The E3 bulletin: Thursday

E3 Thursday is the party drawing to a close, when you know you've had the best experiences already but can't resist sneaking in an extra drink or harvesting one of the remaining snacks that's been sat around for a while but is still mostly good. We refer, of course, to The Last Guardian, which retains gourmet flavour but is showing its age more than we'd like.

The future of the Xbox One remains this year's designated talking point. Phil Spencer pointed out that comparing it to Apple doesn't work because Microsoft doesn't make any money by selling Xboxes. Jim Ryan said Sony wasn't wasn't talking about Neo because it wants to focus on the games, and Andrew House said that Spencer's move was "surprising", which is a pretty weak burn by executive comment standards and likely because he knows that he's going to be having the same conversation about PS4 Neo very soon. Yosp said that everything on the show floor was running on a stock PS4, though, so you can look forward to experiencing The Last Of Kratos without having to upgrade.

Sony was happier to zing Konami, though, pointing out that restricting Kojima was "probably not a wise thing to do." We look forward to Kojima enjoying the same rigorous deadlines currently applied to Kazunori Yamauchi and we're sure he is too, although for now he's mostly talking about how how conference hit Death Stranding is about rope, and is sort of an action game, but also not. Good to have you back, Koj.

Elsewhere on PS4 Bethesda is bringing Fallout 4 mods across, but with a fairly robust set of limitations. God of War 4 has sent Kratos' voice actor to a nice farm in the country to have gruff conversation with Michael Ironside and David Hayter. It was almost set in Egypt, too, but that was deemed to prove too much of a distraction for the deep emotional background of a man who murders things with an axe.

In gloriously unserious business news, Devolver is engaged in a turf war with E3's organisers, and has deployed a huge balloon to ensure it remains visible in its traditional spot over the road. Other publishers are being less confrontational, but reckon that E3 might need to change to suit the fans, which further suggests that next year will Go A Bit Gamescom.

Back inside deodorant-deficient the main halls, we have learned that Bethesda's next two games are big, proper RPGs so the wait for Elder Scrolls 6 should be bearable. There are some new instruments for Rock Band, which seems a touch ambitious. The new standalone version of Gwent is extremely good, the hugely promising Sea of Thieves a is launching in February, and the Crash Bandicoot remake is being made by Vicarious Visions, which must be a nice break from the Call of Duty DLC gulag. Still, could be worse - they could be developing mobile games. Meanwhile Rock, Paper Shotgun continues to ruin everybody's fun by pointing out that maybe the enthusiastic men in the conferences weren't being entirely scientifically accurate.

That's it for the penultimate day - we'll have the final sweepings tomorrow, and then it's lights on, hoover out, and deciding that we're not going to bother cleaning Reggie before putting him back in the shed because he'll have to announce the NX pretty soon anyway. You can find the remaining details on our E3 guide.