Anobb Hyacinthe
Staff Writer
Summertime is usually the best time to enjoy fun activities and bury yourself in your favorite forms of entertainment. For most people, school is out, college classes slow down, or the vacation days saved up all year finally get spent. With this, many individuals use that time to get into their hobbies and personal passions, like diving into a new game. This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for short) pounded players with a plethora of new announcements, demos, and excitement to perfectly open up the summer. Hotly anticipated titles and surprise reveals left gamers and overall fans of entertainment with much to expect for the months to come and beyond.
When it comes to the expected games, many of the biggest updates were spread almost evenly across developers. With the absence of Sony (yes, we all know how sad this is), Microsoft easily took the cake as one of the more important of shows this year. Just at the Xbox Conference alone, we got a celebrity release date announcement from Keanu Reeves for CyberPunk 2077, a release date on Gears 5, and a tease of next gen hardware. Project Scarlett, Microsoft’s new console, has a confirmed release period for holiday 2020 and is expected to run at an insane 8k resolution and 120 frames per second, all powered on AMD’s new Navi architecture. Outside of these updates, Xbox takes the cake for the majority of the biggest reveals, including, Blair Witch, Tales of Arise, Miyazaki and R.R. Martin’s Elder Ring, and Ninja Theory’s Bleed Edge. Outside of the Xbox show came large reveals from Ubisoft (Watch Dogs Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad) and Electronic Arts (Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order).
Yet, out of the all of the conferences this year, the most hype came from the Square Enix show. Despite their lackluster appearance at last year’s E3, Square Enix sought to rock the convention with a full gameplay breakdown and demo of their Final Fantasy 7 remake. The company also announced the game’s release date, and the fact that the game would be released on two blu-ray disks. To leave off, Square Enix dropped a new trailer for the game, allowing players to see every one of its iconic characters come to life in the game’s new art style. Square Enix ended their show with the official reveal for their eagerly awaited Avengers project. The game was described as a third person co-op narrative that would be continually updated for years to come. The Avengers is slated to release in May of 2020.
One thing that could be considered a running theme for E3 would be indie games and classics. Across all presentations, some of the more iconic series that are returning are Battletoads, No More Heroes, Commander Keen, Contra, Resident Evil, and Destroy All Humans, half of which are coming to Nintendo Switch. Xbox hosted some beautiful indies, like 12 Minutes and Way to The Woods, yet Nintendo’s catalog brought the right mix of triple A titles and smaller, almost personal projects. Some of Nintendo’s offerings include, The Witcher 3, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Astral Chain, Empire of Sin, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, Animal Crossing New Horizons, Cadence of Hyrule, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. Nintendo also revealed a new Legend of Zelda and that Banjo Kazooie and Dragon Quest are coming to Super Smash Bros.
Between the shocking and exciting announcements to Devolver Digital’s intense and ultraviolent short-film that doubled as a showcase, Bethesda somehow reached the heart of E3 through it all. The publisher announced some updates to current titles, and charismatically revealed some new projects (Ghostwire and Deathloop). Yet the conference managed to strike beautiful chords by reminding the audience that admisdt the roaring crowds and hype for Doom: Eternal, we all play games to grow closer to each other and ourselves.
Opening the summer, E3 left its viewers and attendees with a lot to unpack. Even outside of the event, announcements like Google’s new cloud gaming platform, Stadia, and Destiny 2 going free to play on Steam will continue to make waves from the days going out. Many other reveals like The Division movie on Netflix and Ubisoft’s new show will leave us rummaging through the information gained just this week alone. If there is anything that we could leave E3 with, it’s that we have a lot of fun stuff to look forward to this summer and beyond.
hyacaj@mail.broward.edu
Photo courtesy of Martin Garcia/ESPAT Media/Getty