to agree with the masses on this one.

Destiny 2 is a chance for a fresh start that I’m excited to see. I like PvE shooters and since there’s no Borderlands 3 yet, I’ll likely give Destiny 2 a shot as a filthy casual player.

I say all of this based on my personal experience with the first game. Zero of my desire to play the sequel comes from its marketing which is a bunch of stupid nonsense. The trailer shown at Sony’s show was stupid, overwrought, and totally forgettable. I don’t want to play Destiny 2 so I can be a hero and save earth or take back the Last City or whatever. I want to play it because it has great mechanics. I will never care about the story in Destiny. Please stop acting like anyone does.

Spider-man

Spider-man really stole the show. For some reason I wasn’t expecting much out of this game. Superhero games aside from the Batman Arkham series have been pretty lame for the most part. Apparently the Spider-man developers thought so to because they’ve take a lot from Arkham. I’m fine with that. Those are great games and some of the mechanics fit Spidey decently well too.

What Spider-man offers that Batman doesn’t is, of course, web-slinging. Spider-man will reportedly feature an open-world which you traverse by physics-based webshooting and wallrunning. That sounds great!

What’s worrying is the abundance of quick-time events in the demo. What happens if you miss the arbitrary button presses? Do you have to restart the sequence? Hopefully this kind of gameplay is sparse and forgiving. Aside from those bits, Spider-man was one of the best games at the show.

Nintendo

I expected an underwhelming show from Nintendo. The rumor of a short 20 to 30 minute presentation was right on the mark. But Nintendo managed to pack more into 25 minutes than everybody else did in an hour or more. Nintendo blew away the low expectations announcing new major games – some distant and some coming a lot sooner than expected.

Kirby

I did not expect a Kirby game this early in the Switch’s life. Usually Kirby games come at the tail end of a system’s life, but this is slated to be out in 2018. I’m not for certain sold. Kirby games are fun, but light on challenge and kind of samey. But this looked delightful nevertheless. It’s the first HD Kirby and that alone might make it worthwhile. 4 player co-op is more at home with Kirby than Mario games.

Pokemon RPG for Switch

This was the block of the show about vague promises. Yes, we’re going to make that thing you want, the Pokemon Company assures fans… eventually. We kind of figured that would be the case, but it’s nice to have confirmation especially after the recent Pokemon Direct left fans wondering if mainline Pokemon would ever come to Switch.

METROID PRIME 4

YOU SEE HOW I CAPITALIZED THE TITLE OF THIS ONE? YEAH, I’M PSYCHED!

I thought a Metroid announcement was too good to be true, but here it is. Metroid Prime 4 is happening. Again, it’s a vague promise. No footage, no concepts, no release date or year. But it’s being made and that’s awesome.

Unexpectedly, Prime 4 isn’t being made by Retro Studios, but a new team. I think that’s great. The passion for a new Metroid might not have existed at Retro. They should make something else if they don’t want to make Prime 4. That means Retro’s new game is something else and we have a cool surprise from them still in store.

I hope the Prime 4 team isn’t afraid to break convention and make big changes. I am very much looking forward to seeing a modern (probably still first person) Metroid game. But it will probably be a while.

Yoshi

Yoshi’s Wooly World was a delightful platformer for Wii U. This is a similar-looking follow-up. Instead of yarn, the world is paper and cardboard. Like Kirby, I’m not sold on this one, but I’m glad to see it.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC

I wasn’t expecting any info about the second DLC pack from E3 and I was basically right. We got some info: a name and vague concept, but that’s it. “The Champion’s Ballad” appears to be a prequel given the characters it features. That’s a neat idea, but we’ll have to wait for more info to get an idea of the expansion’s scope. Expansion 1 is out at the end of the month, but we already knew the features it would bring.

Exploration and puzzles were the strongest parts of Breath of the Wild. Expansion 1 doesn’t seem to building much on those aspects. Hopefully The Champion’s Ballad will find a way to recapture some of that magic.

Rocket League

Rocket League is an excellent game that I never play anymore, but the idea of having it on a portable system… yeah, that’s great. Plus it will be playable with players on the Xbox and PC versions of the game. Sony is the lone hold out there, but that’s their fault. Of course, like most third party games coming to Switch so far, the game will get the requisite Nintendo cosmetic items – Mario hats and such for your cars. The Switch version is targeting a smooth 60 fps at the cost of resolution. That’s the right decision for this sort of game.

Super Mario Odyssey

I was already sold on Mario Odyssey. The game looked incredibly creative and charming in its initial reveal and what was shown at E3 only increased my desire to see and play this game for myself. We’re getting it about a month before I expected – at the end of October rather than November.

Metroid: Samus Returns

I would never have guessed that Nintendo would drop not one, but two Metroid games at E3. While Prime 4 is probably years down the line, Metroid: Samus Returns for 3DS is coming out at the end of the summer.

I’ve wanted a new 2D Metroid game for ages. It’s been 13 years since the last one: Metroid: Zero Mission on the Gameboy Advance. While I would much prefer this just coming to the Switch, a new Metroid game is one of the few things that could get me to bring my 3DS out of retirement.

Samus Returns looks strikingly fluid. I’m used to the spite-based animation of the older games which had few frames of animation. This is quite a leap from that. Gameplay is also updated with the ability to freely aim, perform melee counters to enemies and stylish finishing moves just to name a few additions.

Other Stuff

There were a couple things outside the big press conferences I wanted to highlight as well.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

XCOM 2 was my 4th favorite game of 2016. War of the Chosen is a hefty expansion to that game. I’ll definitely be curious when it comes out, but the latter half of 2017 is starting to look packed with turn-based tactical games like Mario & Rabbids and the next game…

Wargroove

Wargroove is another indie title that picks up the slack of a big company who’s no longer making a beloved series. The company? Nintendo. The series? Advance Wars.

Wargroove is the spitting image of Advance Wars but with a medieval/fantasy theme rather than modern/near-future military. I am so up for that especially since it’s coming to the Switch in addition to PC. It’s also shipping with a full map and campaign editor allowing users to create lots of new content. If Wargroove can live up to the legacy of Advance Wars, this might be one of the surprise best games of the year.

Final Thoughts

Well, that’s it. Another E3 in the books. I’m glad I watched. There weren’t too many really exciting moments, but a lot of what I saw looked very solid and many of the most exciting games are coming this year. I thought 2016 was one of the best years for video games in my lifetime, but 2017 is shaping up to be nearly as good. Who knows, maybe it’ll be better?

Sure, getting excited about all this stuff plays right into the hype that the marketing departments at these companies want. On the flip side, most games are made by passionate and creative people who desire to make great and stimulating experiences. We saw that passion and emotion clearly at times through the developers themselves.

So E3 isn’t just about advertising products. It’s about the collective wonder and excitement shared by people who love games. That’s why we pay attention to it.