The week that would have been E3 2020 is just about over. Despite not having an actual, proper event, several different companies have put their own individual presentations. I debated covering all of them, but decided that I would only focus on the ones that I was particularly interested in, which are the same ones that I did predictions for. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything good shown at the other shows (Persona 4 on PC!) but I just wanted to focus on stuff that would have been in a normal E3, for the most part. And so, let’s talk about that Future Of Gaming show that Sony put on.

From a presentation standpoint, I quite liked this show. It was mostly pretty simple, showing just game after game, occasionally stopping to have a little bit of words from the developers. It would also stop every once in a while to show these weird animations featuring the symbols found on PlayStation face buttons, for some reason. I could have done without those. But regardless, the show had a great pace, never slowing down to bore us with sales data or tech talk that would go over my head, or whatever else. I liked it.

The show opened with the announcement of Grand Theft Auto V getting ported to the PS5, showing only PS4 footage. This was absolutely baffling. I spent the entire trailer waiting for it to transition into a GTAVI reveal, but that just never happened. Thankfully, after that, things went much smoother.

Now, like with all my E3 posts, I’m not going to talk about every single game that was announced, I just want to highlight the stuff that stuck out to me. I’m not a news source, and you shouldn’t come to this blog to find every announcement ever. The first thing that got my attention was Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

This new game is on a smaller scale than the 2018 Spider-Man game, but seems to feature very similar gameplay. Since I’m writing this a few days after the fact, we’ve had that all clarified a couple times. Is it an expansion? A full length new game? Nope, it’s a standalone game. Cool. Miles is a cool character in the comics, and the previous game set him up for his own adventure, so I think this could be really cool.

If there was one game that clearly was demonstrating a generational step forward, it was Ratchet And Clank: Rift Apart. The big gimmick of this game is dimensional rifts, and fluidly moving through them without any loading. It’s all really impressive, and the shear amount of chaos on screen was a delight. I’ve never actually played any of the games in this series before, but this might be the one that I jump onto.

Of all the games shown, Resident Evil 8: Village (Or Resident Evil Village? Or whatever it’s properly called) is the one that I’m most looking forward to playing. I’ve been a huge Resident Evil fan ever since the remake of the original game on the GameCube, and I’m constantly impressed with how often the series can recreate itself. From the original tank controlled games, to the behind the back but still horror based, so straight up action games, to a return to something closer to the original but in first person, the series is never afraid to try new things.

Thankfully, they’re keeping to the first person view from 7, something I was worried we’d be losing thanks to the success of the RE2 and 3 remakes. But, this game seems to be based more on the occult, specifically werewolves and witches. I’m sure it’ll end up being bio-weapons, it’s still Resident Evil, but having drastically different enemies than zombies is pretty exciting. And yes, I know 7 didn’t have zombies, but they did have those weird sludgy monsters that basically functioned the same.

There was a lot of games announced here, and the vast majority of them looked really good. Some other quick call outs would be Hitman 3, a sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn called Forbidden West,  Square Enix’s new IP Project Athia, and a cool little monster hunting game called Little Devil Inside. Overall, this was one of the better shows for just pure volume of good looking video games.

And then there was the hardware reveal. The design of the console has been very polarizing,  and I’m firmly on the side that it’s really ugly. It’s a big black and white tower with these weird fins sticking up from the sides and a lump on one side for the disc drive. There is a digital only option that removes that lump, which looks a lot better since it’s much more symmetrical, but I still think the whole thing looks really silly. Also, I’m going to want the option for discs, so I’m stuck with that weird lump.

Overall, this was a fantastic showing from Sony. We’re still waiting for a release date and a price, but there’s a lot on the PS5 to be excited for.

As I always do with E3 posts, I’m going to end with results on my predictions. As of now, I have zero correct out of three. I was almost right with my Horizon 2 prediction, but I said it would be a launch title, and no date was given. Come back in like a week to see how I did after EA Play 2020.