E3 this week

Like every year, the start of June is when E3 is happening. From Tuesday to Thursday, lots of gaming related information will be revealed to the world. E3 stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo and it’s closed off to the public, but it doesn’t stop it from being the most awaited time of the year for video gamers who follow pre-release games or people who just like GCI trailers. E3 has changed a lot over time; a few years ago we had to wait weeks, sometimes months to get juicy info, new screenshots, and sometimes videos out of the expo, because only gaming journalists had access. Not anymore. Now we have live streaming directly from the floor, live Q&As and demos and lots of trailers. The public can’t enter E3, so companies brought E3 to the public. Although, being part of the public means that I have to follow E3 online, and having a 40 hour a week job means that I usually miss the live events. So I love the innovation that is the Internet, because those live streams are available after they were “aired” and I can now watch “not direct” live Q&As and gameplay videos. Yeah! 

For the people who can’t wait for my next week’s recap of E3 and who just want to find the information themselves, most live streaming of events are available from their hosts online. So check IGN, Gamespot and G4TV for those. Last year, G4TV had the best coverage in my humble opinion, IGN was awful and I don’t remember what Gamespot did. IGN and Gamespot will probably have lots of hands-on articles as well. EA also has their own E3 website with “live” streams. They had those last year too and it probably gave the most live gameplay of their games.

There are a few games I intend to follow (and you can expect a recap next week about what I found):

Deus Ex: Human Revolution: I already did a preview of this game. Releasing on August 23rd-26th of this year and I can’t wait for it. There is a PC preview build (for journalists) that was leaked recently too and people claim it’s really good (I didn’t succumb to temptation) and fridges are apparently the new “do all” objects.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning: I haven’t talked about this game yet. I consider it a smaller title, because it’s made by a “unproved” studio owned by Curt Schilling (the Major League Baseball pitcher). The guy is a MMO fan and he wanted to have his perfect MMO so he got ahold of R.A Salvatore (book writer) to write the lore and story and Todd McFarlane (well known comic book writer/artist) to design monsters and other things for his MMO, but in the middle of it his studio acquired another studio working on single player RPGs with Ken Rolston (the Elder Scrolls III and IV) at the helm. Reckoning is the merging of both studios: a single player RPG with the MMO lore and monsters. The monsters look nice. EA moved the release from Fall 2011 to early 2012 for “competition reasons” a few months back, I do agree with them, too many RPGs this year.

Mass Effect 3: The final act of Commander Shepard’s adventure to save the Milky Way. Not much to say, beside that I want to see how much they changed combat. I like ME1 and ME2 enough to follow the 3rd act pre-release. We will see females of some species too! Also, I really want this song to be in it. Another title that will release in early 2012.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: I can’t wait for this to release as well, but it’s not really hype. I don’t expect to like the combat that much, but I think it’s worth a look at (and I love Star Wars).  We shouldn’t have too much time to wait before release either… hopefully.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: My most awaited game for the year. We are supposed to get a live 5 minutes demo of the game! I want to see the new magic system in action, and the combat and all the races’ new looks, etc.

Anything else that seems interesting and that I haven’t heard of yet: there are a lot of exclusive announcements at E3. Nintendo is supposed to unveil their new consoles, CD Projeckt is supposed to announce a new IP, etc.

Of course, there are also companies that don’t participate at E3, mostly because it’s not an expo for the general people. It’s mostly a BIG marketing machine for the “gaming journalists.” Some of them sometimes release interesting thing during the week or soon after, otherwise it’s wait for Gamescon in August for them.