The most hotly-anticipated event in the video gaming world has come and gone for the twentieth time, leaving in its wake a gaggle of fan-boy adoration, critique and hope for the next year of gaming, touted as to be one of the best seen in years. If you haven’t been up to date on the events, announcements and showcases that made up the Electronic Arts Expo (E3) however, don’t worry; here were the best bits of the trade fair!
In terms of huge, ground-breaking releases, E3 was truly a sight to behold! We had DICE’s beautiful-looking Star Wars: Battlefront, where both thrilling co-op and multiplayer game modes were shown in breathtaking detail, and Rainbow 6: The Siege, where players will be given a hearty dose of strategy at a time when many shooter fans are growing tired with the over-the-top, arcade-y approach driven by titles such as Call of Duty.
Then there was the announcement that RPG fans would soon be able to play through a twenty-first-century remake of the utterly popular Final Fantasy 7, plus a remake of the much-derided, but critically-appraised Doom. There was a lot of this sort of nostalgic leaning at E3 2015, with Sony bringing back The Last Guardian (produced by the makers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) and kicking off a Kickstarter campaign for Shenmue 3, that despite the exciting prospect, did make one wonder why a tech giant was asking for funding from the public-at-large. Perhaps this is the moment that crowd-funding went corporate?
There wasn’t much shown from the online casino gaming world, a glaring omission given the utter, ever-growing popularity of sites such as Royal Vegas Casino. These sorts of sites, where players are afforded access to virtual versions of casino games, are booming worldwide, with the industry as a whole set to be worth nearly $60 billion by 2018. As such, it’s hard to see why such developers have yet to be invited to E3. Nevertheless, fans of casino thrills will have to wait until the iGaming Super Show later this month in Amsterdam to find out the new developments within this skyrocketing gaming sub-industry.
Fallout 4 was, for many, the highlight of the show. Fans of the series have been waiting for years for RPG-extraordinaire Bethesda to create a new iteration of the utterly popular post-apocalyptic franchise, but were treated with a gloriously long trailer and gameplay reveal that did much to reignite the hype!
Sci-Fi fans were also bestowed with a healthy crop of releases. Mass Effect: Andromeda looked set to continue our love affair with all things alien; Star Fox Zero – unfortunately one of the few Nintendo showcases at E3; and the still-hazy No Man’s Sky, which seems to appear more and more gorgeous every time we ravenously lap up another shred of gameplay footage!
The future of gaming was also spelled out at E3 in two letters – V.R. Facebook’s Oculus, Sony’s Morpheus and Microsoft’s HoloLens were all present, showing the gaming public that gaming is about to get all the more immersive. HoloLens was perhaps the most promising though; instead of taking gamers out of the real world it aims to project the game on to the real world, something that might satiate the fears of those who fear the escapist nature of other headsets.
So with one whole year to wait until E3 2016, what parts of this year’s show did you like most? Let us know your thoughts below!