So, for those of you who don't know: the Electronic Entertainment Expo is a yearly convention held in Los Angeles that is pretty much the biggest single event in gaming. All three platform makers and most major publishers have a press conference where they announce their new games and talk smack about each other. Then there's the show floor, where developers give demos to the press of all these shiny new games, give interviews, all that good stuff. Occasionally a guy with an extremely fake tan talks in absolutely absurd marketing speak about games for tween girls for about 20 minutes, it's great. Anyway, it's going on pretty much all next week, so this is the thread to talk about all the crazy shit that's going down!
First, some stuff that got announced before the show:
Harmonix finally announced Rock Band 3, a game pretty much everyone knew existed already. It's got a keyboard peripheral, a crazy new guitar controller, a pro mode that's supposed to actually teach you music, and a whole bunch of other crazy shit
Activision announced Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, because it's Activision and everything is annual whether you want it or not. It's got... a story-based 'quest mode' narrated by Gene Simmons. Yeah. They also announced DJ Hero 2, but honestly, who the fuck cares?
Sega is doing what they do best and milking nostalgia from the era when they actually made
good video games through releasing a bunch of their old Dreamcast games through downloadable services. Sonic Adventure and Crazy Taxi are the only two announced so far, but you can fucking bet Sega will ride this train as far as it will go.
WB announced a new Mortal Kombat reboot (simply titled Mortal Kombat), and it actually
doesn't look like garbage. If you're one of the few thousand people on Earth who cares about non-Capcom fighting games, then that's cool I guess.
Atlus is continuing their quirky indie publishing deals and putting out the sequel to last year's Lost-Vikings-esque platformer Trine, as well as the next game from Ace Team, aka the dudes who made Zeno Clash. It's called "Rock of Ages", so I can only assume that it's a 4 player Def Leppard simulator. I call the one-armed drummer in advance. But more importantly, they're bringing Etrian Odyssey 3 to the US, so I get another brutally hard dungeon crawler with bitchin' Yuzo Koshiro music. I'm pretty happy about that.
Square-Enix announced a 4-player sidescrolling action game with goofy character designs and an even goofier title,
Necromachina. It looks pretty much like co-op Strider, so I'm down.
Square-Enix
also announced Dungeon Siege 3, which is being developed by Obsidian. It's... not exactly what Obsidian typically makes, but hey. They're continuing to get work, so I'm OK with that.
Some stupid Kingdom Hearts PSP game is coming to the US, I guess. Kingdom Hearts sucks and you're a bad person if you like it.
2K finally gave Civilization 5 a proper release date: it's coming out September 24th. Sorry for everyone who believed that September 1st date was anything more than a placeholder, but you only have to wait another 3 weeks.
THQ announced
Red Faction: Armageddon, where you will play as the grandson of the main characters from Guerrilla. It takes place back underground this time, and apparently miners fuck up and release some aliens that were dormant in the depths of Mars. Getting a very strong Aliens vibe from that trailer, it could be cool.
Sony announced Killzone 3, and it will utilize the advanced 3D technology that .01% of the market has the TVs to support! Way to use that 70 million dollar budget on things that create a better user experience, dudes.
They also announced Infamous 2, so more electric superhero open world shenanigans coming soon. We'll see if Activision announces a Prototype sequel that will come out a month apart so they can be constantly compared to each other again.
Twisted Pixel announced that their new game Comic Jumper will come with DLC for their last game, the excellent but frustrating 'Splosion Man, packed in for free. Pretty nice bonus for their existing fans.
And finally, games that we don't know anything new about (yet) but have new trailers that I'm going to dump in here anyway:
Deus Ex 3,
Vanquish (what),
Crysis 2 (whaaaaat), and
X-COM.
OK, so now what we can expect to see:
Release dates and game lineups for both Project Natal (rumored to be renamed to the Wave) and Playstation Move. Blatant ripoffs of Nintendo's innovation or actually making good on motion controls in actual games? You decide!
Official unveiling of the 3DS, possibly a release date for that as well. Maybe some Nintendo launch games, maybe only tech demos, it's impossible to say.
Probably an official announcement of the Wii Zelda game that has been acknowledged at Nintendo as being in development since forever ago.
Something crazy from Valve. They canceled their Portal-themed event but said that something will be replacing it. Portal 2's been pushed back to absolutely no one's surprise and Newell said that card thing with the stealth G-Man face was fake, so who the fuck knows? It'll probably be pretty good though!
An announcement of the multiplatform Insomniac game from EA. It was a big deal for both of them a few weeks ago so I'm sure they'll talk more about it at E3.
For that matter, I'd expect to hear more about the Activision-Bungie partnership too. I think Activision only announced that before the show in the first place because their stock price was tanking after all the Infinity Ward shit blew up.
A release date and hopefully more details about Fallout: New Vegas. It's still apparently on track for this fall, so if it doesn't get a firm date by E3 that's officially time to start worrying.
And finally, for the leaks and/or rumors:
If Gamespot's floor plan of the convention center is to be believed, EA will be announcing both Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2 at the show. Hardly a stretch, since both of those games are more or less open secrets anyway, but hey. If they're really announcing ME3 already, maybe they'll finally clear up exactly what those job listings for multiplayer designers were all about.
All kinds of crazy rumors about the 3DS hardware specs. Does it have a tilt sensor? Does it have an analog stick? Depending on who you believe, the processing power is either around the same level as the Gamecube or 'just below the 360 and PS3'. If the latter is true, it marks a huge shift from Nintendo's usual policy of releasing low-cost hardware for cheap and making a profit right away instead of eating losses up front like MS and Sony do.
Speaking of which, since Sony is finally pulling a 'rats fleeing the sinking ship' on the PSP hardware and giving a ton of free games to anyone who will take the hardware off their hands, it's rumored that they're preparing to announce a PSP2 as counterprogramming to the 3DS. However, since the PSP Go failed so spectacularly I'm wondering if that put the kibosh on their plans to make a digital-only follow up.
Gametrailers TV is running their traditional pre-E3 special tonight at 11 o'clock on Spike and they promise several 'exclusive' reveals. They specifically mention one of gaming's legends 'finally' announcing his project, which I'm betting is the Ken Levine project that has been mired in shadow for years.
Sony is supposedly going to unveil an entire 3D initiative that nobody will care about. What other games will support it beyond Killzone 3 are anyone's guess.
Rumors of an Uncharted 3 announcement are pretty persistent as well. Considering Sony kind of blew their first-party game load early in the year, it wouldn't surprise me.
Also, a Resistance 3 billboard showed up on a movie set forever ago, so it'd be pretty surprising if Sony didn't have anything to say about it now. This will hopefully be the show where they finally get Team Ico to say something about Last Guardian as well, although people thought that about E3 last year and all we got was a rehashed version of the same trailer they announced it with.
This is even more tenuous than most of the rumors here, but I've seen a couple people on message boards talking about having an 'inside source' telling them of a Persona 5 announcement. It seems out of character for Atlus to announce a SMT game at an American show, but the series (and especially Persona) is getting more popular over here all the time so I guess it's not out of the question.
Thaaaat's just about all I can think of from a quick scan of the blogs. Anybody have other news or rumors that I forgot about? Anything you'd like to see happen, big or small? There'll be more to actually discuss once the show starts, but I figured it'd be fun to speculate for a bit before the actual conference starts rolling.
