E3 2018 has came and went, and with it brought breathtaking reveal trailers, must-play demos, and many surprise announcements. Once again held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the three-day show featured dozens of different publishers and developers showing off their new lineup of games including Behemoths like Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation. Ahead of the trade show’s official opening, each company gave us look at what they’ve been up to. Here are the highlights: Sony Sony's E3 press conference was spot on with our predictions. With a stacked lineup of already announced games, Sony used their event stage to mainly show off gameplay trailer after gameplay trailer. We got lengthy looks at the dream team lineup of The Last of Us Part II, Spiderman, Ghost of Tsushima and even the mysterious Kojima game Death Stranding. Sony will always Sony, and provided a few surprises along the way including a Resident Evil 2 remake coming in January and an announcement trailer for Noah 2. Besides for the awkward stage transition during the start of the show, Sony left E3 with a big win. Microsoft Microsoft proved that they are listening, and went heavy on revealing exclusive titles during their conference. During their show, they announced fifty games and twenty exclusives titles including a new Halo, Forza, and Gears of War game, which is the first time all three have been announced in the same E3. And if that's not enough, Microsoft also dropped hints about its next Xbox console, saying teams are "deep into architecting" the next device. Are you ready for a next generation Xbox? We sure are! Nintendo Nintendo could do no wrong. Like Sony, they came into E3 with an already strong lineup of games announced. For the Nintendo Direct, they primarily focused on their two most hyped titles Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokemon: Lets Go Pikachu & Evee. The new Super Smash shocked fans revealing that every single playable character in the series' history will be in the game. This totals the lineup to over sixty figures. Nintendo also had a few big announcements including a trailer for Super Mario Party, Fire Emblem Three Houses, and highly requested Fortnite port, which is out now. EA Anthem and Battlefield V were the saving graces for EA's lack luster press conference. What seemed like more talking than games being shown, EA weren't able to maintain the hype like other companies. However, when we finally got a look their upcoming online fantasy shooter Anthem, we were blown away. Their sports title is always a sure win, and BFV is shaping up to be the biggest war game of all time. Outside of working on their presentation skills, EA's lineup looks solid. Ubisoft Ubisoft doubled down on sequels to their biggest franchises, and it worked. Assassins Creed Odyssey takes us to ancient Rome where we can spartan kick our away across the map with either a male or female protagonist. The Division 2 leaves the gritty New York streets for a warmer post apocalyptic Washington D.C. Finally, Beyond Good and Evil 2 is set to bring sci-fi action to a galactic scale. Ubisoft has been on a winning streak the passed couple years with major AAA titles, and they show no signs of slowing down. The Best Trailers This year, companies forgone many hardware announcements, and instead gave gamers a plethora of reveal trailers and gameplay walkthroughs to drool over. Although some titles many expected to hear updates about like The Last of Us Part II and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, fans were treated with a nearly unlimited supply of new trailers. Check out our favorites below, and tell us which games you're excited to play first. The Last of Us Part II Beyond Good & Evil 2 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Spiderman Assassins Creed: Odyssey Death Stranding Fallout 76 Cyberpunk 2077 Halo Infinite Kingdom Hearts 3 Jump Force Gears of War 5 'Anthem' Battlefield 5 Super Mario Party Ghost of Tsushima Rage 2 Just Cause 4 Forza Horizon 4 Devil May Cry 5 Destiny 2: Forsaken For more on E3, take an in depth look at 'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's biggest character lineup ever.<doc-sep>Above: A big baddie turns up in Anthem This morning in Los Angeles, Electronic Arts kicked off E3 2018 with a press conference in which they announced a new Star Wars game, an Unravel sequel, and took a longer look at BioWare’s upcoming RPG Anthem, which is out next February. It was a straightforward way to begin E3: light on major news, with a focus on games we already knew about. Here’s everything EA showed and announced. Advertisement Battlefield V gets more destructible environments and a battle royale mode. The next Battlefield game will bring back the destructive environments that DICE ran wild with in Battlefield: Bad Company. In the World War II-based Battlefield V, tanks can blast through buildings and destroy cover in real time. Also, your character can dive-roll through windows? Hell yeah man, I’ve always wanted to do that in a game like this. “No loot boxes. No premium pass,” the developers reiterated on stage. They also announced “royale reimagined” for Battlefield, meaning that Battlefield V will be getting a battle royale-style gameplay mode. I’m shocked. Shocked, I say! The developers said they’ll have more to share on that mode later in the year, and we’ll see more of the game at Microsoft’s Xbox conference tomorrow. Respawn’s Star Wars game is called Jedi: Fallen Order. Respawn’s Vince Zampella confirmed that means you’ll be playing as a Jedi, lightsabers and all. The game takes place “during the dark times” between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, when the Jedi are being hunted. Per EA on Twitter, it’ll be “an original Star Wars story around a surviving Padawan set shortly after the events of Star Wars: Episode III.” It’s coming in holiday 2019. Advertisement Advertisement Battlefront II is taking on the Clone Wars. Star Wars Battlefront II is getting a bunch of new stuff this year, including a new squad system, a new starfighter mode, a new command-post capture mode, and new heroes and maps taken from the Clone Wars. There will be new heroes including General Grievous, Obi Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker. Advertisement Unravel Two brings Yarny back for a co-op adventure, out today. It looks as cute as the first game, but has a co-op focus that has both players using their yarn abilities to swing around and avoid hazards. They were sure to stress that you can play it in single-player, if you want—the other yarn character just wraps itself around Yarny and you can control them both. The demo also had this weird bird chasing the yarn creatures around, and it was pretty stressful. Go away, bird! Advertisement EA also pulled the first Beyoncé of E3, announcing at the end of the presentation that you can buy the game... today! It’s on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Sea of Solitude is all about loneliness and depression. It’s another EA indie, this time from German studio Jo-Mei Games. The game was introduced in a winningly wandering way by writer/creative director Cornelia Geppert, who seems pretty great. It’ll be out in early 2019. Advertisement Command & Conquer is returning as a mobile game. After those announcements, EA hosted a resoundingly unexciting stage demo of a new competitive Command & Conquer mobile game. It’s called Command & Conquer: Rivals and it definitely looks a competitive mobile RTS. I don’t really know what else to say about it. You can watch a gameplay overview here. Advertisement We learned more about BioWare’s Anthem, coming in February. During an on-stage interview segment, BioWare manager Casey Hudson, Anthem executive producer Mark Darrah and lead writer Cathleen Rootsaert talked about how they’re approaching their much-hyped action RPG. They seem pretty focused on story, and Rootsaert said they’ll be adding things to the game “for years to come.” Advertisement As we already knew, the sci fi action game is designed about the “Javelin” exo suit you wear. Since your character is a person who wears the suit, you can change your suit whenever you want to fit the mission or your team makeup. So basically, Javelins are changeable character classes. There’ll be no loot boxes in the game (not a huge surprise), and there’s the expected customization options for your mech. We saw a gameplay demo that looks like the same third-person, Destiny-ish gameplay we’ve already seen. Slick though, and some pretty big bosses. I’m also happy to report that the soundtrack during the demo was synth-heavy in an appealingly Mass Effect-ish way, especially in quieter moments. Watch that demo here: The game’ll be out on February 22, 2019. For more on Anthem, read this post compiling everything we’ve learned about the game. Advertisement A few other things: We got a dramatic trailer for FIFA 19, which is out on September 28; an enhanced “Origin Access Premiere” subscription service is coming later this year that’ll give full access to EA’s big PC games; Madden is coming to PC; We got a trailer for Madden Overdrive; and EA CEO Andrew Wilson talked up their “Play to Give” program supporting various charities. And that’s it for EA! Feels like last year’s EA press conference was just last week. But no, it was an entire year ago. You are now a year older than when you first found out about A Way Out. I’m not, though. Every year, I stay the same age. Advertisement We’ll be here all week covering every E3 press conference and with news, interviews, and hands-on impressions from the show floor. Stick around.<doc-sep>Microsoft just showed off a ton of stuff at their E3 2018 Xbox press conference, including new Halo and Gears of War games, Fallout 76, The Division 2, Dying Light 2, a shiny Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, and a new samurai action game from the makers of Dark Souls. Personally speaking, I’m most excited about that last one, but there were a lot of good-looking games in general at Microsoft’s show. It was basically just a long run of trailers, but still a welcome jolt of excitement after yesterday’s sleepy Electronic Arts press conference. Many of the games shown were from third-party developers and will be available on other systems, so it’s a good idea to revisit my post from last year that broke down the various possible definitions of the word “exclusive” in this modern era. Advertisement Ready to dive in? Let’s do this. They kicked off by announcing Halo Infinite. The teaser was light on information, but showed what looked like the original Halo, some marines driving a warthog, Master Chief holding his helmet and, apparently, Chief loading an AI (Cortana?) into his helmet. No release date on this one. Ori and the Will of the Wisps still looks beautiful. We got a good look at the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, which debuted last year. Looks like the same mix of gorgeous visuals and surprisingly tough gameplay. Main question is how many times the sequel will get me to cry in the first 15 minutes. It’s coming in 2019. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a ninja game from the makers of Dark Souls, and I am excited enough for it to write a really long subhed for this entry! ! You know how I described Team Ninja’s excellent Nioh as “basically Samurai Bloodborne”? Well, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is ninja Bloodborne, and it’s actually being made by FromSoftware, the developer of Bloodborne and Dark Souls. Advertisement Hell yes. Hell yes! I will play the heck out of this, right after I finish playing all of Bloodborne for the second time. You play as a ninja with a prosthetic arm. He has a grappling hook, which means: traversal mechanics in a From game! (Not that “roll over a ledge and down to a weird platform” doesn’t count as traversal mechanics.) Also lots of sword fighting, huge bosses, monsters, and so on. Jason saw a separate demo of this game earlier today and will have more about it on Kotaku soon. He seems psyched, though. It’s coming in 2019 and will also be on PC and PS4. Bethesda gave us a first look at Fallout 76. It’s four times the size of Fallout 4, and set in the hills of West Virginia. As expected, it focuses on the years shortly after the bombs dropped. Not a lot of other details on how the game actually works, though of course my colleague Jason Schreier has already reported that it’ll be an online survival game with base-building, sort of like Rust or Ark. I’m sure we’ll learn more tonight at Bethesda’s press conference. Advertisement The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a new game in the Life is Strange universe. It looks like a charming game about a young boy with an active imagination whose stories come to life. It’s out as a free download on June 26th. Advertisement We got more Crackdown 3 Terry Crews antics. This game still looks pretty silly, as much later Saints Row games as early Crackdown. The trailer was trying pretty hard, but hey, the game lets you drive your car up a building, so whatever. As we reported late last week, the game has been delayed one final (hopefully?) time to February 2019. Advertisement Metro: Exodus is still looking nice and bleak. Nothing major or new in the trailer, just a bunch more good Metro stuff, this time in an open (or at least more open) world. Love these games; will definitely play this one, too. It’s coming out on February 22, 2019. Looks like February of next year is gonna be a hell of a month! Advertisement Kingdom Hearts 3 will have a Frozen world. The newest game in Square Enix’s extremely confusing but equally charming action series will feature a Frozen world featuring Elsa and Anna along with Rapunzel from Tangled. Last night Square Enix announced that it’ll be out on January 29, 2019. Advertisement Forza Horizon 4 takes the series to Britain, goes full shared-world. I love Forza Horizon 3 and will definitely play a new one of these games set in Britain. This one is being described as a seamless, shared-world online game, as opposed to previous games, which were more instanced and filled with AI “Drivatars.” There’ll be a 60fps mode on Xbox One X, which is nice; I love playing the third game at a high frame rate on PC. This is one of the few games at this conference that’s an actual exclusive, which means it’ll only ever be on Xbox and PC. It’ll be out on October 2, and will be included in Xbox Game Pass on the same day. Advertisement Advertisement Microsoft opened a new studio and bought a bunch of indies. They didn’t like, do any of that live onstage or anything, but they announced that they had. Xbox head Phil Spencer introduced the new Microsoft studio The Initiative, and also announced several studio acquisitions. Those acquisitions include State of Decay makers Undead Labs and Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, the second of which will be working on a new project in addition to Forza. Microsoft also bought Hellblade studio Ninja Theory as well as Compulsion Games, makers of We Happy Few. A couple of those studios had already been making games with Microsoft as their publisher. This all seems like Microsoft investing in having more in-house studios working on Xbox exclusives for the future. Advertisement The Division 2 is moving to D.C. in the summertime.<doc-sep>E3 is the biggest gaming event of the year, and while the focus is primarily on console and PC titles, mobile games are steadily becoming more and more prevalent. This year's E3 is no different, and as the conference progresses and more announcements are made, we'll be updating this list with all of the biggest Android games that are unveiled. Without further ado, here's what's been announced! Elder Scrolls Blades Although there's no denying that Fallout 76 was the highlight of Bethesda's E3 conference, one of the most surprising announcements came in the form of Elder Scrolls Blades. Elder Scrolls Blades is a first-person RPG adventure in which you play as a member of the Blades, "the empire's top agents". According to Bethesda's Todd Howard, the game will see you coming back from a mission only to find your home completely destroyed. In your quest to find out who's responsible for this destruction, you'll be sent off into exile and go through dungeons that are both procedurally generated and pre-created by Bethesda. Blades will eventually launch on consoles, PC, and VR headsets, too. Despite being a mobile game, Elder Scrolls Blades will have "console-quality graphics" and offer players a variety of ways to interact with everything. You can move your character by tapping on the screen or use virtual joysticks, combat is "all-new" and "follows your specific movements and timings", and a "town-building" mode in Blades will allow you to create/manage your own village. You can play Blades by holding your phone horizontally like most games of its nature, but Bethesda is also letting you go through the whole thing with your phone in portrait mode. Elder Scrolls Blades will later make its way to PCs, consoles, and VR headsets, but it'll first launch as a mobile title for Android and iOS in the fall. Sign up for early access Command & Conquer: Rivals<doc-sep>
Today, Microsoft held its annual Xbox E3 conference in Los Angeles. A variety of new games were announced and we got an in-depth look at Gears 5 on Xbox One X alongside other titles. You can read about everything the publisher announced at the press event below. Spencer confirmed that fifty games, eighteen exclusives, and fifteen world premieres would take place today. Halo Infinite Today, Microsoft opened its E3 2018 briefing with a teaser for "Halo Infinite" which is powered by the new "Slipspace Engine". According to 343 Industries, the engine allows for emergent experiences for gamers of today and tomorrow. Ori and the Will of the Wisps Ori and the Will of the Wisps got a stunning new trailer. The game looks gorgeous on Xbox One X and should launch in 2019. The title was confirmed to run at "4K Ultra HD" and "HDR" on Microsoft's new console. You can also fly this time around with the help of an owl companion. VPN Deals: Lifetime license for $16, monthly plans at $1 & more Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice FromSoftware revealed a new game which features an ancient Japanese setting. They're working with Activision to bring the title to gamers around the world in early 2019. Fallout 76 Fallout 76 is a massive game which is four times the size of Fallout 4. You can preorder the title on June 15, 2018. The new trailer showcased an expansive world with gorgeous visuals. Best of all, it's also 4K Ultra HD and HDR on Xbox One X. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit takes place in the Life Is Strange universe and tells a touching story between a father and son. According to Square Enix, the game will release "digitally and completely free on a permanent basis for everyone on June 26". Crackdown 3 Crackdown 3 got a new trailer featuring the hilarious Terry Crews. There's a lot of destruction and other mayhem involved. The vehicles have to be the best part though. Nier: Automata Nier: Automata is coming to Xbox One this month. The title supports 4K Ultra HD and HDR on Xbox One X unlike PlayStation 4 Pro. Metro Exodus Metro Exodus is coming to Xbox One on February 22, 2019. That month is going to be packed with games like Crackdown 3 and others. Kingdom Hearts III Phil Spencer assured gamers that the company was working with developers to make their games run best on Xbox One. After that he revealed a new Kingdom Hearts III trailer which gives you a taste of its gorgeous visuals and characters like Hercules. Sea of Thieves: Cursed Sails and Forsaken Shore Future Sea of Thieves content was teased at E3 2018. The "Cursed Sails" and "Forsaken Shore" expansions are coming to the game soon. Battlefield V Battlefield V got a new trailer which shared one of the single-player scenarios. The mission seemed grounded due to the powerful acting and music. Forza Horizon 4 Forza Horizon 4 takes place in a shared open-world Britain. The racing game also allows for different weather seasons unlike its predecessor. Lastly, the Xbox One X gets a 60 FPS mode. Previous Forza Horizon games have all been 30 FPS on consoles. The wait for Forza Horizon 4 won't be too long because it launches on October 2 this year. Studios Phil Spencer took to the stage again and discussed the recent Microsoft Studios acquisitions. The Initiative is led by Darrell Gallagher of Tomb Raider fame and is based in Santa Monica. Apart from that, great studios like Compulsion Games, Ninja Theory, Playground Games, and Undead Labs are joining the company. We Happy Few We Happy Few got a new trailer and it looks like an even bigger experience than before. The title will launch in August and supports 4K Ultra HD on Xbox One X. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is getting a new "War Mode" this winter. It looks like a more intimate and intense experience than the traditional battle royale mode. Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition is coming to Xbox One this winter and is being published by Bandai Namco. The Division 2 The Division 2 takes place in Washington, DC and forces you to prevent a new American Civil War. The gameplay featured a gorgeous Smithsonian setting and ended with the March 15, 2019 release date being revealed.