Month: April 2021

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E3 2021 is going to look a lot different than the E3 events of years past. Rather than host a large, in-person event like we’ve seen every other year except 2020, the ESA has chosen to host a digital show featuring a number of development and publishing partners. This will give everyone the chance to see trailers and announcements online while also giving companies the freedom to run events their own way. GameSpot is also participating in the gaming frenzy this June with the return of Play For All, which includes support for important charities.

It can be a lot to keep track of, particularly if you’re used to the more rigid schedule of traditional E3 events. However, game companies have started to announce when they’ll be hosting their own events, and we’ve organized them to make it as easy as possible to plan your personalized E3 viewing party.

When Is E3 2021?

E3 2021 will take place from June 12 through June 15, and participating publishers will be hosting their own events within that timeframe.

However, we won’t be limiting this breakdown to only official E3 events, because several publishers have chosen to forgo the ESA’s structure for their own events. EA and Sony are two of the biggest players to do this in the past, and we will include their events if and when they announce them independently.

E3 2021 Schedule

June 12

Ubisoft Forward: Noon PT / 3 PM ET

Ubisoft Forward began last year after the cancellation of E3 2020, giving the publisher a chance to show off and announce its games. We actually got two separate Ubisoft Forward presentations last year, and it’s possible that could be planned again. Far Cry 6 and VR-based Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell projects are in the works, as well as the extreme sports game Riders Republic.

June 13

PC Gaming Show and Future Games Show: Time TBD

PC Gamer and GamesRadar will once again host the PC Gaming Show and Future Games Show, respectively, on June 13. These events typically have more of a talk show format, particularly the former, and focus on a variety of games. That includes lots of indie titles, and there are also opportunities for deeper gameplay dives and questioning than we typically see in the other press conferences.

June (Date TBD)

Summer Game Fest and Day of the Devs

Geoff Keighley is once again not associated with E3 this year, and has instead organized another Summer Game Fest to offer game announcements and news over several months. It’ll kick off in June, and it will also feature a special iteration of the Day of the Devs from Double Fine and Iam8Bit. This will give aspiring and established developers the chance to show off their games to the world.

Unscheduled

The following publishers have not officially announced press conference dates or presentations for E3 2021. However, they are confirmed to be participating in E3 and have almost always held events in the past.

Xbox

Microsoft’s event this year is probably going to look a lot different than in years past, and not just because of the digital format. As of earlier this spring, Bethesda is part of Xbox Game Studios, meaning the publisher’s own content will likely be included in the Xbox show instead of in a separate conference, and mentions of “summer” seem to indicate E3 is the place where it happens. That could also make the Xbox show one of the longer ones we see this year, and we’ll surely see something on the upcoming Halo Infinite.

Nintendo

Nintendo didn’t release a Nintendo Direct presentation last year in the wake of E3’s cancellation, but the company is confirmed for E3 2021 in some capacity. Its E3 Nintendo Direct events are almost always fantastic, offering big news on a variety of first-party Nintendo Switch games. With such a long period of no information on games like Metroid Prime 4 and Bayonetta 3, it would seemingly be the right time to give some updates.

Not participating

PlayStation

PlayStation was not listed among E3 partners when the ESA revealed its plans for the show. This would keep in line with what Sony has done over the last few years, as it has offered State of Play presentations without hosting a huge, blockbuster event. With the PS5 now available, however, we could see some sort of separate event.

Electronic Arts

EA was one of the first big publishers to break away from E3, instead hosting its own EA Play festivities at the same time. It isn’t clear what form that will take, or if that’s the plan, for 2021, as these events are focused more on community interaction than normal press conferences. It did still host a conference last year, however, so chances are EA has another planned for June.

Amazon has reportedly canceled its long-awaited Lord of the Rings MMO game, making it just the latest in a growing list of unreleased projects from the tech giant. However, it appears this game’s cancellation came from a contract dispute rather than any issue with creating something that met quality standards.

Bloomberg reported on April 17 that issues arose after co-developer Leyou Technologies was purchased by Tencent back in December. Amazon and Tencent could not then come to an agreement to continue developing the game, which was also being co-developed by an internal Amazon team, and this forced it to be canceled. According to a statement Amazon gave to Bloomberg, the internal team will move to other projects.

Leyou is the same parent company behind Warframe developer Digital Extremes and Gears Tactics studio Splash Damage. It also owns a stake in Certain Affinity, a studio that has worked extensively on support development for the Halo series.

Thus far, Amazon Games has a very rocky track record for actually shipping games. Multiplayer titles like Breakaway and Crucible have been canceled outright, with the latter actually releasing and then being un-released after receiving significant criticism. Two other projects were apparently canceled, as well, and the MMO New World has been delayed repeatedly. It’s now arriving in August.

Amazon is still spending a whole lot of money on another Lord of the Rings project, however. The first season of the upcoming Lord of the Rings show cost a reported $465 million to make, a staggering figure for a series that will be included free with Amazon Prime memberships.

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Jonathan Ferguson, a weapons expert and Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, breaks down the weaponry of Resident Evil 7, including the iconic Remington 870 shotgun, and the PP-19 Bizon-2 submachine gun, alongside some of the Baker family’s more unique contraptions.

By Dave Jewitt and Adam Mason on April 17, 2021 at 7:00AM PDT

When you get your PS5–if you’re lucky enough to find one–you’ll notice right away that its packaging is different from other consoles. This was a conscious decision by Sony to make the entire box recyclable, and it managed to do so without sacrificing protection.

In a post on the Sony Interactive Entertainment website, director of environment and technical compliance Kieren Mayers said that Sony has committed to eliminating plastic use in small product packaging by 2025 in an effort to cut down on ocean pollution. In the case of the PS5, Sony was able to do this by making fairly minor adjustments to the box design. In place of plastic trays are card inserts and “paper pulp cushion trays,” and the plastic cable ties we’ve seen for so long have been replaced by paper ones. If you opened up any PS5 accessories’ boxes, that change was made for those, too.

Instead of gluing hanger tabs for the outer portion of the packaging, folding techniques were used, and unnecessary plastic bags holding things like cables and manuals were removed. One feature of smaller boxes–plastic display windows–had to be eliminated outright, but we all know what a PS5 controller looks like.

Video game companies have made some steps to reduce plastic waste in the past, such as when game cases began getting cutouts and thinner materials. However, other, newer gaming innovations could come with their own problems for the environment. Streaming requires the use of remote data centers using their own power. For Microsoft’s part, it says it will use 100% renewable energy for its data centers by 2025, but others will have to follow suit in order to manage the potential harm. Sony, meanwhile, plans to achieve “zero environmental footprint” by 2050, both for its businesses and products.

The PS5 has often been almost impossible to find, but that hasn’t stopped Sony’s new system from selling a whole bunch of units–even if some were going to bots. Through five months, the PS5 is the best-selling game console in US history, both in terms of units sold as well as dollar sales.

The numbers come from the latest NPD report, which showed that compared to last year at the same point, hardware sales are up by nearly 50%. This isn’t a huge surprise, given that multiple game consoles launched and this almost always brings a big surge in sales, but it’s impressive that Sony has been able to accomplish this feat during a pandemic. Last year, several retailers weren’t even offering the PS5 in stores–aside from online order pickup–to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but this didn’t seem to be a deterrent for those who wanted the system.

Despite continuing its record-setting pace, the PS5 actually got outsold by the Nintendo Switch in March, both in units and dollars. If you look at the best-selling game for Switch in March, that makes sense. Monster Hunter Rise shot to the top of the Switch sales chart, and it’s the only non-Nintendo game on there. Given the massive popularity of Capcom’s series, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Switch take the top spot in April, too.

The PS5 has a pretty steady stream of games releasing for it over the next few months, including exclusives like Returnal and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The one area it has, oddly, lost a little value in is sports, as MLB The Show 21 is releasing Xbox and will be available on Xbox Game Pass at launch. According to Sony, this decision came from MLB itself, as you don’t have as much control over these sorts of choices when you’re making a licensed game.

Since the start, each mainline Assassin’s Creed game has typically grown in size and superseded that of the previous title, with the three games in the prequel trilogy–Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla–dwarfing all the others (with the exception of Black Flag, which continues to have one of the largest maps in the franchise to date). And though I’ve enjoyed my long journeys across the deserts of Ptolemaic Egypt, war-torn island communities of ancient Greece, and fields of Anglo-Saxon England, I think it’s time that Ubisoft created a smaller setting for Assassin’s Creed. A smaller setting could condense the overall experience of Assassin’s Creed, which would ensure certain storylines can be better realized and that players can more easily experience the best that the game has to offer.

To Better Serve The Story

Now it’s worth pointing out that I don’t think a big map is inherently a bad thing. Though I still have my qualms with the pacing of Odyssey’s story (especially Chapter 5, which can seriously drag), there’s such a sense of joy in riding your horse to the top of a hill, looking out at the glistening ocean, noticing a tiny speck of another island in the far distance, and knowing that you can set sail for it and reach it without encountering a single loading screen. Odyssey wants you to explore because your character, Kassandra, wants to explore after being cooped up on the same island for most of her life.

Of the three games in the prequel trilogy, Odyssey has managed to take advantage of its staggeringly large map size the best, utilizing a fully realized Greece to deliver on the promise of sending the player on an odyssey to reunite their biological family, only to discover that family is what you make of it–blood does not have to define it.

That’s the map acting in service to its story; Kassandra’s tale is an adventure, with some awesome side stories scattered around the vast map. There are encounters such as meeting Daphnae at the very start of the game and learning about the Daughters of Artemis, an all-women community that involves you in a a side-quest that continues until you nearly reach the endgame level cap, as well as running into and falling in love with Kyra over the course of the phenomenal nine-part Silver Islands questline. It all helps sell why Kassandra would regularly deviate from her path–which, in theory, should have been rather linear–and stretch her journey over the course of years. It’s a lifelong odyssey to discover the meaning of family, which is reflected in the giant setting that is filled to the brim with many families to meet; some are dysfunctional, others are loving, but they all shape Kassandra through the decisions you make for her, ultimately resulting in one of several possible families she can bring together by the end of the campaign.

You can’t really say the same for Origins and Valhalla, both of which possess stories that suffer a bit from the large settings they take place in. Origins is the story of a cop and his wife and how their quest for revenge twisted their actions so that they protected those in power and didn’t serve the people. The map is large and filled with many side quests and activities but rarely do they have much to do with the fact that you’re aiding Cleopatra in seizing control away from others to benefit her. Most quests actually see you aid the people, which goes against the overall story that Origins is trying to tell–only a few storylines support how Bayek and Aya are in the wrong for most of the game. But they’re drowned out; the setting is so big that it has to be filled with things to do in order to avoid having a large, empty map.

Valhalla isn’t much better. England is huge and thus filled with dozens of side activities, collectibles, and storylines that drown out the handful of quests that are tied to its overall narrative: The story of an invader trying to escape her cursed fate, only to learn that living for the here and now is a far more satisfying life than striving for a glorious afterlife. It’s difficult to invest in Eivor’s struggle to avoid her fate when she spends so much of her time across the course of Valhalla doing things that don’t relate back to that, or at the very least don’t seem to.

To Better Serve The Gameplay

And beyond just serving the story, there’s another problem that you can run into when you have a huge setting: You fill it with too many things to do. I’ve spent over 41 hours in Origins, over 142 hours in Odyssey, and just under 100 hours in Valhalla–and I’m still nowhere near close to completing all the side activities, finding all the collectibles, and meeting all the characters in each one. There’s just so much to do because a big map needs a lot to fill it up in order to not feel empty.

This problem is especially egregious in Valhalla, which actually tries to do something fundamentally different for an Assassin’s Creed game: It doesn’t tie all of its storylines and quests to symbols on a map. It’s a wonderful change that has led to some effective storytelling and sense of discovery in the game, but so much of it feels wasted in the avalanche of stuff to do.

And to be clear, I’m not even talking about the quests like finding Excalibur or lifting Mjolnir, which require you to find a lot of items hidden behind some seemingly unrelated quests. You can luck into doing that just by reading Valhalla’s Achievement/Trophy list. No, I’m talking about the really obscure things, the stuff that you will not find unless you carefully read every document and explore every inch of England.

Like, take the “quest” to discover the fate of Victus, a long-dead magister for the Hidden Ones. There’s no reason to even think the quest exists. To “start” it, you’ll need to find five Hidden One bureaus scattered across England, notice notes in each one written by some guy named Victus, discover pieces of Victus’ armor that cryptically reveal his fate is still not known, and then just think to yourself, “Ya know, I bet I can figure this out,” without any prompting from the game.

That search will ultimately require you to carefully observe seemingly unimportant details carved into random towers, do a little triangulation to find the location of a hidden well that’s not marked on your map, discover the right book of knowledge in order to unlock the necessary ability to open a secret crypt, crack the cypher on an encrypted note, and then translate some Latin.

There’s no concrete reward for doing any of this, no Achievement or weapon or anything, beyond the joy of just figuring out another piece of the overall lore of Assassin’s Creed. And there are dozens of other unmarked “quests” like this across Valhalla that you can only find and complete through careful observation and sound reasoning–some do give you concrete rewards like a powerful bow or spear, but they’re all primarily serving the purpose of fleshing out the world and telling stories. The community of players still playing Valhalla are finding new ones all the time, working together to slowly piece together more story and lore, much like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild community banded together to discover the game’s undisclosed mechanics and secrets following its release.

And I would think all of that is incredibly cool if it wasn’t for the fact that all of these storylines are so easy to miss because Valhalla’s map is massive and the main campaign is 60 to 80 hours long. That’s a staggeringly long commitment for a single-player game, especially one like Valhalla that has more maps on top of England (such as Norway, where the game begins) and will get more through DLC (like Ireland in Wrath of the Druids). So it’s not one giant map–it’s one giant map and several other not-as-big-but-still-pretty-big maps. When you hide cool questlines, lore-changing Easter eggs (like connections to every single mainline game in the series), or secret rewards (like the best piece of musical composition for an Assassin’s Creed game since Ezio’s Family) behind a towering wall of other so-so stuff to do, it’s unlikely that most of the playerbase is actually going to see them.

All that Valhalla (and to an extent, Origins) does would be better served in a smaller setting where the player can take the time to stop and really look at the world around them. So I’d love to see Ubisoft do just that, embracing less expansive locations as the settings for its Assassin’s Creed games. Plus, with the power of the new generation of consoles, Assassin’s Creed could create a small town or city setting the likes of which we’ve never seen. Instead of a massive map that captures a whole country, Ubisoft could make a super detailed location where all that Xbox Series X|S and PS5 power is devoted to creating some incredible in-game systems, like more reactive AI, a more in-depth social-stealth system, and a wider array of enemy types. And then you can also drop the cluttered assortment of points-of-interest; if an area is small enough, you can rely on environmental context clues to inform what the player should do next instead of handing them a checklist. The best quests in Valhalla could just be a staple part of the franchise in a smaller setting with less distractions.

The smaller details are what makes Origins and Valhalla such special games, Ubisoft just gave them too much room to breathe and then overshadowed them with too much other stuff to do–usually stuff that does nothing to support the underlying narrative of the main campaign. Bigger can mean better, and Odyssey is proof of that. But not every Assassin’s Creed game needs to one-up its predecessor by being the biggest game the franchise has ever seen. There’s room for smaller settings that allow Ubisoft to better support its efforts to be a bit more experimentative with the types of stories it wants to tell and gameplay it wants to offer.