E3 2021 coverage: What happened and what I care about from it!

     This week, I've been fortunate enough to spend some time on the beach, and though I will admit to not being the biggest fan of sand between my toes, the rise and fall of the tide is quite interesting to watch, and it makes for a nice change of scenery in terms of places to write. The sounds of the ocean make for excellent background noise as I consider all of the things being announced this week, as the beginning of the week is E3 and I will be attempting here to cover most of the things that interest me. As of the time I'm starting to write this, many of the big announcements have already been made yesterday or the day before as part of the Microsoft, Ubisoft, or Square Enix livestreams, but the big one in my opinion is coming tomorrow. Nintendo is waiting until the last day of E3 to have their presentation, followed by three hours of continual coverage on things after that, which I'm certainly excited about, but I'll get to that later. This week, I'm going to be using this post as a live journal of sorts about the things that I'm interested in that have been shown, and continuing coverage as I go along.

Summer Game Fest kicks things off!

    Before E3 technically started this year, Geoff Keighley really got the ball rolling with the kick off event for his Summer Game Fest's second year which took place on June 10. The event was first held last year when E3 didn't happen. There were a lot of indie titles announced during this event last year, as well as a few big ones such as Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. At the kick-off live event this year, there were a lot of new game reveals, updates on some titles that we've known about for a while, special guests, and even musical performances. Among the biggest reveals shown, we got a first look at a new Borderlands game called Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, which seems to be playing off of one of the DLC's for Borderlands 2 which took place inside a "Dungeons and Dragons" style campaign hosted by one of the characters. It may not be a big deal for a lot of people, but as a fan of Borderlands, I'm pretty excited for it. On top of a pretty cool concept for the game, they revealed a stellar voice cast including Andy Samberg, Wanda Sykes, Will Arnett, and Ashley Burch, which is enough to make me excited about any project. The big news from this event of course though, was that Elden Ring finally got a lengthy trailer and a release date of January 2022. For those not in the know, Elden Ring is a new project that's been highly anticipated ever since it leaked a little while before E3 2018, and has had really nothing to show since its initial teaser trailer from that year. It's a collaboration between FromSoftware (developers of the Dark Souls games) and George R.R. Martin, the writer of the "Game of Thrones" books. I must admit that I'm not a huge fan of FromSoftware's titles for the most part, but this game looks pretty impressive. It's hard to describe in words exactly what they're going for in this game, but it looks like it has the same tight focus on challenging combat and incredible monsters, while also expanding the scope to be an open-world affair. Whether it pays off or not is anyone's guess at this point, but I will say that I am certainly impressed, even if I'm not planning on picking it up myself. 

Ubisoft does their usual thing

    I want to be a fan of Ubisoft, but they've let me down so many times at this point, I just can't be. All I really want from them is another 2D Rayman game like Rayman Origins or Legends, though it's certainly not likely, especially since they closed down Ubi Arts, the team that made those two incredible games. Other people wanted to see any sort of information at all on Beyond Good and Evil 2, though Michel Ancel, the father of the project and the original game left Ubisoft last year amidst all of the investigations of internal sexism and sexual harassment in the company (though that may have just been coincidental). They once again neglected to show anything about that, as you can imagine. That being said, Ubisoft showed off a few interesting games this year during their presentation. Rainbow Six: Extraction (formerly called Quarantine, which changed last year due to Covid-19) looks like a weird zombie shooter game, kind of reminiscent of The Division 2, but with zombies. It's hard to tell if this is how it will play though, since it was mostly cinematic what they showed, but it's an interesting idea to say the least. It's definitely a change for Rainbow Six, which seems to be mostly a realistic fiction series. They also showed off among many other things some more of the highly anticipated Far Cry 6, which is coming out in the next few months, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, which is a sequel to 2017's Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, and a game based on the 2009 film Avatar (really?), called "Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora." Out of all these games, I'm really only interested in the Mario + Rabbids game, as the first one was a surprisingly fun and well made tactical RPG, even though it involved the Rabbids, potentially the most irritating thing to come out of video games in a long time. On top of promise of more fun gameplay in this sequel, Grant Kirkhope has announced he's returning to make the music for this game, which is always a good thing. Kirkhope previously made the music for Banjo Kazooie and many other Rare titles from the N64 era, in addition to writing the spectacular scores for the first game in this series.

Microsoft and Bethesda turn up the heat a bit

    Microsoft is another brand that I used to be a big fan of during the Xbox 360 era, but since then, they've really not had very many exclusives that I've been interested in. The only Xbox One game that I really thought looked cool was Sunset Overdrive (which I hope we'll see a sequel or a port for PS5 at some point since Insomniac was bought by Sony), and there were other interesting titles, I'm sure, but none of them were enough for me to buy an Xbox One at any point, especially since both Ori titles and Cuphead were ported to the Switch eventually. I'm happy for people who are big fans of Xbox though, since it seems this year they showed a lot of interesting exclusives, mostly stemming from their purchase of Bethesda in the last few months. First of all, Halo Infinite is a game that was supposed to be the big game for Series X/S's launch, but it was delayed a little more than a year to Holiday 2021, and it seems like people are very excited for it. Halo is always a big win for Xbox, and with Master Chief getting a grappling hook in this title, it looks like it'll add another layer of interesting play variety for the players. That coupled with the ability to play the Multiplayer for free is nice, though it does worry me about Halo taking a free-to-play model using microtransactions. Of course, this also seems to imply that 343 thinks that people are going to pay full price just for the campaign, which seems like a weird gamble for a game mostly focused on multiplayer gameplay. Starfield is a game that has made a lot of headlines recently, being Bethesda's next open world game, which has now officially been confirmed as an Xbox exclusive to be released November 11, 2022.  This upset many Playstation fans, understandably, though wasn't a huge shock considering just how much money Microsoft spent to purchase the studio in the first place. Let's hope that "Elder Scrolls 6" won't be exclusive for just one console, but I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if that is the case. Speaking of other Bethesda Xbox exclusives, they announced a new game from Arkane Studios called Redfall, seemingly a co-op 4 player shooter in the style of Left 4 Dead, but instead of zombies like in that game, it looks like you're against vampires, and you have pretty distinct skills based on which character you're playing. It looks like a pretty interesting time, and it's coming out tentatively in the Summer of 2022 according to the trailer that they showed. There was also the Forza Horizon 5 reveal which doesn't really interest me, but it looks very pretty and I'm sure made the racing fans out there really excited. I'm happy for them, certainly, it's just not my cup of tea. Overall, Microsoft had the most solid conference (before I saw the Nintendo presentation the next day), I think that's fair to say, even though I personally wasn't very interested in much that they showed.

Nintendo always makes me happy!

    Nintendo's press conference is always a big deal because, as you have probably noticed from my blog up until this point, I'm a huge fan of Nintendo games. I'm incredibly excited about the games that were announced here, to the point where, for me, Nintendo really had the strongest showing out of E3 this year. Right out of the gate, Kazuya from Tekken was announced for Smash Bros. Ultimate, meaning there's only one DLC character slot left, so who knows who it's going to be? A new "Mario Party" was announced, Mario Party: Superstars, which brings back some original game boards and minigames from previous games, including Peach's Birthday Cake from the original and Space Land from Mario Party 2. They announced a new "WarioWare" game, WarioWare Get It Together, which is the first game in the series since Gold in 2018, which was just a compilation of previous titles in the series. A new 2D Metroid game was announced, which is the first original 2D game in the series since 2002 when Metroid Fusion came out for the Game Boy Advance. It's crazy, but this is considered "Metroid 5," following the lineage of the original Metroid game for the NES. Metroid Dread has been a long time coming, but with the partnership between Nintendo and Mercury Steam (which also created Metroid: Samus Returns), the game looks really good and is coming out in October along with Mario Party and several other titles that were announced. The first two Advance Wars are also getting remakes for the Switch, hopefully making the tactical RPG fans happy, even though a new Fire Emblem wasn't announced. They also announced that they're bringing back Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and Deluxe for Switch, which is pretty exciting, as Super Monkey Ball 2 was the second game that I ever got for Gamecube. The biggest news that came out today though was the new look at the sequel to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This game truly looks pretty crazy, it looks like Link has a cyber-arm this time around, or something like it, which seems to allow him to rewind time for a spike ball rolling down a hill, and also seems to allow him to do many other things, like teleport to different segments of the world in what looks like a raindrop. Time travel looks to be something explored in this game, as well as some form of sky exploration with floating islands reminiscent of Skyward Sword. This game seems super weird, and I'm really excited to see what the bizarre and seemingly distorted world of Hyrule holds in this sequel when the game is finally released sometime in 2022.

    E3 is always an interesting time, and has long been referred to as a "gamer's second Christmas," which makes sense, though instead of getting presents, it seems like the industry is taking money directly out of your pockets. While this year's show wasn't a super great time for a lot of people, I feel like I'm pretty happy with all of the announcements that we got this week. I won't be able to play any of the stuff from Microsoft's conference for a good little while, but I also wasn't super interested in it. I didn't see much of Square Enix's presentation, though I know they're making a Guardians of the Galaxy game, which I'm honestly not expecting a whole lot from, but hopefully I'm wrong. They also announced a new Final Fantasy game which plays more like Dark Souls from what I've heard so far, which will hopefully be good. Capcom showed off nothing new, only things that they had already announced, and truly it seems like they shouldn't have had a presentation at all, considering how much money they probably had to pay to have that time. E3 is always a fun time even when times aren't super exciting overall, and this year was no exception, I hope that everyone was as happy as I was for all the different reveals.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! I'm sure that I didn't cover everything, but I tried my best to at least touch on most of the big things that were announced during the last few days. If you liked something that you saw that I missed, please let me know in the comments, I'm sure there were lots of cool announcements! I've been your Self-Proclaimed E3 coverage reporter, and I'll talk to you again next week.