Format: Pre-recorded studio clips linking together trailers, no interviews, “motion design is my passion” interstitial graphics

Discernable trends: British-ish locations, regional accents, Western RPGs, multi-platform releases

Notable absences: Fable, Forza, Halo, Perfect Dark

Microsoft, like Sony, shows signs of having hit a sensible and sustainable groove with its summer showcases. These are platforms in middle age, professing to be comfortable with who they are (Sony: extremely successful hardware platform; Microsoft: vast, ubiquitous multiplatform game repository) and happy to skip the suits and the live shows in favour of dress-down chats and developer-free trailers. The chief difference is that Sony is plum out of first-party material and had to pillage Summer Game Fest’s prospects for its show, whereas Xbox has more studios than it knows what to do with.

Things opened with The Outer Worlds 2, a game that’s also comfortable with itself as a slightly goofy open-world RPG and thus confident enough to spend time on a story taking heavy-handed digs at big exploitative corporations. This would feel more enjoyable if it wasn’t taking place in a showcase by a huge corporation, and in a world less abundant in corporate malfeasance, but maybe this is as close to revolution as videogames can get.

First was High on Life 2, which looks like a fairly straightforward continuation of the last game: bright colours, highly detailed animation and talking guns, paired with an iron belief in its own hilariousness. This was expressed by a mercifully brief in-universe skit that was merely dull rather than excruciating and there wasn’t any in-game VO so there’s reason to hope that has improved.

Resonance, A Plague Tale Legacy was an all-cinematic debut for a new spin on the well-regarded Plague Tale universe, although it was not itself new on account of having leaked early. It’s got a giant minotaur and what looks like some fairly unsafe electrical wiring, and apparently it’s set fifteen years before the first game rather than doing anything with the finale of the last one.

The big hardware reveal wasn’t particularly new either, given that Phil Spencer has been hyping handhelds for ages and the device itself was revealed in photos last month. The confirmation - which was also seemingly CGI, you can’t trust anything these days - revealed that it’s being produced in partnership with ASUS, which is no great surprise given Xbox’s long-standing difficulties in selling hardware and the allegedly closer eye Microsoft has been keeping on things since it forked out $69B for Activision.

Otherwise it’s about what you’d expect: a bit like a Steam Deck only running a less demanding version of Windows and supporting a range of different game stores, under Microsoft’s new We’re All About Multiplatform, Us messaging. This was delivered with a slightly unsettling intensity by Sarah Bond, Phil having retreated higher up the chain of command these days, who opted for wearing just a single T-shirt from her position in a faintly sinister grey studio filled with screens.

Her pitch for bringing together the power of Xbox and the “freedom of Windows” will land depending on how recently you’ve fought with the latter, with an uncharitable read being this will be the first console to relentlessly hype news stories about Elon Musk and beg you to sign up for online file storage. The talk of connecting players felt a bit overdone, with the stirring orchestral music building to a crescendo over chat about things like the ability to access Achievements on any platform, but multiplatform support is undoubtedly a good thing.

After the grimdark slog of Summer Game Fest, the promise of a “story-rich RPG steeped in dark fantasy” from Bandai Namco held no appeal whatsoever, but The Blood of Dawnwalker won me over: a high-fantasy Blade in which you’re a “dawnwalker” bringing down a vampire empire, which promises goofy abilities like teleportation and gravity-defying wall walks. There was still a lot of stabbing, blood-sucking and decapitation, but the countryside appeared to actually be green and we got the whole way through the trailer without a boss fight against a body-horror nightmare so that was one point to the green team.

A welcome shift back to brightly-coloured toy insects turned out to be a bait and switch for Super Meat Boy 3D. This gives one of the OG indie games a lavishly detailed 3D glow-up while retaining the mass death from rotating spikes. Ninja Gaiden 4 continued on to third-person gore with big melee weapons but it’s a fine franchise and they can at least claim they were doing it before everybody else was.

Indiana Jones got Order of Giants DLC which was a name and not much else beyond the reminder of how perfectly Machinegames nailed the franchise trimmings. Best of Reincarnation was more fighting huge messed-up monsters, but you’re a lady with a big and probably magical wolf. There are also robots. If you asked me at the end of this week to match the game to the name, or even the showcase, I would probably fail, but there’s clearly huge demand for this stuff and I hope they all find success.

Then came Clockwork Revolution, InXile’s Bioshock-ish RPG, which followed what I’m starting to worry is a trend of British-ish locations populated by sweary regional accents and scheming toffs. This was fine when it was just Fable but it’s starting to get out of hand, and it’s not clear if that’s driven by the tax credits or any recent example of national brand damage. Perhaps both.

Anyway, the trailer once again brought to mind Bioshock both in combat and aesthetic, with the toffs vs the proles and the robots, but it was also very long and spent a lot of time on character VO explaining the narrative in a way that made me nostalgic for a ruthlessly drilled associate producer reciting a glib positioning statement. Much was made of the time-bending ability, which is strikingly reminiscent of what Singularity promised if not delivered, and while it was entirely too enamoured of a swearing doll the game is clearly aiming high and I look forward to seeing if it manages it.

Then it was back to the sinister liminal space with Matt Booty to commend the studios for shipping “their most-played games ever,” which would sound impressive if you don’t know about them being included in a value-priced subscription service and also, on an additional major console besides the one Microsoft owns itself. There was the promise of more TV and film adaptations although without volunteering any detail, and it was illustrated with an incidental clip of the chicken jockey rather than a cringeworthy gag about it which I appreciated.

Grounded 2 is Grounded Again, which is understandable given that the nature of game development and doubtless is why it’s hitting early access as soon as next month, but is nevertheless a missed opportunity to go Full Moranis. It was introduced with a period TV spot for a He-Man knockoff, which felt like it was pandering to my demographic in a slightly unsettling way, but maybe tired millennials are the market they’re laser-focused on.

Cronos was third-person horror with mutant abominations which meant more gore-splattered headshots, or shots on the limbs where a head might once have been. We’ve seen it before, and we’ve definitely seen the name before, but Bloober Team have some talent and it’s still novel to be doing this sort of thing in the blasted remains of Poland rather than Anytown, USA. There were more regional British accents here, too, which I’ll chalk up to tax efficiency.

The reveal of pets in Elder Scrolls Online was nicely done but that’s at least the third time that “create your own story” has showed up in an MMO trailer this week and the trailer itself ran long seemingly just to showcase all the pet animations.

Dontnod’s Aphelion looked like Tomb Raider with all platforming and no combat, which is actually a decent pitch, although the closing reveal of Generic Astronaut Guy and non-reveal of some chichitinous alien monstrosity suggested that it might revert to trope later. A collaboration with the European Space Agency was intriguing although not expanded upon. The new Age of Mythology DLC is called Heavenly Spear, which should be safely if confusingly stored next to Heavenly Sword.

There Are No Ghosts At The Grand started out as a talky attempt to give Homes Under The Hammer the Powerwash Simulator treatment but got steadily weirder and more interesting as things developed, with musical numbers, puzzle solving, portals into a fantasy platforming realm and a dancing policeman all overseen by a talking cat. Apparently it’s cosy paranormal investigation and the cat is called Mr Bones The Bastard. Honestly my favourite reveal of the week so far.

I am also cautiously enthusiastic about Mudang Two Hearts, a big Korean production that probably had Yves Guillemot throwing his Rayman statue at the screen, combining Splinter Cell with all the other Tom Clancy games plus a dash of Resident Evil for good measure. There are zombies and a lot of brutal melee takedowns, so it’s not an entirely fresh experience, but I’m a sucker for stealth action and this is the sort of 60%-novel thing that Ubisoft used to close its conference with so it feels soothingly nostalgic to boot.

Planet of Lana 2 is Inside with a Studio Ghibli colour palette and a catblob, again. I’ve known a number of very blob-like cats and I’m sure they’ll be grateful for the representation. Bethesda is still doing Vault-Tec style adverts but the one for fishing in Fallout 76 had the spokesman acknowledging the wasteland which feels like breaking kayfabe. It also, importantly, renames the Science perk to Science!.

Solo Levelling: ARISE OVERDRIVE was another anime fever dream that turned out to be an action RPG making the move from mobile to console, although this one’s extra silly because it’s adding four-player co-op while “solo” is right there in the title. The confirmation of Persona 4 Revival is a big deal. Aniimo sure looks a lot like Palworld and a very carefully calibrated amount like Pokemon, I’m sure their lawyer is on speed dial.

Invincible VS was another very good-looking comic character beat-em-up but based on an Image licence so it’s OK to both swear and murder people. Double Fine’s Keeper was baffling but beautiful, a lighthouse traversing a fantasy world on insectoid legs, but the huge monsters all seemed to have their organs inside them and there wasn’t a drop of blood to be seen. Out in October, too.

It’s always nice to see Tony Hawk, like meeting an elderly dog from your childhood, although I would have felt less elderly if they skipped the side-by-side comparison of the Pro Skater 3+4 remake and the original, and giving the Ninja Turtles human proportions just looks a bit weird, like it’s a costume in Saints Row. At Fate’s End looked interesting: a comic-styled metroidvania with a card-based battle system in which you fight your siblings through “swordplay, dialogue, psychological insight, and hard-won knowledge of shared history,” which is obviously table stakes for anybody who’s endured family Christmases in their 30s but the game makes it look much more exciting.

Phil Spencer showed up for the finale, showing how serious he is now by wearing neither T-shirt nor even leather jacket, to name-drop the more obvious omissions of Fable, Forza and Gears E-Day which are apparently returning for the console’s 25th anniversary next year. He also teased the return of “a classic that’s been with us since the beginning”, which based on both current trends and Xbox’s unending dedication to non-existent fanbases I’m going to say is Cel Damage. Let’s circle back next year and see.

The show ended on One More Thing which was a man with the bland looks and sensible jacket of a Resident Evil protagonist, or Alan Wake’s less idiotic brother, visiting a robot manufacturer before a gravity-flipping hallucination revealed him to be… the returning protagonist of Black Ops 7. It’s on me for failing to realise we’d gone the whole show without mentioning Phil’s largest and most expensive son, but it also speaks to the range of stuff they’d shown without ever feeling like they were approaching the bottom of the barrel.

I’m broadly ambivalent about playing CoD again, but that doesn’t matter because it was preceded by a decent crop of games I do want to play, and plenty more besides. A good show, all told, and while that shouldn’t be surprising given the number of studios Xbox owns it has taken it a while to get here. The omissions are telling - particularly Halo and Perfect Dark, both of which have been the subject of gloomy news reports - but for once you can’t say that Xbox has a gap in the lineup it needs to fill. And the show didn’t outstay its welcome, which three showcases in, I am increasingly grateful for.

Rating: A

YouTube link

Vibe: The smoothest presentation, the shiniest trailers, and by the way indies are great

Format: Live stage, pro hosts, occasional guests, sparing inclusion of on-stage banter

Discernable trends: Dark Souls, horror, medieval fantasy, anime

Geoff Keighley has killed and eaten E3, and that means he inherits its problems: there isn’t the volume of triple-A games that used to sustain the show in its prime, and those that remain are so huge they don’t really need his event or anybody else’s. The solution is to pivot to the thousands of increasingly spectacular double-A games capable of delivering the trailer quality he needs, which our host made particularly explicit by putting up a GameDiscoverCo sales chart at the opener to big up R.E.P.O, Schedule 1 and Clair Obscur..

Opening with the sales figures is a classic E3 conference move so in one sense this is merely honouring the ancient rituals, but it also feels like a machine that was built for one type of warfare being hastily repurposed for a new one. A persistent talking point was listing how small each development team was (something which is not really accurate) and Geoff opened by explicitly hyping his showcases as a way for games to be discovered. This juxtaposition is a bit thick given that his ratecard is $250k per minute for the privilege, and discovery has rarely been that difficult for people with that sort of marketing budget.

To his credit, there are some free slots for small teams, but most of the games at the show had a publisher on the end-card and presumably the invoice as well - although rarely any in-person talent to talk about. The result was a show with less celebrity fluff and more game trailers, which started to feel like a monkey’s-paw wish as you hit the middle of the second hour, and regular pleas to wishlist things because wishlists are the opiate of the marketing classes and the metric by which these showcases are judged.

The first in what would prove to be a long, long list of games that resemble Dark Souls was Mortal Shell 2, a sequel to a game celebrated for its resemblance to Dark Souls and thus understandably sticking close to the model. We then had the briefest glimpse of a new Star Wars event in Fortnite before Geoff’s best mate Kojima showed up with a Dead Stranding 2 trailer in what was apparently but implausibly his first time on the SGF stage.

The trailer itself was a classic Kojima banger, being the exclusive reveal of a man called Neil meeting a woman called Lucy in an office, and telling us barely anything about either save the names of the actors playing them. Nobody else gets to spend money like this any more and we should cherish Kojima while the spell lasts.

Next was Chronicles Medieval, which sounds like a European TV show you’d find at the very bottom of Amazon Prime and is also the only two features confirmed by the trailer. A Tom Hardy voiceover confirmed the existence of stories in a medieval setting but not how they’d be told or in what circumstances, save of course that it involves killing people because this is videogames. Then came Sonic Cross Racing, which is Mario Kart but with Sonic and an extended list of Sega family friends, as if the creators of Yakuza needed a different franchise to put their characters into a go-kart race.

The success of the Sonic movies means that there’s an increasing likelihood that the extended cast of Sonic characters will be known by people who aren’t creating fetish fanart, although the game also expands the horizons of the latter by adding Hatsune Miku and Minecraft Steve to doubtless horrifying effect. The director called out Mario Kart directly when announcing cross-platform play, which was kind of adorable given that the latest Mario Kart had probably already beaten the lifetime sales of his game since its launch 72 hours previously, but it’s a worthy feature and the Sonic Racing games are always fun.

Next was another game that looks a lot like Dark Souls and turned out to be a sequel to an existing game that had previously looked a lot like Dark Souls. This was Code Vein 2, which is Dark Souls but more anime, so at least there were some clean clothes and a big motorcycle to liven things up. End of Abyss took us back to fighting nightmarish body-horror creations but in third person, and Mouse: PI For Hire took us back to first-person shooting and Troy Baker voicing things, neither sufficiently disguised by a retro-animation aesthetic.

Game of Thrones: War For Westeros was another entirely cinematic trailer which made a point of saying “this is not the game you know” and ending on “A REAL-TIME STRATEGY GAME” which felt like solving a problem that the trailer had itself created by focusing on a multi-camera 1v1 faceoff instead of anything that resembled a strategy game. There was footage of a dragon toasting the battlefield before being shot down so I guess that’ll be one of the larger battle units.

Next came a multi-hyphenate genre combination that turned out to be Mundfish’s Atomic Heart 2, which felt like one of those Xbox post-conference recap sizzle reels rather than a coherent look at a single product. There were strong notes of Titanfall, Mad Max and Just Cause in there, along with all the Soviet futurism that gave people the ick about the first game, but that was mostly trying to be Bioshock and this suggested that the sequel will continue that effort but adding more features rather than a coherent story.

Mundfish also had an equally unfathomable and CGI-rich trailer for The Cube, which is a multiplayer shooter that uses the characters and world of Atomic Heart. Based on the fetish-gear costumes and lingering crotch shots it’ll be a version of Destiny in which fourteen-year-old boys are the character designers as well as the player base, but it was another trailer that was all vibes and no detail so we’ll have to wait and see.

Geoff then attempted to hype new characters for a Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which looks like a fun game but character reveals are never exciting to anybody except the True Fans and putting them in large-scale showcases is never going to change that. Then it was back to Fromsoft comparisons with a very Sekiro-like clip of Onimusha Way of the Sword, before what felt like the show’s first sincerely novel debut in the form of muppet combat simulator Felt That Boxing. That’s it, that’s the pitch, I’ll take it.

This was immediately followed by the first bit of laugh-out-loud dissonance, with Killer Inn’s voiceover’d pitch of murder mystery deduction paired with footage of third-person mass murder. It sounds a bit like The Ship updated for a world in which everybody watches The Traitors, and looks like a sort of multiplayer Hitman, and none of those things are easy to accurately express in a trailer so I have to give them bonus points for including a lot of game footage rather than leaning on CGI.

It didn’t last. ARC Raider and Dune Awakening are both hugely anticipated online games that are all but guaranteed to be massively successful, but chose to manifest as CGI mood boards that give little idea of what the game will actually entail save that it involves shooting people. Dune could at least claim to be in line with the books and the films by prioritising aesthetic over almost everything else, but the trailer felt like an invitation to a branded experience rather than to a game I’d actually want to play.

Proceedings then deteriorated into a relentless, anime-infused mass which felt like the weebs getting revenge for those years when E3 was nothing but military shooters. Chrono Odyssey appeared to be another Dark Souls with dress-up and something about different timelines, but didn’t have a 2 appended to the title and I can’t decide if that made it better or worse. It’s somebody at NCSoft’s job to make people care about “the Blade and Soul universe” and I wish them luck, but a combat trailer isn’t going to do it. Jeff Goldblum’s VO for the Jurassic Park Evolution 3 trailer was so hilariously perfunctory it eclipsed the illogicality of his character being in any way positive about Jurassic Park.

There were some standouts. The performance-captured cloth puppetry of Out of Words and the verisimilitude of Lego Voyagers both had a distinct aesthetic, co-op play and a child-friendly focus and felt like a ray of light into an increasingly dark future in which there are only huge axes or huge eyes or both. The abundance of Unreal-engine output - emphasised further by a trailer for Unreal Fest, which was effectively a trailer for some more trailers - meant the NES aesthetic of Hollow Knight followup Mina the Hollower felt fresher as a result.

An overdone “crash” managed the one-two disappointment punch of namedropping Hollow Knight: Silksong, then revealing a new Ryan Reynolds-voiced Deadpool game… but for Quest VR. The game looks quite well done, but it’s not going to reach a big audience and having Deadpool crack wise about late capitalism doesn’t really work in an ad for Mark Zuckerberg’s previous attempt to own reality.

Dying Light: The Beast feels like a very old-school E3 game but it appeared here purely to confirm a release date, which is the sort of PR beat that only really blossomed in the age of digital showcases. I can’t describe the Mixtape any better than Nic Ruben’s “somebody else’s idea of being a teenager”, although I have to commend its resurrection of Trailer Voiceover Guy to ram home its 90s credentials. Towa and Guardians of the Sacred Tree is one for the furries and looks a bit more hardcore than the name might suggest.

Acts of Blood looks like Sleeping Dogs but leaning a bit more into the Batman combat, which I’m into. I don’t believe that anybody has been waiting over a decade for a new Scott Pilgrim game, but I’m glad it exists if only for “Playable Toronto” as a feature. The very shiny, look-how-high-fidelty-we-are trailer for MindsEye is the sort of thing that would have “won” E3 not long ago, but it’s launching in two days, the platform holders haven’t mentioned it and nobody seems all that fussed. Not a good sign.

Le Chiffre as an Elusive Target is a solid crossing of IO’s streams but not remotely worth wheeling Mad Mikkelsen out for, so I must assume that was just appeasing Geoff’s thirst for celebrity guests. Wildgate and Last Flag both appear to be going for “competent but shameless Team Fortress 2 clone” which you might have thought would cause awkwardness but Last Flag is so shameless they’re probably incapable of feeling it. Infinitesimals looks like a heavily militarized version of Antz which manage to feel like a distinctive aesthetic choice this year. Other highlights: Rise of the Deceiver was yet another third-person action game but it’s about the Wu-Tang Clan, and Into the Unwell is the same but it’s doing the Cuphead animation aesthetic which still just about counts as novel.

There was an uneven run to the finale. Splitgate 2 both highlighted and justified the night’s relatively rare developer appearances by introducing an unreconstructed bro wearing a “Make PC Gaming Great Again” hat who’d come to celebrate Halo 3, mourn Titanfall and shit-talk Call of Duty, before throwing to a Battle Royale trailer soundtracked by Imagine Dragons. This was a great way to spend a huge amount of money on ensuring that people talked about him rather than the game, and doesn’t even seem to have got the anti-woke folks on board.

A much better use of money was Stranger Than Heaven, which added a name, a new time period and a bunch of LA Noire-type mechanics to the vintage Yakuza game previously called Project Century. It’s set in 1943 and looks extremely promising. Then the big reveal: all the previous pussyfooting around Resident Evil was all a clever ruse and there was actually a reveal trailer, containing what remains of Raccoon City and a release date.

This was undoubtedly a big drop, of the sort that you feel Summer Game Fest was built to feature, and Geoff seemed to be more energised to be talking about a major big-budget exclusive after all those Soulslikes and Korean imports. Then again, maybe he was just glad the show was over. It was hard not to feel the same, and this was only Friday: the showcases would continue until morale improves.

Rating: C+

They only achieved the first two, at best, but they were fun to write, the commenters liked them and I did them every year until the pandemic paused, then killed, E3. My job then changed and I rarely had time to write anything anyway.

This year, I have a bit more time, I don’t have a new Nintendo handheld, and I’m paying attention to the showcases. So I’m writing about them again - join me.

Playstation: State of Play June 2025

Youtube link

Vibe: Live service games? Never heard of them. Check out this third-party third-person action

Format: No intro, mostly trailers with a few short asides from developers and Playstation staff

Discernable trends: Fancy lighting, bright colours, Japanese VO, swords

Sony is almost embarrassingly ahead in what used to be considered the console race and it’s been doing State of Play events for a while, so it can proceed with confidence and efficiency. That meant no execs reading off an autocue and instead getting straight to business of showing off games with the reveal of Lumines Arise. This is Lumines given the Tetris Effect treatment, which is great news for dads with reliable drug dealers.

There was big dad energy to Capcom’s Pragamata, too. It opened with an AI pitch for “Delphi Corporation” credible enough that I’d just started to worry it was serious, before it segued into some intriguingly classy third-person space exploration/combat with Grizzled Astronaut and Cute Robot Daughter in Abandoned Space Station Full Of Murderous Robots. His suit makes me think of Vanquish and the kid makes me wonder if she’ll end up being the final boss or simply need to be sacrificed to complete the game. Should be solid regardless, Capcom are on a tear these days.

The next protagonist had the misfortune to be in a Suda 51 game, Romeo Is A Dead Man, which means he has been forcibly biohacked by an off-brand Grandpa Rick into a chainsaw-swinging melee combat specialist traversing what looks like a greatest hits of classic Capcom locations. The trailer helpfully points out that this is “ultra-violent science fiction” and tacked on “maybe” to the 2026 “release date”, and the website confirms he’s searching for a missing girlfriend so it all seems fairly standard Suda stuff, glad he’s still getting work. It looks like his jacket was suede rather than leather, too, which counts as innovation this year.

Silent Hill f ditched the Silent Hill setting and headed to Japan, adding a schoolgirl protagonist but keeping the grotesque female enemies, which is just a tremendous gift to the hentai community. Looks horrifying (complimentary), I’m too squeamish to play it. Side-scrolling 2.5D RPG Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement is a remarkably dazzling upgrade from the 2019 debut, and looks like they gave the dev a bag of money and told them to add more of everything.

I’m too old to understand Digimon but I’m not convinced that the trailer for Digimon Story Time Stranger would have made much sense even if I did. Anime visuals, time travel, baffling sci-fi, jaunty music, flashy but blood-free combat, there’s a lot of character customisation and an extremely detailed skill tree in there somewhere. I wish nothing but the best to all involved. I’m the right age for Final Fantasy Tactics but I never played it, so I will merely extend the same good wishes to my generation for finally getting the remaster they have wanted for so long, and commend Matsuno for going hard on “inequality and division”.

Sony’s Shawn Benson and Sid Shuman just about fitted into the same frame to introduce Baby Steps, by far the most lavishly rendered game in which lovable sadist Bennett Foddy makes it very difficult for you to go somewhere. The trailer suggests there’s a story this time, but it’s about going to the toilet so it shouldn’t sully things too much. Hirogami is a lovely little adventure game in which everything is made of paper, Everybody’s Golf Hot Shots added a day-night cycle and Pac-Man as a playable character, neither of which can be considered essential. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is another side-scroller for the 90s kids, and Cairn is an interesting game about how much it sucks to climb a mountain. There’s a demo.

Next came the news that Digital Eclipse are doing their thing to the classic Mortal Kombat releases, which Ed Boon is delighted by. There was an entirely pre-rendered glimpse of Project Defiant which is a fight stick, but wireless, which I suspect the FGC have many thoughts about. The Snake Eater remake retains both the stealth and the goofiness, with the trailer including a lingering confirmation of the Ape Escape crossover. Team Ninja debuted Nioh 3, which continues the existing model of a samurai traversing a fantasy land messing up fantastical bosses with British accents but now with actual traversal and also, ninja moves. There’s a demo for that too.

There’s also a new Thief game for PSVR, which resurrected at least two things presumed to be dead, rising to three with the Garrett cameo. It looks great and I cherish that franchise, but I wouldn’t want to bet on a long future for any of ‘em. Nice to see some Northern representation in the voice acting and for all I know the setting, bonus marks if they get Andy Burnham to do a voice cameo.

Tides of Tomorrow looks interesting, with a sort of technicolour Ubiworld style and an intriguing asynchronous multiplayer model where you follow the steps of other players. I’m sure it’ll be at least partially undone by griefing and inappropriate usernames but the prospect of your mission being shaped by the previous actions of TrukNuts_9000 is novel.

Team Asobi’s Nicholas Doucet showed up to flex about the “few honours” that Astro Bot received, which is just a savage burn on BAFTA, and promise more DLC and a custom controller. Sea of Remnants looks like it’s gunning for Sea of Thieves, although its multiplayer pirate fantasy is going a lot harder on the fantasy than Rare did. Sword of the Sea was instantly recognisable as the next thing from the people who brought you Abzu and Journey, only with sick boarding moves this time, and FBC Firebreak is definitely from the people who made Control only with multiplayer chaos this time.

The first look at IO’s Bond game revealed that it stars an almost instantly insufferable Young Bond, who looks like they fed every online argument about who should replace Daniel Craig into an AI and told it generate an average of the white ones. IO say this is because they wanted a Bond "who's comfortably just his own game character," which is announcement-speak for “licencing the real person would be an incredibly expensive administrative nightmare and we don’t wanna”, although of course the role is currently vacant anyway.

This is a stroke of luck for IO, because they can at least partially avoid the Temu-talent dissonance that bedevilled Square’s Marvel Avengers, and given that Amazon now owns 007 there’s probably been at least one meeting about how IO’s guy can be in the movie, or at least his own Amazon Prime show. Although based on this, it would be an unwatchably terrible sequence of smirking wisecracks in exotic locations and they already have Red Notice at home.

The footage has the same jet-setting pizazz as the Hitman series - which has always been the reason I’m convinced this is a great IP/developer pairing - and it nails the film aesthetic too, right down to the gratuitous Omega and Land Rover product placement. Stealth! Shooting! The island from Golden Gun! The music from OHMSS! Chasing a plane in an Aston Martin! I suspect I’ll dislike the character but love the game, and I’ll be fine with that.

There followed a brief glimpse of Ghost of Yotei, confirming both a dog and much longer look to come next month, and a much longer look at Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, which is a new beat-em-up from Arc System Works. I’m hopeless at both playing and knowing about fighting games but it looks fantastic and that’s a dev who knows their stuff. Sony clearly wants to emphasise this, because this was the only game in the showcase which got the potted behind-the-scenes video package, although that could also be because (a) Sony owns Evo now (b) if they released it anywhere else nobody but the fighting game fans would watch it.

A decent show, all told, although some notable omissions - chief among them, games developed and/or published by Sony, rather than third parties. Kojima is understandable because he’s got his own show with his best mate Geoff Keighley on Monday, but Marathon is a little bit more ominous given that game’s recent troubles - I hope it shows up later on in the week. There was a notable shortage of online shooters full stop, which is mildly notable given that it’s still a huge chunk of the market. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft’s inevitably Call of Duty-heavy show on Saturday compares.

Overall grade: A-