Gaming/Features

Once the biggest gaming event of the year, E3 has lost some of it’s corporate gusto. But maybe smaller and humbler is actually better?

Gorgeous summer weather can only mean one thing—time to stay indoors and watch hours of video game trailers during E3, the international, make-or-break gaming launchpad convention usually held in person each year in Los Angeles. Often a noxious, overly corporate and hype-saturated affair, E3 felt more interesting than ever this year—largely due to all the competition out there with knives drawn.

E3 has long been a must-attend showcase for the largest games and devices. It’s the event where Nintendo, Sony and Xbox traditionally unveil their biggest plans. If there’s a new Halo or Mario en route, this is when you’d hear about it—or, it used to be. But, over time, other conferences and conventions have swiped the thunder from the expo while major parties have taken to skipping it entirely. And then there was COVID, pushing the entire event online.

Geoff Keighley, a former TV host and Game Awards founder, had a public falling out with E3 last summer and used the livestream after livestream structure to crash the party with his own concurrent streams. Keighley’s competing presentations, from the likes of Double Fine, the Tribeca Film Festival and live performances from Weezer and Japanese Breakfast, rounded out the usual presentations from giant publishers like Microsoft, Capcom and Ubisoft.

Panic and Teenage Engineering, the teams behind Playdate, the handheld monochromatic gaming device with a crank, kicked E3 off by unveiling its game lineup. New games include new work from Katamari creator Keita Takahashi, Getting Over It’s Bennett Foddy and Papers, Please’s Lucas Pope. They also announced that there will be a Playdate speaker dock and pen. A regular pen.

A Wholesome Games stream highlighted violence-averse titles, many focusing on gardening, cooking, pets, photography and all manner of puzzle-solving games. Standouts include Hyper Light Drifter co-creator Teddy Dief’s fictional pop band journal We Are OFK, queer witchcraft gem puzzle game Spirit Swap and SkateBIRD (exactly what it sounds like).

E3 still had plenty big stuff. Battlefield is leapfrogging from its 2018 WWII entry to the near future with Battlefield 2042, where the climate crisis has sparked a war between refugee coalitions and remaining nations. Climate change, apparently, will regularly drop tornadoes on these military skirmishes as well.

Xbox unveiled the gorgeous Forza Horizon 5, which will send drivers racing across the landscapes of Mexico this November. Meanwhile, Fallout and Skyrim publishers Bethesda gave us another peek at Starfield. While it showed little, Todd Howard described the project as “NASA meets Indiana Jones.”

One of the most anticipated games of all was Elden Ring. The collaboration between Dark Souls studio FromSoftware and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin envisions a dark fantasy realm filled with withered lords and mangled beasts, with heavy inspiration drawn from the recently deceased Kentaro Miura’s Berserk series. The game is slated for January, providing there exist deadlines Martin can meet.

There were also big surprises. Despite their Avengers game infamously landing on its face, Eidos-Montréal has returned to the Marvel bullpen for a more promising-looking game based on the Guardians of the Galaxy.

This original adventure will see Star Lord, Gamora, Drax, Groot and Rocket Raccoon butting heads with comic space weirdos like Lady Hellbender and the bumbling Blood Brothers.

Many games call themselves Lynchian, but Her Story maker Sam Barlow’s new project could really be. Barlow has assembled a team of notable screenwriters, including Wild at Heart and Lost Highway writer Barry Gifford, for Immortality, a mystery about an actress’s disappearance that could be solved through footage found in three previously lost films.

E3’s strangest debut was Ninja Theory’s Stranger of Paradise, supposedly a prequel to the original Final Fantasy, that follows three loud, plain-clothed tough guys looking to slaughter someone named “Chaos.”

The most promising game comes from Dishonored studio Arkane, in the form of a four-player monster mash called Redfall. Layla, Dev, Remi and Jacob are unlikely heroes who find themselves with new-found supernatural powers. Trapped in a small town overrun by vampires, they’ll have to scrap their way through the hordes of bloodsuckers without enjoying themselves too much.

No one holds court like Nintendo. We got glimpses of new Metroid, WarioWare, Super Monkey Ball, Shin Megami Tensei and even Advance Wars titles for the Switch, but all were overshadowed by the new Legend of Zelda title, Breath of the Wild 2.

Fans have wondered which direction the new Zelda will take after Link’s last expansive adventure. The answer appears to be… up. Calamity Ganon’s curse has hoisted Hyrule Castle and chunks of the kingdom into the sky, forcing Link (now sporting longer hair like many of us post-COVID) to glide, fall and warp through this strange terrain.

A humbled E3 has made room for a breath of air. This year, the same parade of Halo Infinite’s multiplayer features was shared by the likes of The Gecko Gods, where a precious tiny lizard solves puzzles by pulling levers and pulleys with its itty-bitty mouth. Here’s hoping these trends are carried over when summer game events return to the real world.