With Big Changes, E3 2016 Was the Best One Ever

The face of the E3 2016 showfloor was a new one. For the first time in my nearly decade of attendance, walking onto the floor of the South Hall at the Los Angeles Convention Center was not greeted by EA's expansive two story booth. Activision didn't have an elaborate setpiece or any theaters - just one small meeting room (and a Call of Duty theater experience over at Sony's huge booth). Nintendo only brought one game to the show!

While leading up to E3 2016 many video game fans and journalists were talking primarily about what's next for the hardware scene (and make no mistake, the Xbox One S is very well designed and the HDR lighting on a big 4K looks great, and Sony and Microsoft's next "half-way point" systems sound awesome), it's hard to think anyone is doing anything now but celebrating the amazing year of gaming we're all about to have. Instead of the usual Thursday drain, all I saw were smiling faces. All I heard were exclamations of "best show ever" and "INSERT DEVELOPER HERE came to play" this year. I phrase it that way because you could say it about virtually every booth on the floor: these folks are making fun, engaging games that offer experiences new and old. They're refining older franchises and installing new ones. They're even making Virtual Reality mainstream, with a whole new dimension of high-end gaming.

At Ubisoft for example, one of the last publishers I visited this week at E3, they had brand-new titles like For Honor (biggest adrenaline rush of the show!) and Steep (amazing open world skiing, snowboarding, wingsuiting game), and they also showed off the next chapters in franchises old like Ghost Recon: Wildlands, and ones that are relatively new but look like the sequels, South Park: The Fractured But Whole and Watch Dogs 2 will both pay off the promise of their predecessors with deeper, more refined experiences. Add in the ubiquitous Just Dance franchise, and VR experiences with Eagle Flight and Star Trek, and you have one publisher that literally covered all the bases, and offered up nothing less than spectacular experiences all around.

EA, who opened the show with their new EA Play setup in the nearby L.A. Live in lieu of a show floor, brought less games than usual, keeping things tight, but really focusing on a player-friendly environment. With hundreds of kiosks featuring Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2 (second biggest adrenaline rush of the show!), and the next editions of Madden, FIFA (with an intriguing demo for the new story mode), and NHL, EA let gamers get in there and see exactly what they were doing new and differently. Sure, a closed-doors theater look at say the new Mass Effect or Star Wars games would not have been turned down by this reporter, but the all hands-on approach seemed to work shockingly well.

It was like that all across the board. 2K Games and Nintendo had vast, gorgeous, elaborate set-like booths, with 2K showing off Mafia 3's New Orleans and Nintendo transporting fans to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's beautiful Hyrule. Enter the creepy haunted house constructed at Capcom's booth and try not to scream out loud while playing the Resident Evil VII demo on PS VR (I played... I screamed.). Sony even set up an appointment app so attendees could play VR games and see theater experiences without waiting in four hour lines.

And then it's just the games. The PlayStation VR certainly made its presence felt, with game-changing experiences like Batman: Arkham VR and Farpoint. Elsewhere, prototypes for DOOM VR and Fallout 4 VR wowed. Then there was Halo Wars 2 and Sea of Thieves and God of War and Days Gone and Final Fantasy XV and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tekken 7 and Fullbright's Tacoma and surprise announcements like Insomniac's Spider-Man and Kojima's Death Stranding. Just read through that list of games, and the ones above it - and that's barely scratching the surface - and you're bound to be genuinely excited and hyped up for at least a few!

The games-heavy focus, the new tech, and the way that it seems publishers and developers are listening to fans more than they ever have before across the board made this an E3 that did more than just offer up some game previews, it made me fall in love with video games all over.

We'll have much more from E3, with more closed door descriptions, interviews, and hands-on impressions as the weekend unfolds.