 This is Game Chat with Buona Episode 124, our E3 2018 Press Conference Roundup. Enjoy. Game Chat with Buona, welcome to the show. Now, here's your host Buona McCall with all the gaming news of this week. By the way, that's me. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Episode 124 of Game Chat with Buona. We got a great show lined up for you. This is going to be our E3 2018 Roundup of all the press conferences starting from electronic arts all the way up to Nintendo. I got to say, you know, I went into this with very, very mediocre expectations. I did not expect to come out of this with, you know, with, like, confetti coming out of my ears and jumping around with happiness. But overall, I'll say that my expectations were met. And if you know me, if you've been following me on social media, watching my streams, you probably know that I did not set very high expectations. To the tune of, well, E3 is probably going to be disappointing this year. But there were a couple gems, you know, there were some very, very low moments as well. But again, we will try our best to summarize it for you and give you my thoughts on what each individual company did and hopefully give you an indication of which one was my favorite. Alright, so without further ado, let's get into the show. It should be a long one. So first up the bat was electronic arts or what we like to call EA. And EA has been probably the biggest punching bag in the gaming industry that I have seen in quite a while. You know, if there's anything negative to say about gaming, people say EA. So I think a lot of you and a lot of people watching probably didn't expect much. They probably didn't even watch because they just hate EA. But we'll go through the games that they released and are the games they talked about. First up, they talked about FIFA. I think I have these in the right order. The time sequence may be off. FIFA was the first one. FIFA 19. Not a whole lot there that I wanted to discuss because I'm not a big FIFA fan. But you can expect that they're going to, I think they had a new affiliation so that they can have licensing for various things. Again, I don't want to butcher it. But yeah, that was the big deal with FIFA. I think they got some licensing things resolved and I think it opened up some doors for FIFA. I apologize if I got that. You know what? Let's just take a second and look it up. Okay, so a little bit of looking things up on there. They took the Champions League license away from Konomi's PES. So they now have the Champions League license so that opens up a lot more content for FIFA 19 players. So that's a big thing in terms of that. Battlefield 5, we didn't learn a whole lot of new things regarding Battlefield 5 during this press conference. I think a lot of the new information and a lot of the details came from interviews and various YouTube videos that followed up the press conference. So yeah, Battlefield 5 was not a whole lot of new things. Origin Access Premier, which was kind of a big deal, allows one to pay $100 a year and I think a lot of the details came out after the press conference. But you get $100 a year and you get access to full, excuse me, full games. And they're going to be including Madden 19, Battlefield 5, and Anthem into Origin Access. So if you're going to pay $100 a year, you'll have access to all those games. Very similar to what PSN and Xbox Live do. Kind of like a service type of deal. So if you just want to try games out but you don't want to buy them. If you're a big gamer, it turns out to be cheaper in the long run to do this. But if you're not a big gamer and you want to own your video games, which I think a lot of us in my age bracket want to do, you probably want to pass on this. But it sounds like a pretty good deal, especially for a lot of the games that are coming out at the end of this year. Unravel 2, the yarn-based platformer game which had a lot of style and a lot of personality. This one adds a lot of co-op capability to unravel. I remember when I first saw Unravel, it reminded me of Kirby's Epic Yarn. Which some Nintendo folks got a little bit perturbed about. But Unravel 2, it looks pretty good. Co-op, and you can play single player and have some unique perspectives and some unique features with the two different yarn dudes. I call them yarn dudes. And then there's Sea of Solitude. Sea of Solitude is a very mind bender type of game where it has a deep undertone, deep meaning and the game is trying to explore those deep meanings through art and video game. Kind of creepy looking and talks about the monster inside of us. I think that was the theme or something like that. I'm going to pass on it, but I think some people will probably get some love out of it. And if I'm going too fast, guys, I apologize, but there's a lot of games that were announced. So I'm just going through all the announcements and I'll get into what I like later on. NBA Live 19, same story, different day. I'm probably not going to play it. But we'll see. Madden 19, I think the biggest story for that is that it's coming to PC. Other than that, same old stuff. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, which was pretty much an interview with Vince Sampel in the audience. They announced the title and it's going to be coming out next year. But no footage, no teaser, nothing. Just the name drop and kind of it's going to be in Dark Times in the Star Wars universe. Definitely looking forward to that. But E3 this year showed nothing about it. Now, Command and Conquer rivals probably a big source of controversy amongst all of you. And it takes the Command and Conquer franchise to mobile. And it has this clash royale type of deal where you have units that you send out to destroy each other's bases. It has harvesters. It has basic RTS principles into a mobile environment. And overall, it looks OK. It doesn't look terrible. But I think a lot of people were mad about the idea of Command and Conquer being reduced to a mobile game. And I'll talk about this a little later. But my response is, well, when's the last time you played Command and Conquer? Or when's the last time you wanted to play Command and Conquer? RTSs are kind of dying out, sadly. So I think EA is taking a bet on making this mobile to make some money. Anthem, finally the last of the thing, the last of the deal. Probably the biggest thing that people were looking forward to from EA's camp. This is a new IP, very, very high fidelity, have big aspirations. And they kind of sat down and did an interview type of a documentary take on it. And sadly, they showed some gameplay. But honestly, I don't think they showed a lot. It seemed like I was, it was very scripted number one and number two. It just seemed like there was stuff missing. I couldn't, I was yearning for more. But we saw Anthem and that concluded EA's conference. That was the most, you know, that's pretty much most of the games that they had. And overall, I say it was decent. But I give them a below average grade because pretty much everything here was known. And I think that's going to be the theme for my, this EA, this E3 in general. Just like there were no surprises. And the things that were shown were things that have already been shown in some form or fashion. And there wasn't a whole lot of new details. Anthem, we got to see a little bit more. We got to see the classes. You know, we got to see some of their abilities. Man 19, we got to, we got to find out that was on PC. Battlefield, I really didn't find anything new. FIFA got the new license. That's about it. Origin Access Premier. Yay. Okay. But you know, overall from a, from a, did a wow me factor it underwhelmed me. So EA definitely did not score super duper high points. And next up was Microsoft. Microsoft came out with the mantra of games, games, games. It's all about the games. I think they did it a couple of years ago as well. Started that, that trend because a lot of companies were coming to E3 and they were just putting out trailers. You know, it was a lot of fluff. It was a lot of like videos and things that were like everything except games. And I think Microsoft was really guilty of that because I think that all started with the connect and TV, TV, TV, TV, TV. I think when Phil came in, it was games, games, games, games, games. So we saw a mixture of a lot of games and a lot of world premieres and cross platform titles and things like that. And they really stressed the fact that, you know, you can only play this on Xbox. This is a world premiere. You know, Microsoft was one of the first besides EA to come out. So we got to see some things like Kingdom Hearts and some other things free. I'm sorry, some other things first before everybody else could. So they came out with Halo Infinite. And I wasn't sure what to make of this exactly. And I haven't got a lot of details about it since. But Halo Infinite seems to be, you know, Master Chief's return to the series. And it looks very, very good. The title looks, you know, visually pleasing. And it reeks of open world. So we'll see what they do with that Halo Infinite. Ori and the Will of the Wisps. So this is the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest. Really, really good game. Thanks, Microsoft, for bringing that to another platform. Fallout 76, of course. You know, we guys, Todd came out and Todd Harris came out and talked a little bit. Not a whole lot. And they showed the teaser to Fallout 76 and promised more for the Bethesda conference. And, you know, we'll get to that point sooner or later. Securo Shadows died twice. Kind of forgettable. I didn't see a whole lot in there that I want to see again. The awesome adventures of Captain Spirit, the makers of Life is Strange, the Life is Strange series. They seem to be introducing the next world for Life is Strange type games according to the developers. And it's about this kid with a wild imagination and it shows a lot of what's going on with that. So there's probably going to be a lot of feels. I imagine it's going to be one of those endings that's going to make you cry and all kinds of stuff. That's how they do. Crackdown 3, of course, the big story with that is that we know that it got delayed. But still looks pretty decent. Looks pretty decent. And looks the same as before. So not much changed there. Now, an impressive title, probably one of the more impressive titles is Metro Exodus, the next Metro game in a series of it. And they showed quite a bit of gameplay for that. So that was impressive. Kingdom Hearts 3, the video was actually messed up. We saw the video again in Square Enix. We're going to talk about that. And it had corrected audio, but it's like half the music and sound effects were missing. So it seems like Square was actually actively working on this video during E3. But it's Kingdom Hearts. So if you're a Kingdom Hearts fan, you're probably loving it, no matter what they show you're going to love it anyway. Sea of Thieves, we got to see some of the new content coming to that, Cursed Sales and Forsaken Shores, and kind of an indication of what the cadence for the release dates and the release content packages for Sea of Thieves. I think they're really, really pushing the fact that they're going to release content because the game got some negative reviews and that the content was lacking. So they're trying to reassure the player base that Sea of Thieves content is actually coming. Battlefield 5, again, we saw some stuff. And EA promised that we will see some more Battlefield 5. The single-player stories, the war stories, we'll see more about that. So they showed a little bit of a teaser trailer for that. Wasn't a whole lot though. It was very short. So the theme I got were Microsoft. I'm going to pause and then the content here. They just were rapid-firing videos and content and games. And some of them were short, some of them weren't. And it was kind of dizzying. It wasn't impressive to me. It was just like annoying at some point. They got the Forza Horizon 4 and they paused a little bit and I was happy, which is the next one. They paused a little bit and talked about the game and talked about the open-world aspect of it and playing with friends. And it oddly reminded me of The Crew, which is a game I'm looking forward to from Ubisoft. It reminded me of The Crew with Forza Horizon 4. It looked good. I mean, I would play it. I would play it. I'm not a big Forza guy, but that looked fun. We Happy Few is We Happy Few. I can't really go more beyond that. PUBG did some stuff. They showed off some new maps, some new features. They teased some of the things that were coming. I think we saw a guy with a riot shield and some other stuff. I'm more concerned with PUBG's performance than their features. So hopefully they'll get that thing running better on Xbox. Tales of Aspiria, definitive edition. I was okay. That was my reaction. That was okay. Division 2 looked really, really good. This was a Ubisoft title shown off at the Microsoft conference because of this cross-platform and it looked really, really good. One of the big announcements was Microsoft acquired a whole bunch of studios. They came out and announced all these people. It was a long list, but the one that stood out to me is Ninja Theory, the guys behind Hellblade. Microsoft just acquired all these studios. They planned to do a lot of first-party titles with them. That could change the landscape of Xbox quite a bit. We're going to see how that turns out. Shadow the Tomb Raider. We got to see some footage of that. It looked like Metal Gear Solid. It was like Lara Croft Stealth. It looked a little bit odd. I'm not sure if it fits into the Tomb Raider universe, but it was very, very much so Metal Gear Solid type of gameplay. They showed some stuff with Black Desert, Devil May Cry 5. We saw Dante return. A lot of people squeed because they missed the Devil May Cry series. I'm not a big fan of it, but it was there. Cuphead DLC, which is lovely enough, is called The Delicious Last Course for DLC. They introduced a new female class you can play, as well as some new content and bosses are coming. To Cuphead, the rage beautiful game, by the way, with a beautiful soundtrack, but it's just really, really hard boss fights. That can make you rage a little bit. Tunic, Dying Light 2. Dying Light 2 was actually pretty good. Just Cause 4 looked okay. They talked about some of the... Actually, I don't think they showed that much here. No, they did. I'm getting mixed up with the Ubisoft conference, I believe, but Just Cause 4 looked pretty good. Gear's Pop is Gear's Award with Pop characters, and then they got the Gear's Tactics, which is a Gear's Award game that looks like XCOM, which really, really impressed me. I was like, whoa, Gear's Award would work really well in an isometric top-down tactics game like XCOM. I was like, that's the one I want to play. And then Gear's 5, a big, big, big title, the next iteration of Gear's, probably going to be one of the headliners for Microsoft for a while on top of Halo. Gear's 5 exclusive title. All these are exclusive, actually, to Microsoft. Gear's Tactics and Gear's Pop. I was really hoping that Gear's Tactics would be Xbox Play anywhere, but it's not. It's only Xbox One. And Gear's 5 is Play anywhere, as far as we know. And then the big one drop. Cyberpunk 27.7. The first time we've ever seen any trailers from it. It dropped at the Microsoft conference. And my oh my, that game looks incredible. I can't wait for that. Jump Force, quite the surprise. A big, big crossover in Bandai Namco. I was going to say Bamco Nandai. I don't know why I was going to say that. So we saw Naruto versus Goku versus Frieza versus One Piece Dude. Yeah. So it's a crossover fighting game. Then, oddly enough, we saw Battletoads. And it was kind of weird. And we saw some other things with some Xbox stuff with ID of Xbox and Xbox Game Pass. Some updates to that. And they talked about different titles coming to it. Some improvements. And Nier Automata becomes God's addition for Xbox One. So Microsoft did pretty well. I think they are one of the ones that were above average. They showed a lot of stuff, but to me it was more quantity over quality. The quality was there. I mean Fallout 76, I was already looking forward to that, but I already knew about it. But you got Halo Infinite and you got all the Gears of War stuff. And you got Metro in there. And then they threw Forza in there. Battlefield we kind of knew about already. And we saw Cyberpunk for the first time. And it really nailed kind of like the initial wow factor because a lot of these things we hadn't seen. And out of everybody in the conference, I think they may have taken a title for the most surprises in terms of content we hadn't seen. Not really surprises. I guess that's a bad word. New, I guess world premiere. That's what they call a world premiere content. You know, being a second presenter, they have the luxury of showing some of these cross-platform titles first, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Just Cause for Devil May Cry, the Division 2, all of these cross-platform titles, they were kind of, if they weren't EA, they had the luxury of showing them first, Metro Exodus. So I think their positioning worked out more so than the actual conference and the platform. But all in all, it was definitely above average for the guys over at Microsoft. Okay, let's shift gears over to the folks over at Bethesda. Bethesda, I mean, prior to this whole conference, everybody was buzzing about Fallout 76 and of course the infamous rage to leak. Bethesda, so loving. They just played right into it. It was beautiful. When they came out on stage, they said, thanks to the folks over at Walmart up in Canada who leaked rage too. They pretty much ruined the surprise. So Rage 2 was the first thing they covered and it looks like Open World Doom, which is probably going to appeal to a lot of people. It looks like a definite improvement from the first rage in terms of visuals and it just looked like they took the mechanics from Doom because id Software is on Bethesda or Zinamax. And it just threw it into an Open World. So it looks pretty good. The other scrolls legends, they talked about some UI updates. They're going to revamp a lot of things. And one of the things I noticed, I think starting with this conference, I don't think Microsoft did much of it, they brought community managers on stage. These are people that manage the social media, the streams, the YouTubes and stuff. They brought community managers on stage and I think this was the first community manager I saw and he promised a lot of things coming to the game and revamping and it was pretty interesting to have a community manager come up there and do that. And then we got a very small sneak peek at the Elder Scrolls Online Somerset, which recently just came out. A bunch of Zinamax titles. Doom Eternal, which was kind of a surprise, coupled with Rage 2. I don't think we knew much about that if it weren't for Armour. But Doom Eternal is the next Doom game and it looks like Doom. Like the Doom that came out, the Doom remake, you're going to love this. It's pretty much the same thing. Quake Champions got some love here. The community manager came on stage and one of the promotions they're doing for Quake Champions is that for this week of E3, you can go to Steam and add it to your account and essentially you have it forever. So if you want to play Quake Champions, all you have to do is add it to your account and they're doing that promotion now, so I did it. I haven't played it since the beta, but I mean it's still beta, but in the early beta. It was a solid game. I didn't like the loot boxes that much. I didn't like the idea of that and hopefully they'll change it around. Prey Moon Crash, which was very interesting. It was like a rogue-like type of a deal with Prey. And multiple runs with different things and the decisions you make in these runs change the outcome. So it's almost like a Prey spin-off, which seemed very interesting. I'm not going to play it, but it seemed interesting. Wolfenstein Youngblood, not much I remember from that. It was okay. The previous Wolfenstein games have been pretty good, but I looked at this and I was like, I'll probably pass on it. Fallout 76, of course. We got some questions answered. We raised new questions. Todd came out and talked about it and it is going to be multiplayer. Fallout 76 is going to be multiplayer. But at the conference itself, I'm going to revisit this probably later on a different show or maybe in a few minutes. I'll just talk about it now. There wasn't a lot introduced in the conference and there was a lot of open-ended questions. Sure, it's going to be multiplayer. It's going to be four times the size of Fallout 4. It is going to be set, the time period is going to be set a few years after the bombs dropped. So it's like one of the prequel timeframes. And it's not going to be your typical single-player Fallout experience. So that raised a lot of questions from people. Ever since then, a lot of information has come out. Todd has done several interviews. Namely, the folks over at Noclip have done a documentary about the making of Fallout 76, which answered a ton of my questions. And it sounds pretty freaking awesome. Just to say the least bit about it, it sounds really awesome. It's a side Fallout game. Despite what people may say, if you watch the Noclip documentary, it pretty much solidifies that. This is an experiment. This is something they wanted to try for a long time. They brought in people that knew about MMOs and multiplayer games, and they basically converted the Fallout world into a multiplayer experience. And they just injected a lot of content and they gave us a sandbox for immersive gameplay with the Fallout universe. And essentially their attitude is, we're just going to give them the tools and see what players do and see what happens. I love that. I play EVE Online. I play sandbox games. That is my jam. I don't shy away from multiplayer games like a lot of people do. There's a ton of complainers out there that want Fallout to be totally single-player all the time. And to them, I say this is not the Fallout for you. Thankfully, we've got something new in the Fallout universe. This is my favorite universe from Bethesda by far. I love Fallout. This is the end of the Elder Scrolls universe. I love the Fallout universe. The fact that we're getting a sandboxy type of a survival game with all of these cool elements is fantastic. So I'm looking forward to it. It should be a lot of fun, but it's not going to rub everybody the right way. And I'm cool with that. Hopefully people will move on and just wait for the next Fallout title, which I probably think is not going to be multiplayer. Fallout 5 is not going to be multiplayer. And then they went into Skyrim, which was kind of a touchy subject because people have been waiting on the next Skyrim. Skyrim, very special edition, was kind of like a little play on them putting Skyrim on everything. They've been putting it on all types of platforms, namely the Switch. And they did a little comedy skit with Fallout. I mean, with Skyrim being on Alexa, which actually, after the conference, returned out to be a real thing. You can actually play Skyrim on Alexa. So it was like giving voice commands. It was pretty funny. But anyway, they talked about Fallout shelter a little bit after that. And then they started talking about their next plans for Elder Scrolls. And this is going to be a very aggressive project with Elder Scrolls. They're going to start on mobile with Elder Scrolls Blades. And what they're going to do is they're going to have an experience with this Elder Scrolls universe where you can use a character, upgrade gear, all from your mobile device. But essentially, they're going to take this to all platforms, as many platforms as they can. So not only is it going to be an Elder Scrolls universe on your mobile, not only is the Elder Scrolls universe going to be on mobile, it's going to be in VR. It's going to be PCs. It's going to be different platforms, consoles, whatever. So kind of an interesting take. And then after they showed that off, we got the bomb drop. Two bomb drops. First off, the highly anticipated Starfield title, which was not announced, but leaked many, many years ago. They finally announced that Starfield is coming sometime in the future. This is going to be a sci-fi space game. That's my jam. I can't wait. I don't know what it's going to be about, but I can't wait. And then finally, a very, very short final teaser of the Elder Scrolls 6. So Bethesda dropped a lot of stuff. So overall, I think they were above average as well. Namely because of all the stuff that they're doing with beloved titles, like Doom, which got a lot of positive reviews. Doom Eternal. Rage, which wasn't positively met when it came out, but the new Rage looks really, really good. And Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Elder Scrolls, basically big titles, they're getting updates across the board. Mobile on the regular front. Elder Scrolls, Mobile on the regular front. Starfield, a new game, as well as Elder Scrolls 6. So they were definitely above average. Elder Scrolls and Fallout are beloved franchises from Bethesda. And I don't think any... I think the only fans that left this conference that were a little bit perturbed were Fallout fans. I think because they were unsure of the Fallout 76 stuff, which what I said was, you know, later answered in interviews and on the documentary. But I think Elder Scrolls fans were ecstatic. Elder Scrolls 6 got teased. That's all they want. I think that's all they want. So everybody was happy. So that was a lowdown from the guys from Bethesda. All right, so we had the mediocre performance from EA, decent above average performances from Microsoft and Bethesda, and out came Square Enix. So the buzz behind Square Enix was, you know, we were hoping to see a lot more about Kingdom Hearts and hopefully some information about Final Fantasy VII Remake and some other titles. So what Square Enix did, very similar in the vein of Nintendo, is that they ran a bunch of videos. There was no live stage. It was just all video, starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which showed some play-throughs of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And again, this re-emphasized my point about it looking like Metal Gear Solid or a stealth adventure game. I don't know, and like I said, I don't know how much of this is going to impact the Tomb Raider fans out there because generally the Tomb Raider franchise reboot has been met with positive praise, but this is taking kind of a little bit of another direction. We'll see how it turns out. I don't think anything negative will happen, but I'm just being cautious about it. And then we got to Final Fantasy XIV and talking about the updates that came out with that under the moonlight, with Stormblood, so these were minor updates, not necessarily a major expansion. And again, we saw some stuff with awesome adventures of Captain Spirit. We talked about this universe thing with Life is Strange. I just keep forgetting the name of that game, man. Life is Strange. In that universe, Life is Strange, this kid with the imagination, playing games. Dragon Quest, Babylon's Fall, Octopath Traveler, Just Cause 4 got another trailer. The Quiet Man, which seemed to be very interesting. The Quiet Man looked like an action-adventure movie because they had real actors and then they kind of transitioned to these video game versions of them. And it seems to be a deaf guy that has heightened abilities. But it looked interesting, but all we got was a short teaser about it. Kingdom Hearts III, this was pretty much the same thing we saw with Microsoft. A little bit of extra content, actually some music and sound effects added. So it was a little bit improved. So if you saw it during Microsoft, it here. And then, Final Fantasy XIV and Monster Hunter Crossover that's coming to those games, that's coming to Final Fantasy XIV, I should say. Which seems to be very exciting for Final Fantasy XIV. Now I'm a Final Fantasy XIV fan. It looks like something that's good, but it's not something to make me reinstall the game and go and play again. So if you're into Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy, you already play Final Fantasy. That's probably going to be something you're going to enjoy. And that was it. It was a very, very short presentation, barely 30 minutes. Nothing but videos. And it just cut after that. And it left the internet a little bit wanting and people were upset. It seemed very lazy. It just looked like they took a bunch of videos and threw them together. So I guess if they didn't have anything to show, that's what it comes down to. So Square Enix definitely works below average. Not necessarily for the lack of content, but just a lack of effort. It looked like they really didn't care. Alright, the King and Queens of Cringe, Ubisoft, are up next. They started out with some just dance stuff with a live marching band with a very catchy tune. I got to commend it. This was a very catchy tune, very easy to tap your foot to. But we all had our cringe meters at, cringe detection meters way up. Ready to cringe. I don't say that word often, but when it comes to Ubisoft press conferences, they never fail. After the just dance presentation and just dance intro, they went to Beyond Good and Evil 2, which was one of their big, big announcements from last year, showed some more footage, and we got kind of a glimpse as to what's going on with the time frame. It seems to be a prequel from the previous year, so yes, you heard that right. Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a prequel to Beyond Good and Evil 1. So they actually called it 2 even though it was a prequel, so that's pretty interesting. And then the community managers came back on stage for Rainbow Six Siege, and Trials Rising, and talked about those games and what's coming for those. The Division 2 got some love again. Again, we saw this with Microsoft, but they showed a lot more content and what's happening, kind of set it up for what the universe is going to be. It's going to be in D.C. The virus had already hit New York, and now we're talking about D.C., and we're talking about the aftermath, and the theme is who is going to rewrite history, or who is going to write history? Who will be the victor? Will it be the bullies, or will it be society's good guys, if you will? Then from there, we went to Mario and the Rabbits, Kingdom Battle, Donkey Kong Adventure, which is an exclusive title, and then we saw Ubisoft's answer to Sea of Thieves, which is called Skull and Bones. If you've never seen this title before, imagine the Assassin's Creed Pirate Ship Battles yanked out of Assassin's Creed and put into his own game a pirate game, which looks to be very, very fun. I've been following this game for a couple months, ever since Sea of- well actually a month or two before Sea of Thieves came out. I've been following Skull and Bones, and it looks to be very, very well done. So I'm going to definitely keep my eyes on that. Transference, which is kind of a VR game, looked okay, but very forgettable. And then Starlink, Battle for Atlas came out, and kind of, this is where I got confused, because for the first time in E3, I actually yelled and got excited. Because in this Starlink game, I first, I actually thought it was No Man's Sky when they were showing. I was like, is this No Man's Sky? But they had like NPCs talking and they had like dialogue. And I was like, wait a minute. And it ended up being this game called Starlink, Battle for Atlas, which looks incredible by the way. But then, I heard a familiar sound effect. I was like, what is that? That sounds familiar. And it was a Star Fox sound effect. And I was like, what? And then they brought up this big Star Fox thing, and Miyamoto came out from Nintendo in this big deal. I was like, oh my gosh! They're going to make a Star Fox game and turns out the Starlink game experience on the Switch will feature Star Fox. And that's it. So, I was both very hyped and very disappointed in like a matter of two minutes. So yeah. Still exciting. The game looks good. I was just hoping more of the Star Fox would be in the game anywhere, but only on Nintendo's platform. And then the Community Manager came back out for For Honor. They talked about For Honor. That game is going to be free for this next week, for the Starter Edition. They talked about the new expansion that's coming out called Marching Fire, which will include castle sieges. 4v4 castle sieges should be interesting. And they talked about the Crew 2, a lot of which we already knew about because the Crew 2 is already open beta. And then we got the first look at Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which seems to be ancient Greek times. And you can play as a male or female, which is one of the big changes that they made. And it's Assassin's Creed. So, typical fights and assassinations and stuff. Nothing new in that realm, but the timeframe is going to be different. And then we ended it with a game called Space Junkies, which is exclusive in a VR game. So, I think Ubisoft did probably the best they've done in a while. Squeaking above average. It wasn't bad. It was a little bit better than average because I think what they showed would be all good and evil was exceptional. I think their intro was very, very fun. I think their message overall resonates with me because what they said in the closing is that we need to listen to you to make our games better. Because we got a bunch of combat stories here. We've got Division. We've got Four Honor. And we've got Rainbow Six Siege. All games which really had a bumpy start that incorporated user feedback to make changes and turned out to be better in the end. And when the leader of the company comes out and says that, that resonated with me. I was like, thank you. Because there's listening to everything people say and doing it and ruining a game. And then there's listening incorporating feedback in an intelligent manner and making a game actually better for everyone without relying on armchair designers to just give you stuff to make things easier. I need to be able to do this in two seconds instead of, you know, the ten minutes. And the game seems solid. I mean there's there's a lot of games in here I'm going to play. I mean Division II I'm going to play. I'm going to play Four Honor. I'm going to download that. The Crew II. I'm looking at that game. Skull and Bones I want to play. So it's like of all the ones so far, I mean, that's a lot of games I want to play. And I think Ubisoft did it. I think they did an above average job of convincing me to play those games. So I think they did pretty good. Congrats Ubisoft. Okay, so now we're going to move on and talk about the PC Gaming show which is put on by PC Gaming. PC Gaming Magazine, right? I think so, yeah. PC Gaming show. And this is this used to be one of my favorites, but this year for some reason I was a little bit bored. They show some games quite a bit of games. It was like almost a two hour presentation, so many. But I'm just going to talk about I'm not going to go through the full list because time is getting a little bit long. But I do want to talk about some of my favorites from the PC Gaming show. And my absolute favorite was a game called Satisfactory from the makers of Goat Simulator. I think they did Goat Simulator. Not sure. But Satisfactory, which is a 3D kind of a take on a factory automation simulator. Factorio basically if you're into that kind of genre. And it looked incredible. I had never heard this game. I had never conceived that this game was actually going to be a thing, but it looks insane. I immediately went to the Steam page once it came up and I followed it. I wish listed. I can't wait until that game comes out. That's going to be what I'm definitely playing. Another game to look good was called Neocab. Very, very artistic game that had a lot of style and had an interesting looking story premise that you're driving the cab and I guess you're like wanted at some point according to the trailer and you're trying to get away and get includes for your cell phone. Look very interesting. Starcon Origins or Star Control Origins, which you know, if you've ever played Starcon before, I guess, you know, you kind of know about it, but it looked a little bit different. But it still piqued my interest a little bit. Obviously, I'm a warframe guy so warframe to sacrifice the announcement that it is coming this week as of this podcast. I kind of, you know, we kind of knew that was coming. So that that was something that wasn't a surprise, but I'm happy to see it. Other than that, though, I mean, it's like a lot of the stuff we already knew about some of the titles really didn't stand out. They showed Star Citizen, they showed Just Cause 4, this game called Two Point Hospital, which looked okay. Anno 1800, which looks all right. The cyanide that happened this game that's going to offend me and everybody else. And I was like, I'm not going to play that. Telltale's The Walking Dead, The Final Season, Hitman 2, you know, these are things that we kind of already knew about that are coming to PC. So it wasn't really that big of a show for me. It was kind of below average. And that says a lot coming from me because I usually like the PC gaming show more than anything else. But it was, it was, it reminded me of Microsoft where it was like more quantity over quality, but there was less quality. It was a lot of quantity, but not a lot of quality. So sadly I got to give, you know, the PC gaming show kind of like below average marks because it was not that great. And I actually fell asleep many, many times, but I was really tired when I was watching it. So that's their excuse. But you know, that's what happened. All right. Now we talk about Sony. Sony is the one that I think everybody had the highest expectations for because Sony is kind of leading the game in the console race. You know, despite what the sales may say, it seems wise is leading the pack. Well, with that said, Sony took a little bit of a chance this year. They, at the venue, they started out in a church and they had a guy playing a banjo set us up for the Last of Us part two. And after the guy played this number, they showed the Last of Us two trailer and then they moved everybody to another venue. There was a very awkward decision to do that. And I think that's kind of the overtone of what happened at Sony's conference. And sadly, the games are going to get overshadowed by that. I'm just going to get out of the way right now. But let's talk about the games. Last of Us part two looked incredible. The animations, the graphics, the story, I mean, the game got critically acclaimed high marks for a reason. It is a really, really well produced game. So I don't expect part two to be any worse. And it's probably going to be the highlight of the show for Sony for a lot of people. Not me. I recognize this greatness. I think it looks good, but it's not my highlight, but it looks okay. Destiny 2, for sick. We got to see some Destiny 2 stuff. We do know that Destiny and Bungie are in bed with Sony in terms of like agreements and exclusives. Exclusive, so. They show Cade getting killed. It's not really a spoiler alert because that's what they show Cade just gets wrecked and we don't know if he's actually dead or dead. I think Bungie actually has commented on that, but I'm going to lead that up to you guys in the interpretation. So they showed off Destiny 2 and you know, this whole venue moving thing kind of moved them to another spot after Destiny 2. I think it was after Destiny 2. Ghost of Tsushima. Tsushima, I think that's the name of it. And they moved everybody to another spot and they had this guy playing I forgot the name of the flute. It's one of those eastern style flutes which is really nice. And the guy did a great job. It was a very nice song, just like the guy with the banjo at the church. It did really well. Both were really well done. They set the ambience, but again it was kind of an awkward thing to do at E3. And this game looks really good too. And they showed like a little battle sequence with a nice backdrop and visually it was just stunning. It was very stunning. So that looked okay too. Both of those titles, Last of Us and Ghost of Tsushima were exclusive to PS4. And then they showed a game called Control which had a lot of moving blocks and like anti-gravity stuff. It seemed kind of strange. I have no idea what this game is about. But it was interesting. I'm probably not going to play it, but it was interesting. And then everybody went nuts because they showed a Resident Evil 2 remake which made me groan. Oh gosh. Not necessarily because it's because it's Resident Evil 2 or because, you know, I don't like that game. It's just, I don't like the idea of remasters and remakes getting so much praise. That's just a trend I don't like to say so. But anyway, Resident Evil 2, they showed that. Kingdom Hearts 3, they showed some more stuff except they focused a little bit more on Cap Jack Sparrow part of it. We got to see some of that part of Disney so that was cool. And then we got to see Death Stranding. Hideo Kojima and his wild whack in his obsession with confusing everybody. It triggered me. I went off on a stream on them. I was just like, this is stupid. Because it was more clues and more confusion and more just extreme weirdness that didn't answer any questions and a majority of us don't even know what the game is. So if you're coming to E3 and you're showing a trailer and everybody's confused, to me that's a bad thing. But everybody's like, oh, I like the appeal. I like to go look up information. I want to find, oh, it's Hideo. If it was anybody else, they'd get laughed off the stage. That was my point. But anyway, Death Stranding, we'll do this out again. There you go. Another surprise though was Neo 2. I was like, wow. Okay, Neo 2. Neo was kind of a hit on the PS4 and Neo 2 will be a thing as well. Now my darling of the show was Spider-Man. Oh my goodness, Spider-Man. Spider-Man. Spider-Freaking-Man. Oh my gosh. Spider-Man really, really impressed me. It has impressed me for many, many months, but they showed some... they showed some more of it. And my goodness, did it look good. The combat, the combos, the missions, they showed some boss battles. Wow. This is a game I want to play. Spider-Man looks incredible. So it was definitely my favorite. Probably the entire show. It was like the entire show, man. I liked Fallout 76 as well, but Spider-Man was so impressive. It blew away last of us to me. I know people were not going to like me for saying that, but Spider-Man was just incredible. Everything about that game looks just pristine. And it kind of abruptly... I don't know what Sony did, but they had pacing issues and I think the conference ended at that point, but they continued to show more stuff throughout the night. So I thought the conference ended at Spider-Man, but then they kept talking, and then it was like they went into this interview segment, and then they showed some more stuff, which I didn't really watch. Some other stuff with Black Ops and the PSVR and Dear Ruccini, I think is the name of another game they showed, which was a VR game, so I don't know. Sony was weird. They had some production pacing issues, but all in all, I think they were above average, because the games they showed, this particular press conference was packed with quality. It was like the opposite of Microsoft. Microsoft had a lot of quality, a lot of quantity with some quantity with a little bit of quality, but overall it was good. Sony just really had a lot of good quality games in here. Spider-Man, Neo 2. If I knew what Death Stranding was, I'd probably give it a more of a praise, but it still looked good. Kingdom Hearts, of course. Everybody knows about that, though. Control, Ghost of Tsushima, which looked really good. Destiny 2 actually looked pretty good, but I got words with Bungie, so we're not going to talk about that. And, of course, Last of Us Part 2. Really, really high quality games, as we know with PS4 anyway. So Sony walked away with above average marks. Even though they didn't show a whole lot, even though their production was weird, even though they had the venue switching stuff, which is what everybody's going to talk about, the games they showed were actually okay. Alright, now we're going to end it with Nintendo. Nintendo produced their thing on Tuesday at noon. They were the only ones presenting their press conference on that day. And, you know, we had some... I had some higher than normal expectations for some reason. I usually don't for Nintendo, but I kind of thought in the back of my head, hey, the switch really needs to show off some games, so they better show off some stuff. Boy, was I wrong. Remember I told you about Square Enix and how they just showed a bunch of videos for 30 minutes? Well, I really wish Nintendo had done even that. Because they showed off Daemon X Machina, which is a mech game. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Torna, which seems to be DLC. Super Mario Party, they showed that off for a good, you know, three to five minutes. Fortnite, they showed a little teaser for that. Fortnite's coming to someone coming to the switch. Overcooked 2, which is a game I think is really good, they're bringing it to the switch. So it was a lot of ports. After Mario Party, we got to see a lot of ports. And then Fire Emblem Three Houses. And then all of a sudden, they went to Smash Mode. Super Smash Brothers Ultimate and I'm not saying the game was bad because it looked like a good Smash game. They talked about, they're bringing back all the Smash Heroes from every game, every Smash game ever made, every Smash Hero, including some new ones. And it went through every single character and talked about in gratuitous detail their powers, the changes, the graphical updates between previous versions, their echoes, all kinds of stuff. They went to detail for 30 minutes. Their entire press conference was about 40 to 45 minutes. And 30 minutes of that press conference was Smash. And then that was it. They ended. I think I failed to mention Hollow Knight and Octopath Travel for some other things that were in videos. Dragon Ball FighterZ, they showed like this very, very fast entourage of trailers. Not really featured them, they just showed them. Like, hey, we're going to bring these games, we're going to pour them. But Smash was 30 minutes of this entire presentation. Now apparently I hurried it through the Gravevine that they warned us on Twitter that it was going to be heavily Smash focused. I haven't seen that myself. But still there's no excuse. I was grossly disappointed. I was like, the Switch is selling like hotcakes, people are all over it. But I think the common thing for the Switch, the effort from people who own the Switch is that it needs some more games. They love the hardware. I mean this is a very typical Nintendo thing to say. I love the hardware, but I need more games. And it's you got Mario Party. For me, the only thing that stands out here is Mario Party and Smash. I knew Fortnite was coming and Fortnite is going to be big on that platform. I already know that already, but still Mario Party, I was like, alright, cool. We got Mario Party on another platform. We brought back another title, Nintendo Yay. And then Smash, we knew Smash was coming because that was the bomb drop last year. At the end, it was just a very, very minor teaser and this year we got a lot more about it. So, Nintendo what happened? I mean, this was a very shallow E3 for Nintendo. And the fact that they had to have 30 minutes of Smash content kind of exemplifies that point. It kind of it really highlights that point. 30 minutes of Smash at E3. At least Square Enix showed 30 minutes of different things. They showed 30 minutes of Smash and like 10 minutes of something else. So, I don't know. Nintendo got below average for me. Not because of Smash, because I thought Smash was a standout game. It looked really polished. It looked like a good Smash game. But that's all they showed. That was like it. And it was like an entire Smash show. So, that's very disappointing. If all you got to look for on the switch is Smash, this is E3. So, until the next major Nintendo event whatever that is the Nintendo presentations what are you going to do on your switch? In the meantime I don't know man. If I was a switch owner I would not be happy with this presentation and they got below average from me. Alright, so now that's all that's out I tried to be as factual as I could but I had to inject some opinions in there. Thank you for listening to our E3 Roundup 2018, all the press conferences. Overall, like I said in the beginning, I have very low expectations for E3 now. We live in an age where most things get spoiled or leaked on the internet or talked about on social media or leaked on YouTube or whatever. So, the E3 I remember was all about big surprises and things that we didn't know were coming. Announcements of new news that we didn't know existed and there's very, very little of that these days. What we're seeing now is fleshed out explanations of upcoming titles and we're also seeing people announce dates for games that were no or coming. I apologize for my voice leaving because I've been talking a lot this episode and I was talking a lot on my stream yesterday as well so my voice is starting to go. It's a I don't know, I'm not upset I'm not like disappointed because I set my expectations appropriately in the beginning but with that said Square Enix Nintendo really, really disappointed me. I think those two were like the low points of the conference. They were really, really bad. I think followed by them as electronic arts. They did okay but they still were below average. I mean it was just stuff that I didn't really care about and stuff that I did care about, again, I already knew about so they didn't really give me a lot of new information. So those three are at the bottom. EA Nintendo and Square Enix. Now at the top are Microsoft but that's the Ubisoft, I'm sorry I forgot about the PC Gaming Show. PC Gaming Show is down there again with the EA. Just wasn't a whole lot there. So those four are at the bottom. At the top are Microsoft but that's the Ubisoft and Sony. Those were the ones that were impressive and I think that says a lot because I think I don't know. The console owners Microsoft and Sony being at the top of E3 shouldn't be surprising because they usually throw the most money at these events than anybody. I mean look at Sony. Sony just they had multiple venues. That had to be expensive. But Microsoft to me I think they took the cost-effective approach and they just showed a lot of games and they were hit and miss but they showed a lot of games and I think the amount I think they said 50 there was going to show and there was enough quality there to give them high marks and Sony didn't show a whole lot but they had a lot of quality packed in there and Bethesda didn't have a whole lot but they had quality packed in there for things that everybody was looking forward to. If you're a Bethesda fan that show pretty much made you upset or if you're a Fallout fan you probably left upset but most people didn't and most people left but Bethesda did a decent job. Definitely better than last year but Bethesda land was a disappointment. I don't know what that crap was. Let's hope they don't do that again. But if I had to get a title to anybody at E3 it's sad I don't know if it's I want to say sad but they went from the bottom to the top in one year that's Ubisoft and I know some people are going to be like surprised that I picked Ubisoft as being my top dog but as I stated when I was talking about Ubisoft they gave me the most incentive to play their games it wasn't about hype it wasn't about being surprised about something new I wanted to play their games after watching their conference I was like man I want to play at least five of their games Starlink, Division 2 Trials, Skull and Bones For Honor, The Crew 2 I want to play all of those you know that's like five or six games right there and no other conference I mean I want to play Spiderman from Sony Microsoft there are some cross-platform titles I want to play from them a piece of gaming show I talked about those as well but just from that measurement alone Ubisoft took it for me they took it I mean they took the show and that surprises me because I usually hate their press conferences like with a passion they usually cringe I usually go cringe crazy it's like their shows are usually always trying to be super edgy and not funny and this year was different it was a more humble tone I don't know if you guys caught that it was a more humble tone they brought out community managers mainly talking about how they're going to keep supporting their games that are already out there and these new games that are coming that whole philosophy is going to carry forward which is a good philosophy and again Starlink looks like a man Starlink and Skull and Bones I'm looking at new IPs here the Starlink and Skull and Bones man they look very strong very strong games from Ubisoft so yeah with that said this might surprise you but I think Ubisoft is my top press conference from E3 I'm not going to say they won E3 because I think it's stupid to say somebody won E3 like it's a contest but I think they put on the most impressive show from my perspective okay so I hope you all enjoyed this very lengthy recap I've already during the entire press during the entire press conferences I was doing commentary and all these videos are up on my Twitch stream at twitch.tv. If you go there you'll see all the archive footage of me reacting to all this stuff so I did a lot of talking during and after so a lot of what I'm saying if you watch my streams you probably already heard it except the conclusion I don't think anybody's heard that yet but what an E3 and it's just getting started I think a lot of things are going to happen today and tomorrow a lot more news a lot more news is coming out a lot more things getting fleshed out I tried to focus this podcast mainly on the press conferences even though I kind of went off tangent with Fallout 76 because it was more of a clarification more than flushing out it was like a lot of open-ended questions were there and I wanted to do the same for Death Stranding but I didn't get a chance to because I think a lot of questions were answered about that very frustrating for Death Stranding I just maybe not want to even care about that game anymore dangling a carrot and I got tired of doing that this is Buona from Buona.TV this is game chat with one episode 100 and something and you guys follow me on Twitter Twitter.com Buona I have a stream a live stream I don't know if you've ever heard of it Twitch.tv we stream every day except Wednesdays and Sundays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. check us out we've been playing a lot of Dauntless we've been playing we just recently started playing Jurassic World Evolution a new game from Frontier and a bunch of other stuff we're going to be playing Warframe the Sacrifice when that comes out this week that's already been announced that it's coming out this week and a bunch of other stuff so if you want to watch me live check it out YouTube.com Buona I also post this particular show up on YouTube at YouTube.com Buona you can check it out there also I post stream bites every week or every other week which are highlights from all my streams on Twitch so you can kind of get the funny moments and the cool moments from the live stream still waiting on this podcast to be approved by Spotify I went through Podbean which probably was a mistake and is just sitting there at waiting or pending I forgot the word to use I probably should have just independently submitted it myself because it might be denied or something and they're just sitting on it I don't know what's going on so hopefully I'll be on Spotify soon Google play on iTunes and also on YouTube you guys have a great afternoon evening and I will see you all next week for another great show of Game Chat Buona take care have a great day hey guys thanks for watching the video please comment, like, subscribe and all that good stuff and make sure you click the bell to be notified otherwise you ain't going to see this video wait how did you see this video okay bye