Our Top E3 2019 Misses

XBOX

With Sony taking a year of E3 due to lack of content, Microsoft, in my opinion, really had a chance to step on the gas and capture those gamers who were thirsty for new information. Similar to how the Xbox 360 got out of the gates early, both announcement and release, it created a lead that Sony had to work very hard to catch up to and although Sony eventually surpassed the sales of the 360 it took the whole life cycle of the console to do it. The Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005 and the PS3 launched almost a full year later. It seems that they will be taking a similar approach this time to how they treated Project Scorpio. They want to be the most powerful console on the market and they want to pair this with all the features and services they have been building during this console cycle as they have been trying to play catch up. They did announce that the system would be launching In holiday of 2020 but other than that we just got some sizzle reel of gaming components and the mention that it would be using an SSD.

Animal Stopping

One of the more anticipated titles coming to the Nintendo Switch was the next instalment in the Animal Crossing series and we finally got a look at some gameplay. The game looks great and looks like a natural evolution of that series. Nothing looks overly revolutionary, just more of what has worked in the past for that series with a modern touch on the Nintendo Switch. The bittersweet here came as we were told we would be seeing this game in 2019 but at the end of the trailer they announced they would have to be pushing it back to March 2020 to fully execute on the vision they have for the series. It was assumed Animal Crossing would hbe been released near the end of the year and March isn’t too much of a delay. Although, March is already getting a little crowded because most companies are trying to get all of their games out by the end of fiscal. Investors clearly werre’t happy with the delay either as the game delay cost the company dearly in the stock price. In the morning before the presentation the stock was 45.29 and after it had dropped to the low 43’s.

Nintendont

I have loved my Switch since day one but there are some experiences that I have been dying for on the hybrid system. When the announced Metroid Prime 4 in development back at E3 2017, you knew there was light at the end of the tunnel. Then nothing at E3 2018 and then in the early months of 2019 they announced the project wasn’t going according to schedule and has been scraped and given back to Retro Studios. Which meant that we weren’t going to be seeing Metroid on the Switch for at least the first four years of the console unless we got a virtual console successor or the strongly and often rumoured Metroid Prime Trilogy. On the Nintendo Switch Online side of things the offerings for the monthly NES titles are getting pretty uninspired and they have to be seeing a lack of engagement from their data. I had two high hopes that we would see Metroid Prime Trilogy and/or new console additions to the Nintendo Switch Online service. Hopefully, this doesn’t come true but Nintendo could be holding more systems for the NSO service until closer to September 18, which is the anniversary of when the service launched and annual subscriptions will be running out. What better way to hook people in for another year then to release new content near September 18th.

Splinter Cell

With 2013 being the last time we saw Sam Fisher it seemed like we were on track to have him return. There was good reason to believe that the series was going to be announced. Ghost Recon Breakpoint was just announced on its own about a month ago which led to the questions of what that meant for the Ubisoft conference and why they wanted to get that reveal out of the way. Then in the past couple months we had received all the Splinter Cell games on Xbox with the backwards compatibility treatment along with the Xbox one X enhanced features. The timing of that just seemed to coincidental and then finally if Splinter Cell wasn’t going to be announced at this E3 then it probably wouldn’t be making an appearance on the current generation of consoles. Skipping a generation for a once loved series that didnt fail, but instead just ceased to exist seemed unfathomable. This is where we are now, and it certainly seems like we wont be getting a Splinter Cell game for the Xbox One and the PS4. Throwing salt in the wound, during the Ubisoft conference they announced a mobile game that featured many prominent Tom Clancy characters and Sam Fisher was included.

Avengers

With a game so long in the making and so long held under wraps with little to no information once we finally saw the near final product the only word that came to mind was underwhelming. It wasn’t that the game looked terrible but with a name such as The Avengers, especially coming off 20 plus blockbuster movies with some of the biggest actors in the world and some of best CGI at the time, people were expecting more, I was expecting more. I guess I assumed that the characters would look like the movie stars or at least somewhat closer to them instead we got some weird looking super heroes in my opinion. Maybe the expectations were too high since SpiderMan for PS4 was a fantastic game and they didn’t use the likeness of the movie but instead created a character that had a familiarity as well as all the other people from the universe. It could have also been that the writing in Spiderman was well done and had some weight and even though it was based off comics it had a sense of reality to it. I love the work of Troy Baker and Nolan North but they just don’t seem right for these parts as Iron Man just sounds like the higher pitched Ghost from Destiny. Finally there wasn’t a whole lot of actual game play shown, just game engine and its very unsure if this game will be a online multiplayer experience similar to Destiny and The Division.