Here Are The Only Five Things You Need To Know From This Year's E3

A few signs of hope from the lackluster trade show.
















FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP / Getty Images











In many ways, E3 is an annual reminder of the game industry's worst impulses. Giant, sometimes monolithic, and often short-sighted corporations bombard the gaming public with assembly-line products saturated for no good reason with graphic violence and objectified and powerless women. This year was no exception. The big press conferences held over past two days were simultaneously unendurably loud and unendurably dull, a grim dump of guns (guns), germs (zombies), and steel (cars), mostly bereft of new ideas, plopping on impact like so much lazy profit motive.

And yet. Amid the litany of indistinguishable turds shone four potentially great new games, and one essential remake. These five titles, all of which should be released in the next two years, represent the flame of creativity, burning wondrously, if faintly, even at the dark center of the craven and juvenile spectacle in Los Angeles. These five titles are vastly different, but each one says: Take heart.

















No Man's Sky, a huge game from a tiny company.


















Hello Games is a studio of four located in Guildford, a small city in England — a typically modest profile for an indie game company. Yet the electrifying first two trailers the company's made for its new game, No Man's Sky, have engendered hype more befitting of a game built by a team of hundreds. You really just need to watch the one above to understand why.

What we've seen of No Man's Sky seems to smartly synthesize so many of the good ideas and mechanics that indie games have popularized over the past five years, things like procedural generation, a Day-Glo color palette, and permanent death. But it also refurbishes a beloved though out-of-favor genre — the first-person space combat game — and it's this twist that I believe gives the game the chance to be truly unique.

Hello Games has made some big promises about this game that have played like catnip to a gaming public starving for new ideas. Frankly, if this one is a small fraction as compelling as its trailers, it will be one of the best and most compelling games to come along in quite a long time.







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