E3 is nearly upon us! Over the past few weeks we've seen a couple of leaks and more than a few teases, and we've done our own fair share of speculating. So, we’ve gathered our predictions for the biggest videogame show of the year—some are bold, some are obvious, but none have been completely pulled out of thin air.
We’re already in Los Angeles to cover the show as always, so if rumors and wild speculation aren’t your thing, hold tight. In the meantime, tell us in the comments what you expect to see, how wrong we are, or if we just plain missed something. There’s still a few hours left to argue.
Expect to see a lot of Destiny 2. With a beta planned for its September release, you can bet Activision pushes Destiny 2 hard, ideally showing off new classes, planet designs, enemies, and maybe even teasing a raid. The best surprise would be an update schedule that details how often new stuff, big or small, comes to the game.
An on-stage Destiny 2 PC demo will be interrupted by a Windows Creators Update pop-up. It’s not the kind of raid we want to see, but it’s the raid we’re expecting to see.
BioWare will tease its new thing, possibly the rumored KOTOR game. Note that, even though it seems pretty soon to announce big new games after ME:A, different teams are working on the "new IP" they’ve talked about and that rumored Star Wars game.
Call of Duty: WWII will have a Battlefield-scale multiplayer mode, vehicles and all. We know it’ll be at the show already, but the latest Call of Duty might surprise people. Sort of. I mean, the only footage we’ve seen of the multiplayer so far is a couple dozen soldiers on a shoreline. Large-scale battles are heavily implied, which would require a big map, and to get around that big map, vehicles would probably cut down on travel time. Tanks, planes, and tiny motorcycles could change the way we 720-no-scope forever.
Boots will be present and, surprisingly, on the ground. We have a feeling in our collective viscera.
We’ll get a glimpse at what the Dark Souls devs are working on now. With Dark Souls in the rearview and three projects in the works, chances are one of them is at least ready to tease. Our bet is on the next Armored Core, which Miyazaki told IGN about late last year. It could also very well be another Souls-like game, since From Software already has a speedy development pipeline in place, putting out the entire Dark Souls trilogy (including Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne) in less than 10 years, but let’s hope they try something new.
A Star Wars game that isn’t Battlefront 2 will be teased with a scripted demo. Battlefront 2 is due this year, but to coincide with the yearly movie release schedule, EA will probably at least want to tease a new Star Wars project for next year. Respawn’s Star Wars game is probably too early to show off, but we saw Visceral’s game in motion for a minute last year. And a year is probably enough time to script a short demo sequence. It’ll have the unnaturally smooth camera control all live demos do, some explosive moments, and it’ll end with an offscreen line from a familiar character. The crowd will pee a lot in their pants, and the Star Wars logo will hit the screen with an inaudible thwack as the subtitle fades in beneath: A Gungan’s Choice.
Letting the public in will turn the show floor into a Cronenberg nightmare. We’re happy that anyone can experience E3—the long lines, the miasma of sweat, the omnipresent pulse of EDM somewhere in the distance—but a crowded show floor is never a fun thing to navigate, even if you’re there for fun.
Cyberpunk 2077 will be a no-show. During a financial results conference earlier this year, CD Projekt Red president Adam Kiciński outlined the staggering ambition behind Cyberpunk. He claimed it was still a ways off from a proper reveal and that, “This year belongs to Gwent. This year we'll be communicating Gwent." It’s safer to expect the reveal of the first Gwent campaign, if anything, especially because the open beta is nearly here.
Ubisoft will announce a bunch of new, systems-driven sandbox games at once. With most of the other publishers, we have an idea of what they've got coming up this year—but not Ubisoft. South Park and Star Trek Bridge Crew aside, there's little else on their schedule, and typically a Ubisoft year will see three or four big hitters come to PC. Presumably, they've got a lot to show off at E3.
We'll probably see any two of a new Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed and Far Cry at E3 this year, along with an all-new series of some description. We know that the next Assassin's Creed (probably called Origins and set in Egypt) will be the first of its games to move away from scripted narratives. That's a dead cert for E3, then, whether it comes out this year or early next. But they're bound to show something else off on top of that.
The PC Gamer editors will try to sneak into the Nintendo booth. We need to find an excuse to write about the new Mario game without losing our credibility in public. Look for an unnaturally tall man in a trenchcoat claiming to be from ‘LegitimateNintendoGameWritersForReal.com’.
AMD will launch RX Vega. Technically this won't happen at the show, but Vega will show up in a bunch of booths and demos, boasting better DX12 performance than any other graphics chip. Expect to see it paired with Ryzen 7 for the one-two punch.
Wolfenstein is going to be the game of the show for Bethesda, and it's going to be the most promising shooter of the show. Machine Games really surprised us with the thoughtful, serious alternate history Wolfenstein: The New Order, and its success and praise will mean Bethesda gave them the freedom and confidence to be bold with their follow-up. The story, though, is a big question, given how things wrapped up last time. Maybe we go back in time to hang with Baby Blazkowicz?
The Evil Within 2 will be Bethesda’s second big announcement. ZeniMax still owns Tango Gameworks, and we haven’t heard anything about what they’re doing since The Evil Within, which released in 2014. Three years is enough time to mostly finish banging a new horror game into shape, and a job listing hinted that this one was on the way.
Finally, neither of those games will be Bethesda's big money maker. They'll surprise announce another free-to-play mobile game in the vein of Fallout Shelter—we'll call it Elder Scrolls: Dwemer Halls—and it will be available the day of the show for mobile and PC. It'll make a billion dollars.
Terry Crews will be back to play a multiplayer game on camera, but his K/D ratio won’t be hell. The guy built a PC with his son, so surely he’s had some practice by now, right?
A new BioShock will be announced. OK, so this one’s a big bet, but a few years back, 2K confirmed that they weren’t giving up on the BioShock series just because Ken Levine was. 2K Marin has “shepherding” the series from here on out, and it might just be that they’re ready to show off, or at least tease, what they’ve been working on. If we’ve been to the bottom of the ocean and suspended in the sky, then next logical setting is rural Idaho.
A press conference will feature uncomfortable silence. Or just the bone-chilling screams of one extremely enthusiastic person.
Nvidia announces GTX 1180. It's a long shot, but then we weren't really expecting the Volta GV100 to be revealed at GTC. Last year the GTX 1080 and 1070 followed the GP100 announcement at GTC by just a month or two, and even though the GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp just came out, Nvidia might surprise us. It's either that or a machine learning monstrosity will arrive at E3 and kill everyone.
Halo 6 will be the big franchise focus for Microsoft, and they'll talk about making a bigger, better campaign and building on Halo 5's pretty damn good multiplayer. This is the one game where the PC might get a little special attention: they'll talk about how great it is to finally have Halo on PC again, and that'll include a little talk about aiming with keyboard and mouse and gaming at 4K 60 fps.
Snoop Dogg will bring blunts for everyone. It’s only fair.
Crackdown 3 will finally resurface. The trailer will show off plenty of mayhem, lots of jumping and promise a holiday 2017 release date. Microsoft's talk of how Azure servers allow for insane destruction will not return to this year's show.
Sean Plott will win our hearts and minds. We're back at it again with the PC Gaming Show, our E3 showcase of upcoming games, hardware, and undiscovered projects. Get the lowdown on what to expect right here.
