E3’s biggest hitters may be surprises

For the sort of people who still identify as “core” gamers, E3 is the big annual event that’s the closest thing to Christmas. It’s the one event of the year that elicits that child-like wonder and gets us excited about the future of big-budget video games. Every year, the same games get shown – or at least it seems that way. We get Call of Duty eleventeen, Assassin’s Creed: Creed harder and talk of how this coming FIFA will be so much damned better than the last one. But every now and then, we get a great big surprise. And it’s these sorts of games that’ll have the biggest impact.

In the same podcast that brought us Keighly’s thoughts on the possibility of newly refreshed consoles, we have one on the big hits and hopes of E3.

What game will make the biggest splash? Wow… it’s a little hard to say right now. My hunch is that it’ll be something that we don’t know about and hasn’t been announced yet. Some kind of surprise game.

We know Uncharted will be big, we know Halo will be big. Those are known quantities, we know Call of Duty will be there, there’ll be another Assassin’s… Hopefully there will be something that comes out of nowhere and just blows people away. That’s what we all live for. That’s what we love of E3, the surprise that we didn’t know was coming and blows us away.

And one of those big new splashes may be another third party exclusive. It’ll likely happen, even though just about everybody on the planet agrees that third party exclusives suck.

What third party exclusive megaton will there be… I don’t know… It’s tough because I remember there was all the drama… Tomb Raider last year and then Street Fighter… I guess there will be something like that, but I don’t really love the idea of games just being on one platform, one audience celebrating, and the other audience being upset about it.

Everyone should play great games. I can tell you a lot of the people I know who make first party games just for one system, nothing pains them more than the fact that there are a bunch of people that are never gonna enjoy their game.

The guys at Naughty Dog, they don’t like that people on Xbox can’t play their games… There’s benefits to make games just for PlayStation, because they can really max out that platform, but I think everyone as a game maker wants to have as many people experiencing their games as possible.

Maybe there’ll be a business deal that will shock people… You know, this game is gonna come exclusively for this period of time on a platform. And I think they’re cool announcements, but I just don’t know if there’s anything that’s going to shift the momentum dramatically.

E3’s super competitive and right now, is all about “winning,” which he feels is disingenuous. Instead, it should be about great games. It should be about being excited about games again.

It’s competitive and I know everyone and all the companies they love to get a deal and feel that they won E3 […] It’s a point in time when everyone wants to win, so I get it, but at the end of the day I just want to see a lot of great games, and after a year or so, so far, there hasn’t been a lot of truly amazing stuff. I just wanna be inspired and excited about being a gamer. That’s what I wanna see at E3.

What do you hope for E3…other than it not being a resounding disappointment.

Last Updated: April 13, 2015