The E3 Bulletin: Monday
Doom 4! Fallout! Earthbound! Shenmue?
More E3 bulletins: Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday
The big news came, as expected, from Bethesda. The publisher made an accomplished conference debut with the expected deep-dives into Doom 4, Fallout 4, and Dishonored 2. The surprise of the latter was somewhat spoiled by their accidentally streaming the dress rehearsal on Twitch on Saturday, but it did manage to throw us one curveball with the news that you can play as either Corvo or Emily Kaldwin.
We'd already heard that Fallout 4 was launching this year, too, but it looks great so we don't mind. There was plenty of footage available, which you can find both on the site and on the YouTube channel. Want screenshots instead? VG247 has posted everything up.
There was also a look at new team-based FPS BattleCry, which is getting an open beta later this year, the announcement of an Elder Scrolls card-based battler coming later this year, and a Fallout iOS vault-management game that is out right now.
If parsing all that is a bit much, you can just watch this 90-second supercut from the video team.
Nintendo managed to fit in some surprises too, with a few reveals during the almost impossibly good-natured Nintendo World Championships at the Nokia Center just before Bethesda's showcase. Thus, the first genuine bombshell of the show: NES RPG classic Mother is coming to Wii U Virtual Console right now as Earthbound: Beginnings - the first time it's been available outside Japan. You could consider this a treat for those of us who aren't at E3, but that would be to overlook the fact that it's about as unrelaxing a game as you can imagine.
It was followed by a glimse of Mario Maker, now rebranded Super Mario Maker through the inspired decision to make the World Championship finalists play through levels created in it, showcasing the scale and flexibility of the tools provided.
The great tradition of pre-show leaks was upheld by the rather more crushing indication that Platinum's new game, which we'd almost convinced ourselves was Vanquish 2, is more likely to be a new Transformers game. Which doesn't look all that bad, actually, but we're expecting the worst given how dismal their last Activision tie-in was. Not to be outdone in failures of corporate communication, EA appears to have let slip the story details of the Old Republic expansion it will revealing later on.
Finally, one mega-tease: Sega's Yu Suzuki Tweeted a picture of a forklift truck in the E3 staging area, which is all it takes to get everybody excited about Shenmue 3. It's probably nothing, probably, but now is a magical time when anything seems possible.
Tonight the biggest guns will be wheeled out at the Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft conferences. You can find all the E3 2015 conference times here, and we'll be runnning our own liveblogs throughout.