Differing greatly from the hardware focus of the Microsoft conference, Sony's PlayStation showcase ahead of this week's E3 expo followed the blueprint it laid out last year: lots of exciting footage, minimal talking, incredible theatrics and very few concrete details about when we might play the new games.
Unlike last year, however, the vast majority of the games shown have been previously announced — many of them at last year's conference — so the impact was somewhat dulled.
The PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation VR are at the forefront of games technology, said CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America Shawn Layden, but "it all comes back to games", and so that's what the company showed. Blending a massive screen and 3D projection backdrop with physical objects and theatre techniques, Sony delivered more than an hour of almost back-to-back game trailers accompanied by everything from live music to pyrotechnics to sand artistically falling from the roof.
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy was given a lengthy trailer ahead of its August release, focusing on the tensions between protagonists Chloe and Nadine as they search for the lost tusk of Ganesh. A first look at new content for the previously released Horizon Zero Dawn is also coming this year, with a trailer showing Alloy travelling to a snowy kingdom.
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Many big games announced at previous Sony E3 conferences returned with fresh trailers:
- Days Gone's 'bikers versus fast-moving zombies' post-apocalypse was noticeably smoother this time, with a trailer showing the player using the horde's bloodlust to his advantage.
- Another protagonist in the choose-your-own-adventure android uprising game Detroit: Become Human was revealed.
- More details on the adventures of a beardier, more fatherly Kratos in the new God of War, including that it will be out in 2018.
- A long and excellent gameplay demonstration of Insomniac's Spider-Man game, which is also due next year.
Two PS4 games were shown that had not been previously announced, both appearing to be new entries in fan favourite series and both set to arrive in 2018. Monster Hunter World marks the first time a game in the infamously complex RPG series has come to a Sony platform since 2011, but looks very much in the same vein as recent entries on Nintendo hardware. Meanwhile a game called Shadow of the Colossus was also briefly shown, featuring locations and creatures from the 2005 game of the same name. Since that game already received a HD re-release on PS3, it's safe to assume this is a ground-up remake.
A section in the middle of the conference was dedicated to PlayStation VR games, including a virtual reality version of 2011's Skyrim, a fishing game set in the universe of Final Fantasy XVÂ and a game called Moss starring an extremely cute mouse with a sword.
The most intriguing PSVR reveal was The Inpatient, a psychological horror from the makers of Until Dawn, set 60 years before that game. Players take on the role of an amnesiac in a sanatorium, trying to piece together what's happened to them.
The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Ubisoft.
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