Top 10 Things We Learned At E3 2016
2. VR is here to stay
We’ve seen many fads come and go in the gaming industry over the years, so it’s clear that they’re nothing new. Usually, one company will announce some new technology they’re working on, like 3D games, voice or motion-control or a new service like Games With Gold or PlayStation Plus, so the announcement of VR was no big surprise.
VR had been attempted in the early 90’s by the Virtual Boy and various other ventures, but it wasn’t deemed overly desirable as it was sluggish, massive and often induced motion-sickness; not traits you’d like to display with your latest technology.
It was perhaps surprising, then, to hear that three big hitters (Sony, HTC and Oculus) were working on VR technology at the same time with things like Samsung’s VR kit which released with their latest, massively popular, smartphone bringing VR to mainstream attention.
The clearest indicator for me, though, was Sony’s display during their conference where they showed clip after clip of different games which included big hitters like Star Wars and Batman: Arkham before announcing the release date of October 13th 2016, confirming the price of $399/£349 and then announcing there would be 50 games available for the system before the end of the year!
I’d expect a few of those to suffer delays, but 50 is a huge number! Given we’ve only seen, maybe less than half of that number, that’s a pretty exciting prospect and for my money it suggests that VR will be here for many years to come, perhaps changing the gaming industry with it, hence it’s position at number two on this list.
1. The future’s bright
When you put together everything we’ve seen at this year’s show and everything on this list, whether right or wrong, it makes for some very exciting prospects. We’ve got literally game-changing technology, the return of old favourites, sequels to others and new IPs that look simply incredible.
We’ve seen companies present their wares in new and interesting ways, they’ve improved their use of technology to share those wares with the wider world and even brought some culture into our lives to do it.
We also discovered that no company is perfect, as demonstrated by the “big three” this year and that games developers and development companies can come in all shapes, sizes and mental stabilities.
This all adds up to a future that’s filled with new and exciting adventures for all of us to enjoy. I’d say we’ve reached the golden age of E3 and I hope it can continue for a good few years yet.
