The E3 Bulletin: Friday
Assassins! Anthem! The end!
This is our final update from E3 week. Read the previous ones: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday
It's over. After seven full days that felt like three full weeks, E3 has drawn to a close and the hordes have deserted the LA Convention Center, to inspect their coverage reports, traffic figures or gigantic Final Fantasy-branded sacks full of merch.
Thus ends the first (hah) E3 that was open to the public! The Eurogamer verdict: the conferences are killing the show. The industry's verdict: the crowds are killing us. The public's verdict: s'ok. Overall 7/10, look forward to them addressing the faults in the sequel. That's been confirmed for next year, or has possibly already started, although the ESA is floating the idea of leaving LA in 2020. This once again offers the fleeting hope of moving it to Vegas, which has better infrastructure and more thematically appropriate commitment to fantasy, but it's probably just another example of smack talk to get some more upgrades to the LACC.
What news from the final day? The XCOM DLC was almost XCOM 3. The Xbox Game Pass subscription will give you at least five games a month and they won't expire until at least late November, which is nice, although the prospect of having to rush through a last-minute binge Netflix-style seems like it could be a health risk. Super Mario Odyssey lets you become a hat, which is actually the least outlandish thing we've heard from Nintendo all show.
Assassin's Creed has benefited from its year off, and now features RPG elements and enemies who don't just wait to fight you like shoppers at a cheese counter. Bioware's Anthem demo has been declared glitchy enough to be legit by Digital Foundry. Destiny 2's DK performance is sufficiently impressive that the cinematics look worse than the playable sections, which feels new and strange and unsettling, and Reggie knows you want cloud saves and Virtual Console on Switch but isn't promising to do anything about it, which does not.
Ni No Kuni 2 has multiplayer, for some reason. Shadow of War is always on ironman mode. Bethesda Creator's Club is a sort of outsourced DLC initiative that will live alongside the existing mod community, which will definitely welcome and cherish it.
In hubris news, Kazunori Yamauchi has no idea what any other racing studio is doing but is very confident that he's better than all of them, which seems like entirely standard Polyphony behaviour. Devolver is having a fight with the city of Los Angeles, which seems like entirely standard Devolver behaviour. Aaron Greenberg has described the Xbox One X's power level as "almost unfair" which seems like standard Don Mattrick-era behaviour and thus is probably a bad idea.
Phil Spencer seems to be sincerely upset at Sony's reason for not enabling Minecraft cross-play, which appears to be this year's main controversy and just goes to show that we're in a mid-generation lull because the scandals a few years back were much more spectacular. Microsoft is losing money on Xbox One X even at £449. Avatars are not dead, and Harvest Moon on Switch is pretty much what you're expecting.
Telltale is working on a new IP with a focus on streaming, which presumably won't be entirely glitch-focused. Meanwhile, the show's producers are working on multiple VR games based on the Walking Dead. Because zombie games are going to be what puts that format on the map, obviously. You can watch dogs having sex in Far Cry 5, while wearing a wingsuit if that's what you're into.
Beyond the show, Konami is still paying Kojima and still finding new ways to make people dislike it, while Rockstar is assuring people that it's not trying to kill GTA 5 mods. And over on Facebook, the most-discussed and most-watched games have been FIFA and GTA Online, just in case you thought any of this was mainstream.
That's it for this year's show: we'll almost certainly be back next year although we'd really like it if it could be a few less days and a less punishing time difference, thanks. You can find every bit of coverage we've done on our E3 2017 hub.