After an E3 that didn’t really set the gaming world on fire for the remainder of 2014, the 29 media outlets on the Game Critics Awards panel have announced the official best of E3 award winners. The big winner was Evolve which picked up four awards, including Best of Show. Hot on its heels was No Man’s Sky which won three awards, one of which is was best Indie Game.
By the way, don’t try to make sense of why some games won some big awards but missed out on other awards. Given that I keep hearing about these awards from Geoff Keighley, I’d imagine that some VGX-style consolation prizing is going on.
Every year, a group of gaming publications come together to vote on their favourite games at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3. While E3 awards don’t actually mean anything in reality, they’re hyped heavily in marketing games so the publishers obviously value them.
This year’s top nominated game was Evolve which picked up six nominations. Next with four nominations were Destiny and Rainbow Six: Seige. From a publisher’s perspective, it was a three-way tie between 2K, Warner Bros., and Ubisoft all on eight nominations.
While SteamOS and the Steam Controller have gotten a bit of interest from gamers and developers, the Steam Machines, Valve’s attempt at bringing Steam and PC gaming to the living room, haven’t exactly set the world on fire.
That may change with a new Steam Machine that was unveiled at E3. It’s definitely not your standard Steam Machine. The new SteamBoy is going to take your Steam experience out of the living room and on the road with this portable gaming device.
While we’ve heard plenty of good things about the PlayStation Now services and gotten a look at some of the games but one key component of PS Now that hadn’t been revealed during the closed beta was the pricing model. With the announcement of the PlayStation Now open beta starting on July 31st, Sony took the opportunity to reveal the prices of renting games on the service and it may not endear them to many gamers.
It’s not just the press conferences that have trailers. Developers and publishers have been steadily releasing trailers over the course of the week. Since we quite clearly didn’t get to all of them in our media briefing recaps, let’s try to make up for that with a few of the trailers we haven’t shown you on the blog yet.
In first showings on etg, we have trailers for Batman: Arkham Knight and Dead Island 2. A teaser trailer for the new Doom game was released with more info coming at QuakeCon. Gameplay trailers for EVE: Valkyrie and Mario Party 10 are included. And while we’ve shown you some trailers for them already, there are new trailers for Destiny, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Bloodborne already.
We’ll keep our eyes open for more trailers and include them in next Monday’s trailers roundup.
If you want to make a big wave in marketing your game at E3, you don’t take your game onto IGN or anyone else’s all-day E3 livestream or even make it a part of your media briefing. You take your in-development game to Conan O’Brien for a Clueless Gamer segment.
For his latest Clueless Gamer segment, Conan took at look at the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.
Now that you’ve read about the Ubisoft keynote briefing, it’s time to watch most of it. While I’ve only got the five most interesting trailers from Ubisoft’s E3 presser, those videos still cover 23 minutes of Ubisoft’s one-hour presentation. While Ubisoft might not have had a lot of games to show off this year, they certainly went into depth on the games they did show us.
If there’s one thing that Ubisoft is good at, it’s building hype around new IPs at E3. So it was only natural to hope for something new out of the French to steal the show at E3 once again.
The only problem was that all the delays over the last year meant that there seemed to be no room for Ubisoft to unveil new IPs at E3 this year. Instead, new games were the last thing on Ubi’s mind this year as they focused on established franchises and delayed games for this year’s E3. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear this was their 2013 E3 keynote on repeat.
When Yager came out of absolutely nowhere to throw the modern-military shooter genre on its head with the gripping story of Spec Ops: The Line, everyone was looking to see what they’d do next. Well, it turns out that they’re not going to do the next Spec Ops game.
For their next game, Yager has a new sci-fi game that they refer to as an “aerial armada action game” called Dreadnought.
Final Fantasy VII might not be getting the remastering/HD treatment any time soon and doesn’t seem to be joining the earlier FF entries on mobile platforms, that doesn’t mean that mobile gamers won’t be getting a piece of the FF7 pie.
Later this year, Square Enix will release Final Fantasy VII G-Bike as a free-to-play game with microtransactions for gamers on iOS and Android. It’s based on the Golden Square G Bike minigame that is itself based on the Midgar Highway escape from Shinra headquarters.
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