The Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles has wrapped up for another year, and we now have a much better idea of the blockbuster games coming our way from the world's biggest publishers. Here are 10 things that caught my eye during the expo.
Forza Horizon 3's Australian skies
While the racing game's visuals are pretty much breathtaking overall, it's the remarkable authenticity of the skies I found most striking. The reason: developer Playground Games didn't make the skies, it captured them in Australia using a custom-built 12K HDR camera rig. Every sky you see in the game is a real one that happened at some point, and comes with appropriate lighting and weather effects too.
Of course not everything in FH3 is so realistic (rather than being an actual slab of Australia for example, the game map is more of a mix-tape that jams together disparate landmarks like Apostle's Beach and Surfer's Paradise), but the overall feel is undeniably Aussie.
E3 trivia: Playground Games used custom 12K HDR camera rig to capture hundreds of Aussie skies for Forza Horizon 3. pic.twitter.com/OstmqX1ws6— Tim Biggs (@weeklyrift) June 19, 2016
God of War's anger rehab
When Sony opened its press briefing with the unveiling of a new God of War, I assumed this was a total reboot of the brutal monster-bashing franchise. Yet despite the massive change from Greek to Norse mythology, it turns out this new game is a direct sequel to GoW3.
Having left his old life behind, Kratos now finds himself a single father struggling to hide his god-destroying anger problem from his young son, in a tonal shift that may constitute the single most interesting character situation we've seen him in. Add a closer focus on storytelling, quests and opportunities for exploration and this certainly looks like a big change from the 'roided out series of old.
Sea of Thieves' booze flagon
Famed developer Rare still has a way to go in selling its online swashbuckler as a must play, but it got off to a good start by providing the most ear-to-ear grins of any game at E3. Players were grouped together near moored ships and set loose with no instructions, and most of them either immediately started playing a musical instrument or got exceedingly drunk.
Of course most eventually made their way onto the boat and worked together to get it out to sea, possibly coming across another group and loosing some cannons before desperately trying to keep from sinking, but it was the music and inebriated attempts to board the vessel that were most memorable.
Horizon: Zero Dawn's surprising depth
Primitive humans fighting robot dinosaurs is a pretty bulletproof premise for a game, but at E3 we saw there's a significant amount of complexity hiding beneath the surface, not just in the narrative (which is an intriguing take on religious dogmatism) but in the game mechanics too.
An open world game full of equippable gear and outfits, loot drops, resource management and quests, Horizon's aspirations as a fully-fledged RPG are now out on the table.
Watch Dogs 2's stunning San Francisco
While many felt betrayed by the original Watch Dogs — a game that showed incredibly well at E3 2012 before being visibly stripped back before its 2014 release — the sequel is doing its best to improve on every aspect of the game.
A new protagonist in a new city, Marcus Holloway hacks his way across an amazingly realised San Francisco, which as the home of US tech innovation is the perfect place for a game like this. In my short demo I hacked phones and did some recon with a drone in the hipster-filled downtown area by Coit Tower, before heading out to a much less affluent area in Oakland where Marcus got to show off his stealth skills to grab some hard drives during a gang war.
Tacoma's awesome AR nightmare
From the team that brought us Gone Home, Tacoma blends a nerdily realistic prediction of the near future with a very down-to-earth story about the crew of a centrifugal space station between Earth and the moon.
As an independent contractor sent to pick up the pieces after some sort of disaster, your view of the station is augmented by computer information stored by the station's AI, including the crew's personal communications and all of their movement data. The result is a kind of interactive stage play you can move around in, but during the demo it was made clear that all is not what it seems. One question that kept occurring to me was: given the unclear interests of the data's corporate owners and the AI itself, could I trust that the computerised representations of events were being shown faithfully?
Gears of War 4's new threat
The new cover-based shooter plays almost identically to previous entries in the series, but that's absolutely not a bad thing. Taking place 25 years after Gears 3 and with a new set of heroes, the roadie-running and active-reloading was so familiar it felt almost like second nature, but this is not the Locust-filled world of Sera you remember.
Humans are disappearing at the hands of huge creatures called snatchers, and early in the demo I found out what had become of them, shooting open a fleshy pink sack to find a person that had been partially mutated into one of the game's new enemies. While the familiarity of the Locust meant the last few games had drifted from the tense, surprising scenarios of the original, Gears 4 looks to be bringing the horror back.
Days Gone's plague-like enemies
Set two years after a pandemic converted most of the world's population into something other than human (don't call them zombies), Days Gone was mostly notable for one thing at E3: that demo that showed main character Deacon running from a massive number of former people as they poured through windows and clambered over one another like a plague of mice.
The open world game will apparently follow Deacon, a former biker, as he tries to get by as a bounty hunter in as world devastated by the loss of productive humans. Members of the development team at Sony Bend were keen to point out that even the survivors don't understand what happened to cause the disease or what the people have become, and this will form a big part of the narrative.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's game-changing reimagining
It was the only game Nintendo brought to E3 2016, but Breath of the Wild dominated a lot of the talk on the show floor as attendees waited all day to get into the Disneyland-like Zelda booth and experience it for themselves. We had expected a new Zelda to be revealed, but we hadn't expected Nintendo to more or less go back to the drawing board to reinvent the 30-year-old franchise.
Looking like a gorgeous Japanese animated film and taking place in a completely open world, the game challenges Link to survive in a wild world filled with dangers. Much more of an RPG than we've ever seen from Zelda before, you'll be exploring the landscapes to collect everything you need to procure and maintain your weapons, cook your food, mix your potions and keep yourself warm and protected.
Batman: Arkham VR's detective work
Sony's PlayStation VR will get some big name support after it launches this October, but Barman: Arkham VR was probably the most surprising announcement in the lineup. The game will be around a 60-minute experience that can be played through multiple times, and will forego the usual fisticuffs of the Arkham game to focus on gadgets and detective work.
The E3 demo put you in the cufflinks of Bruce Wayne as he strolled his opulent mansion, before having you descend to the Bat Cave and don the famous black cowl. As with many other first-person VR games, you control the batman's hands and head with your own, examining and grabbing to uncover clues and progress the story. Finally
Others that stood out:
- We Happy Few, for an amazingly disturbing demonstration of its British dystopia. Many had doubted the game based on previous demos but it's hard to deny the fact that something very interesting is going on here.
- Halo Wars 2, for following up the most successful console real-time-strategy game ever with a sequel that looks to appeal to people on both sides of the fence. The game will be coming to both PC and Xbox One, and its range of multiplayer modes offer something for the extremely hardcore as well as those who just want to jump in for some action.
- Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1, both of which are looking to shake off modern shooter fatigue with new directions. The former wowed with a reveal that showed off robot combat and some zero-G shooting in space, while the latter is going back to World War 1, complete with tanks, horses and biplanes.
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which is going back to its roots as a horror game while also pushing forward by making the entire game playable on PlayStation VR.
- Skylanders Imaginators. As usual it looks like the most fun Skylanders adventure yet, but the reason it stood out this year is because of the PS4 version's inclusion of Crash Bandicoot. The character, long dormant thanks some publishing deal conflicts, is also returning to screens soon in HD remakes of his first three games.
The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Microsoft.
