Bioware dug their grave a long time ago. It's about time for them to finally lie in it, and if I could I would piss on it.

That aside, mostly interested in Death Stranding getting some actual gameplay so we can see if it's really worth waiting for Kojima's Norman Reedus mpreg fanfic. Also interested in seeing what FromSoftware's "Shadows Die Twice" will actually be.

 

If Sony is smart they'll unveil a true next gen console (or something good enough to pass for one). Microsoft set itself up for a royal fucking if Sony can capitalize on it. The Xbox One came out not too long ago, and Microsoft decided to make a quick grab at market share with the Xbox One X, the big selling point being the 4k... But it's basically the same console.

If Sony comes out and announces a serious next gen system, even one releasing in say six months, there's very little Microsoft can do to compete. It's not like they can immediately come out with another new console.

And Sony IS smart, they've got a history of messing with Microsft at E3, like when the Xbox One price was announced and the audience went silent, and then Sony announced that the PS4 was $100 cheaper to thunderous applause.

Gamewise I'm looking forward to CD Projekt killing it with Cyberpunk 2077.
Hopefully some new info about From Software's new game.
More on Eitr, as info on it dried up real quick.
Some actual gameplay of The Last Night.
Death Stranding and all the weirdness that it entails. Oh, and the annual standing ovation for Kojima.

 

We might be getting some Pokemon information, I think. The two names for the next generation have supposedly leaked, already, from people keeping track of Nintendo copyrights and such. That and how -

"

So tomorrow an announcement on Pokemon's gonna be made, and then we're heading into E3 soon after?

 

I‘m not entirely discounting a move like this. As you said, Sony has a history with this sort of thing.

However, some of the more trustworthy German media outlets report regularly that we may have to wait until 2020 or 2021 for a PS5, which would (roughly) correspond to Sony‘s usual seven-year cycle. And they only released the PS4 Pro not too long ago, which should tide them over until the next generation even in the face of flailing sales and profits. There is also something to be said about keeping the rhythm for next-gen releases– releasing a truly new console now would only give Microsoft more ammunition down the line. Better to capitalise on the advantage then than throw everything but the kitchen sink at a relatively satisfied market now. Lastly, I am firmly convinced that something would have leaked by now. This is the age of social media, after all.

 

Exactly. PlayStation is very healthy right now, heck, God of War alone has revitalised any stagnation, if there actually was any, singlehandedly. There are so many pending releases that I don't see a new PS coming out until the end of 2020 at the earliest. I never understood why people are always so quick to try and get the new generation when it's at the end of a generation that you get the best games. When developers are familiar with the hardware and squeeze everything they can out of the box. It really doesn't make sense to have a new console announcement now. Sony can be reactive if they want to, they're the big dog this generation.

 

Last of Us 2 is apparently supposed to be teased in this venue. That's all I'm really looking forward to. Vaguely curious about Cyberpunk, I guess, and that mostly for the company.

 

Pretty substantiated rumours I know about:

• Sony announced what first party games they'll be showcasing. There will be third party announcements (OH PLEASE GOD BLOODBORNE 2) There were heavy rumours of Devil May Cry 5 supposedly pushed out of PSX for their E3 conference, and with them revealing Monster Hunter World last year, Capcom unveiling Devil May Cry seems likely.
  
• Fire Emblem Switch
• The Pokemon games will be remakes of Yellow, they'll be titled Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee - if you know anything about Pokemon, you know the significance of those titles (as if you're not gonna get the Eevee one you fucking liars). This, for me, is the best announcement Nintendo will have made in years. I'm a Kantoslut at heart.
• Metroid Prime 4
• Respawn's (Titanfall devs) Star Wars game.
• Pretty much confirmed we're getting a release date for Kingdom Hearts 3 (not that it matters, when SE are more than comfortable holding extravagant 'release date' parties and STILL delaying after that...)

You'll not be seeing PS5 for a long while. There's no point. Sony's games and consoles are still selling gangbusters, even with a more powerful one on the market. You'll only hear it rumoured when that starts to slow down - my guess is we'll hear of it in 2020, released later that year.

What I want? I'm dying to devour everything about Ghosts of Tsushima. I'm a massive fan of both Tenchu and Onimusha, I'm pouring all my unfulfilled desire for sequels to those franchises into this game - which is probably unfair. Just give me an open-world Tenchu and I'll pass out from all the blood in my body going to my nethers.

Now, for my WILD SPECULATION section:
I've been following the Spiderman game closely, obviously. The collector's edition comes with a statue that is only half revealed (the upper half, showing Spidey), leaving the lower half a mystery - they've said that showing it, in fact, will be a spoiler. My wild guess is that what's hidden is Spidergwen or the game's true villain, but Spidergwen would blow more minds so let's go with that...

My second wild theory is regarding Shadow's Die Twice. It was that mysterious trailer we saw at the Game Awards from FromSoft that we know absolutely nothing about. A lot of people are saying it's just Bloodborne 2... I'm unconvinced. I've a strange feeling that Phil Spencer two years ago may have hired From to make Xbox an exclusive, and Shadow's Die Twice is that (which would make me FURIOUS for inadvertently delaying BB2...). So my final theory is that From will reveal a game during Microsoft's conference.

Hey, with wild theories, go big or go home.

I'm super fucking excited for E3. Can't wait!

 

Respawn is making a Star Wars game?

I had to read up on that, the news passed me by completely.

Let‘s hope they‘re allowed to do what they want to do. Whether I‘m interested depends on the single player component, but we desperately need a good Star Wars game, even if it isn‘t to my personal tastes.

 

Single player games are significantly more expensive to make function as a "Live Service", and they literally killed Visceral over trying to produce a single player game, so we're highly unlikely to see that.

The game might still be good, but given EA and Respawn's track record, I'm not holding out very much hope.

 

Idk

It might take a few but Sony’s single players game this year look ready to kill.

I don’t have much faith in EA, but I’m hopeful other studios realize good single player games are still a huge market

God of War has already sold over 5 million copies.

 

Sadly, all of that is probably true. The thing with Visceral in particular. However, we are living in a post-Battlefront II world, where the major gripe many people had with the game aside from the *sigh* lootboxes was the hamfisted campaign. I’m not holding out great hopes either, but hey, weirder things have happened than EA listening to player (and, more importantly: customer) feedback and actually delivering on it beyond the painfully obvious.

I don‘t mind a multiplayer component, and if it is done and received well then that’s great. But on a personal basis, no or only a token single player would be a dealbreaker.

 

I'm hyped for the MK11 announcement

 

I genuinely loved Bioware when DA:O and ME1 came out. I truly thought they were the future of western rpg. How wrong I was...

 

Yep. Much of the following post is very much OT, but I feel like it needs to be said. I‘ll put it under a spoiler tag.

Spoiler

I can‘t quite recall whether DA:O or ME2 was my first BioWare game, but I loved both of them, even though I never finished DA:O. ME 2 in particular is still one of my all-time favourite games. ME3 was very good as well, and the Extended Cut filled a lot of the gaps regarding thevinfamous ending. I feel like the last exceptionally good piece of content BioWare released was the Citadel DLC. I laughed and cried with a frequency that still astounds me to this day. I even wrote a term paper about AI representation in the Mass Effect trilogy in March which was received very well.

DA:I was alright, I didn‘t love it, but I came back to it repeatedly without it feeling like a complete chore, even though the quest design and frequency were hilariously bad at points and the main storyline was somewhat contrived.

And then came Andromeda. It wasn’t as good as the heights of ME2, or even the base-game ME3, but it was good fun and I finished two playthroughs of ME:A relatively soon after it came out. The main storyline was lackluster and the quest design was even worse than in DA:I at times, but who cared about that in the face of a whole new galaxy to explore, right? Right?!

I took a break as the whole DLC drama unfolded and eventually I deleted it because of hard drive constraints (first-gen 500GB PS4, yay), before downloading it again in January. I played for an hour and gave up. The spark wasn‘t there. The driving around was exceptionally tedious, even the fights felt boring. The lack of additional content and influence on many elements of the story made it feel like I had seen everything I cared to see after only two playthroughs, which proved to be the game‘s undoing in my eyes.

You deserved better, Peebee & Drax. Oh, and all the non-Council alien races, I guess.

Back on topic, somewhat: I feel like the utter lack of relevant material we have seen from Anthem so far is not a good sign at all. Big series like Battlefield, CoD or even Assassin’s Creed get away with stuff like that, because the occasional change of setting or new multiplayer mode can‘t gloss over the fact that these games have pretty much been built up and perfected for the audience they want to reach (in the good ways and the bad) over the last fifteen years. I mean, look at the Anthem YouTube channel, FFS. Two videos, the newer one of which is from last year‘s E3.

Anthem needs hype. BioWare needs hype. I know the game has been pushed back to 2019, but it is a new IP and BioWare needs to rebuild a lot of trust with players, even if it isn‘t the BioWare that we used to love. The fact that none of that is happening makes me think that the game is either in development hell with nothing ready to be shown to the public or that EA has given up on BioWare even before its supposedly last chance has even seen the light of day, meaning that marketing will be as lackluster as it was with Andromeda, a shell crew will pump out a couple of updates post-release and then the BioWare name will be thrown into the dustbin of video game history.

Man, I miss the good old days.

 

Sony's been doing fantastically, in no small part thanks to their continual release of quality, single-player focused, non-micro-transaction driven games.

The problem is, they're a first-party publisher who need to sell consoles on top of games, so they (and nintendo, being real here) are ignored by the wider gaming industry in terms of trends and behavior. There's a reason we had the Year of the Lootbox last year, and the Year(s) of the Generic Open World Sandbox Game before that, and why this year will be the Year of the Live Services.

EA is one of the worst in that regard (Activision is the only one worse, except they have a vastly superior PR team), blindly chasing market trends and doing everything it bloody can to squeeze every single last drop of blood from their customer's wallet.

The odds of us seeing a single-player focused, narrative game from EA, Activision, and Ubisoft are slim to none, simply because it doesn't fit within their business directives of "make everything a 'live service' so we can delude ourselves into thinking we'll get infinite revenue".

Bethesda and maybe 2k are the only big publishers still in the business of making games rather than infinite money boxes, and given some of their recent releases, even that may not last all that long.

 

I was unaware that even AC:Origins had been monetised and had to look it up, but at least it still has a very good (or so I have heard) single player mode.

 

@Nevermind, ME2 and ME3 were a huge disappointment for me. ME1 was all about the player discovering the galaxy, being hot on the trail of a rogue operative a la 006, and finding about a dark plot to bring back powerful ancient AI. It had everything: rich lore, good character and scenario designs, fun and interesting sidequests, and an amazing ending with well-thought twists and decisions to make.

My first thought about ME2 was that it would expand on the universe. That we would visit new planets, meet new races, discover stronger, more terrible enemies. After all, a galaxy with billions of years of existence must hide all sort of secrets, right? Wrong. It was the Reapers again. But the problem went beyond that: the game was too closed in on itself. We hardly did anything new. While Omega and Tuchanka were interesting, there was a feeling there could be much more to do in there. More places to go, more things to do, more people to meet. The plot too was simplistic: gather your team, gain their trust, and do the final mission. Sincerely, It felt much more like a dating sim than anything else. And then comes the dlc, and you find out your mission doesn't really matter.

ME3 follows in the same vibe, the turian primarch even spells it out for you: find what you need and the war is over. And this time we find out our decisions don't matter.

My final conclusion was that the ME universe suffered from bad creative decisions (after all there were many staff changes along the way). They just couldn't come up with anything new.

DA at least doesn't have this problem. Their lore and creative team is solid. If you're looking for it, you'll find really interesting stuff regarding the world throughout all the three games. I actually think the gameplay improved along the way, but there were many decisions regarding appeal to a wider range of players that I still disagree with (the MMO vibe of later games for example and the unwillingness to align the protagonist with more controversial beliefs).

 

I'm mostly looking forward to the Nintendo (treehouse it's called these days right?) conference, in particular Smash, super hyped for that game and I want to see some footage. My friend and I have been wondering if they've used the 3DS/WiiU Smash game as a skeleton because the game is coming out so fast after the previous Smash.
Also, Pokémon and Fire Emblem, I'd like to know more of them.

For the rest of the conferences I'm looking forward to being surprised since I haven't followed anything game related closely the last year.

The thing I'll miss most however, will probaply be Totalbiscuit's (RIP) Snarkathon. That was always funny to watch the more cringy conferences with.

 

I may help you potentially trim your wishlist. P6 will be directed by Kazuhisa Wada aka the guy who directed Ultimate and DAN, because Hashino has a new studio now. So writing-wise it will almost assuredly be a bigger quality drop than 2 -> 3 was.


Going back to my own expectations. I see a lot of potential in playing battle royale drinking game, as that will probably be 70% or so titles announced.

Regarding Atlus, DSN and DMN translation is almost a given. They usually didn't show their stuff on the western conferences first, but with how big Persona 5 was (and with how big Catherine was in the west) I hope that we will get some new trailers for Catherine Fullbody at the very least. I don't think we will get new Persona spin-offs announced now, the November event is more probable. TMS#FE port on Switch is a probability too.

From the other things, TES6 is actually a possibility, and I fear that even with my complete lack of expectations in regards to modern Bethesda I may still be disappointed.
I also hope for a new BG&E2 trailer and info.

 

Sadness. Do we know what Hashino is working on?

Also, Bethesda is doing something new with Fallout

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2018/05/29/bethesda-tweets-apparent-fallout-teaser.aspx