Julius

I think it stands a good chance of releasing by 2020 - at the latest. Despite having seen more gameplay from The Last of Us Part II, I think Kojima is having a field day with misleading our expectations, and that this game will release before TLOUII: everything that we know about the game up to this point, outside of trailers, points to it being much further along than we currently think it is. I also think that there's a very good chance that some of the amazing folks over at Guerrilla Games have been working alongside Kojima Productions on this game, and that's why it could be so far along. I remain an optimist Also...

Maybe they've changed it since, but the last time I checked in on this, wasn't the wording saying that there would be a focus on 2018 games? In much the same way that last year's Spotlight had a focus on 2017 games? I haven't read anything to suggest that they are talking exclusively about 2018 games this evening is what I'm saying. But hey, could just be me reading into it a little too much Though, I do think that this... ...is more a case of attempting to subvert/manage expectations, as opposed to suggesting that there will be nothing of merit besides what is already expected (Smash, Fire Emblem, Yoshi, etc.). Nintendo currently have a window of four months between first-party releases on the Switch from Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker in July to Pokémon Let's Go! in November, and have had a relatively quiet year up to this point, so I do expect to see more than we already know about tonight. And besides first-party exclusives for the Switch, I expect a relatively strong third-party showing, even if the bulk of it is a number of Japanese studios. Whether that be new titles or rereleases of older ones, I do expect them - Square Enix especially, after having shown nothing for the Switch in their conference yesterday (yes, we have Octopath Traveller coming in July, but I think they've had some other stuff in the works for the console too) - to have a greater presence than they did last year.

I think it's them continuing what they did last year. The last four months of 2018 are nearly saturated from a gamer's perspective - way I see it, there's already a few games for every type of gamer coming this autumn/winter - and that's without having seen what Nintendo's bringing to the table this evening I think the smart move is to continue what they've been doing up to this point. They waited on revealing God of War's release date until January, iirc, which was the smart move because Q1 2018 was already pretty full, and I think that they didn't want to pit one of their tentpole titles against another AAA title: they want all eyes on their biggest games (i.e. potential system sellers, which I think all of their deep dive games are) when they launch. Q1 2019 is already filling up nice and fast, and I don't think that they want to be part of the frenzy again this time around. The smarter move, I think, would be to wait out like they have been, and navigate the sea of release dates to find one suitable to their title. I don't think that all three of those other games will release next year, because there's really no reason for them to do that at this stage, but I do think that we could get at least one of them, maybe even two of them, in 2019. Plus, they reacted to the backlash of last year's E3 by starving PSX, so I wouldn't be surprised if those release dates have been saved until the end of the year - when they'll know what everyone else is doing - in a reaction to how the last PSX was received. Really weird that they didn't put a release date on it yet, but that got me wondering: would a game like Dreams really stand to benefit much from a typical marketing campaign? Because I don't think that it necessarily would: the game does fill something of a niche, and those who are interested in it have been paying attention this whole time. It also doesn't seem like your typical £60 RRP affair (my guess would be £20 - £35), nor does it really need a physical release (at least at launch), just considering the type of game that this is. I love physical copies of games, but I don't think that anyone will be clamouring for a physical copy over a digital copy, just given the type of game that this is. I think we'll see more at Gamescom in August, and potentially a bit more at PGW or PSX, but I do think that, of all of their games, this would be a great game - and the best suited - to shadow drop at PSX (beginning of December is looking pretty quiet if I recall, right?).

Love that we're finally getting into some lore for the game. You're right: the engine is just superb. Still have very little idea as to what's going on, but I'd want it no other way

Blew me away. The animations are on a whole other level!

Love it. Green Goblin at the end, riiiiiiiiiight? EDIT: or Venom? Or Doctor Octopus? Actually, I think it probably is Doctor Octopus. There’s definitely a mechanical noise, and I suppose the reveal of Otto Octavius as Doc Ock would be just as surprising for Peter as a Norman/Green Goblin reveal would be?

I didn't expect it to look this good! The colour palette really lends itself to being a game set hundreds of years ago, and the particle effect look superb. Just insane. The leaves man! I also love the linear/side-view samurai stand-offs, and the sound effect for unsheathing your katana is incredible. Hoping for a release window come Paris Games Week/PSX

I don’t know if hype can be sustained as a diet for that long...

Uh, I think you mean...

Dude. The Nintendo and Ubisoft love story continues. That was a superb reveal!

Looks as epic as I thought it would. And you’ve gotta love how they handle PR and game development compared to everyone else, and it makes them stand out as one of the best studios out there. They’re scheduled to turn up on YouTube Live @ E3 tomorrow to talk to Geoff Keighley about the game, and they’ve teased that we’ll still hear/see plenty more at this E3. Behind-closed-doors demos as rumoured a while back are expected, but I won’t be at all surprised if we get the first public look at gameplay when they talk to Geoff tomorrow. Killer soundtrack, excellent cyberpunk design ethos...it’s a great time to be a gamer! I have a feeling it’ll be coming in late 2019/early 2020 now, seeing as we didn’t get a release date last night, but I don’t mind. Incredibly smart in making it clear that the game’s development is coming above their bottomline, and that the game is still a while off, and will be ready when it’s ready. Roll on our next look at the game!

I haven’t played any of the Soulsborne games yet, and though I do plan on playing them, the games have never appealed to me with the aesthetic and tone that I’ve seen from their gameplay and trailers. The challenge sounds appealing, and I hear great things about them, but they never leapt out to me as a game that I would rush out to play. They’re a while down my bucket list of games, that’s for sure. However, this seems right up my alley. For one, I’m not being lost in a sea of dark blacks and blues (though they’re great for tone, they aren’t the easiest of coloursto traverse when it comes to gameplay), but just the era it’s set in and the themes that could potentially come with that really excite me. Shocked just like everyone else that Activision is publishing this, but hey, I get it: they want a piece of the action too. I think I’ll hold off on purchasing the other games for now and make this my first From game

Is it too early to be calling February 2019 the new September 2018? Seriously, we already have three or four AAA titles dropping that month...

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

It belongs on this stage. Xbox went from 360 back to One Really strong start to the conference.

Nah, it was just a world premiere. Really weird that Activision are publishing, but at this point with From it's guaranteed money, so why not?

AHHHHHH WHAT IS HAPPENING?! Where have all of these medieval Japanese games come from?! Seriously. Massive get for Xbox. MASSIVE.

HOLY. SMOKES. 50 games -- 18 exclusives -- 15 world premieres?! If I'm not saving for an Xbox by the end of this...

Okay, I wasn't planning on watching this...but what a great start. I'm sticking around for now

I think the next generation is still a few years off, so I don't think that it would be held off until then, just considering the sudden surge this year in activity. That being said, I do, however, think that this game will look ridiculously good, and will probably be one of the first games to be remastered for the next generation, so in a way I agree with what you're saying. It's not impossible for it to be out by the end of the year, given the clout and goodwill they have with their audience after The Witcher 3 especially meaning that it could drop a few weeks after Red Dead Redemption 2 in November and still perform well in sales, but, if not, I think it'll be out by Easter of next year at the latest -- if we do see it tonight.

I think Doom 2 and DLC for both The Evil Within 2 and Prey are within the realms of possibility, but other than that, there doesn't seem to be much in besides Starfield, which makes me think that it's going to be the centrepiece of their show, with anywhere between a 15 minute and 30 minute showing. I have to figure that that's why they revealed two of their new games well ahead of E3 this year. I'm very confident that it will be present. Based on past precedent and the sudden surge in activity around the game since the beginning of the year, I honestly don't know when or where else it could actually turn up. They aren't going to announce it out of the blue themselves; visual fidelity means a lot to them, so there's no reason that they'd show it off on Sony's stage as opposed to Microsoft's (plus, I'd assume that Microsoft would offer more for them to be present on their stage at this point in the generation; and they were on their stage to show off The Witcher 3 a few years back); and so there's no other place it could really turn up this year besides at E3, where they can rub shoulders once again with the very best in the industry, and have the largest outreach possible. Oh, and throw in all of the cryptic teasing by their higher-ups too. So yeah: I will be very surprised if I check the news tomorrow morning and news on Cyberpunk 2077 is absent

I thought that it might be, but wasn’t sure, and I really couldn’t tell by the way that they were phrasing it during their little “announcement” Thanks though, I’ll update the thread title! Something that now worries me with the movement of the colon is that they’re trying to make this a new sub-brand, and I don’t really like it. Battlefront is a great sub-brand name in that it encapsulates everything that the brand is in one word, but this sounds almost ludicrously vague when compared to other sub-brand titles in the franchise - cool, I play as a Jedi, but what else? I can already imagine the names of the sequel - New Order, Luke’s attempt at rebuilding the Jedi Order, but through the eyes of one of his pupils whom goes on to become a Knight of Ren - and the threequel - Resurgent Order, Rey’s attempt to rebuild the Jedi as they once were, prior to the Order that found itself based on Coruscant. It could be really neat, and I’d love to see Coruscant in this like we were supposed to see it in 1313, but it’s once again a case of minimal risks being taken (unless there are tie-ins to IX, but I feel like they’d only be winks and nods) from my perspective. We have plenty of canon comics and novels, an animated TV series, and two spin-off films already set in this very time period. We’ve already seen the aftermath of the Jedi Purge in this period - lost hope, Jedi scattered, and Vader chasing them. It could be really cool if we were take the role of Vader to hunt down some of the remaining Jedi, and see tie-ins to other canon materials, but that’s almost certainly not going to be the case. Because here’s how I see it: We assume the role of a Jedi with PTSD and flashbacks to that night on Coruscant when all of his/her youngling friends were slaughtered. He’s become a smuggler or something, and he’s given up on the Force after all that’s happened. We’ll run into Vader or the Grand Inquisitor, and this will get the ball rolling in terms of running around the galaxy. We’ll run into one too many major characters for it to feel like it isn’t a mash-up piece of fan fiction. It will be extremely linear - given the period in question, I feel it has to be - and can only realistically end in a couple of ways: death at the hands of Vader/an Inquisitor, or we end up somehow surviving all of this and we flashforward to meeting some combination of Luke, Ezra, Sabine and Ashoka in the thirty years between ROTJ and TFA. I just don’t see what they can do in this era which we haven’t already seen in other pieces of canon. It doesn’t feel new, even if it does sound like it has the potential to be exciting - but since when has controlling a Jedi not been exciting? This is EA we’re talking about — they have to fulfill their fiduciary duty of messing up a Star Wars game somehow.

No problem And visually, I think it looks superb. I have a feeling it’s going to really push some more gamers (maybe even myself) to make the upgrade to a Pro/X, because I do have some concerns about how it might run on the base PS4 and XBO models. And no kidding about the numbers (did I also see like a dozen ‘COMBO’s come up at one point?), which seem far larger than they need to be. I actually think that they might be large enough at this point to negate the player’s ability to aim at the enemy, so it might be something worth looking into for them. The size and font of the numbers (and words?), at least from the few minutes I saw, seemed very arcade-like, which is in stark contrast to the tone that they seem to actually be going for oh well, plenty of time left for them to figure out those little kinks.

Coming February 22nd. Wonder if Sony will move Days Gone? I mean, they’re drastically different games so I don’t think it will effect it too much, but I can’t see Sony having delayed this game so many times only to send it out to die. Full gameplay demo and trailer: Game Informer has some exclusive coverage coming up. They also have interviews with Casey Hudson and some of the other members of the team. They also have a forty minute video with exclusive impressions of Anthem from their visit to Bioware.

I probably caught about fifteen or twenty minutes of that after skimming through for what I thought were the interesting parts (FIFA acquiring the rights to the UCL, Jedi Fallen Order, Unravel Two being shadow dropped, and some of the Anthem stuff...). Was the rest of it as boring as I found these 15/20 minutes? Don’t know I particularly want to sit through the entire thing when catching up if so..