While I definitely enjoyed this year's E3, I always felt like it left me wanting still; I never really felt like there was one or several announcements that had me thinking about them non-stop or made me think that this year was one of the great E3s. Sure, there were some very, very memorable announcements and moments, but nothing that really blew me away. I attribute part of that to the fact that we are nearing the end of life for this generation of consoles and I feel like projects that have been in development for a while are finally coming into their own and getting released. Unfortunately we've all known about many of these games for years, which diminishes the amount of excitement someone would feel if they were brand new announcements. And it is those games that have been teased and talked about for a while that were the main highlight of this year's E3, even if their presence at the conference was not a surprise to anyone.
Still, this year was not without its disappointments. I will not even go into EA's or Square's presentations which were both pretty terrible. As many of you know I was not the biggest fan of Bethesda's presentation which was cool due to the announcement of a new Doom game, but other than that it really irritated and annoyed me on various levels. In addition to that I feel like Bethesda might be going in a direction with their single player games that I am not a fan of and I hope I end up being wrong about. Ubisoft's presentation was also very lacking, mostly due to them throwing out what we all knew they would talk about and show. Beyond Good and Evil 2 was a very welcome entry in their presentation, but other than that the presentation was mostly forgettable.
Now for the good presentations; Nintendo's conference today was pretty good, but as I said it didn't really stand out like it could have or should have, and using what's essentially an updated version of Smash on the Wii U as their showcase game was a little underwhelming, but hey, it's Smash. Microsoft had an excellent conference, way better than any other I've seen them have in years, but it was mostly because of all the games they showed off that I'll be buying for my PS4 when they launch. It's there lack of attracting new people to their brand that really made them fall short of what would have been a stellar presentation. That leaves us with Sony's showcase which really stole the show. I was not happy with the format of their presentation, but other than that it was hard to complain about what they did end up showing off and how cool those games look. They may not have showed off as many games as MS, but what they did show they made up for in quality and also the fact that they actually made you want a PS4 or be glad you do have one.
I'm going to hold off on my top announcements of E3 2018 until E3 officially is over on Thursday, just because I'm sure we'll hear about a lot of new titles from the smaller devs and publishers over the next few days. I also need to rewatch some of the trailers and gameplay of certain games to see how I feel about them now that the hype is subsiding a little. But regardless, here is my overall grade for this year's E3.
E3 2018 Overall: C+
