E3 2021 game reveals, live stream, latest news and analysis - The Washington Pos...
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The virtual version of the Electronic Entertainment Exhibition, better known as E3, is underway, with some of the world’s largest video game and console creators set to unveil new game tiles and other updates. This is the first E3 since 2019 after the covid-19 pandemic canceled last year’s conference, usually held at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
This year’s event will be held via a series of live-streamed videos, coordinated by the Entertainment Software Association, which has overseen the event since its debut in 1995.
Launcher, The Washington Post’s video game coverage team, will be breaking down the biggest announcements from the E3 stream, with news updates and analysis from all of the major showcases from Saturday, June 12 to Tuesday, June 15.
Follow along via the official E3 stream above and join the Launcher team for live reaction and analysis around the convention’s larger announcements.
Here’s what you need to know:
• E3 has served as the setting for major announcements from the gaming world’s biggest companies. Launcher looks at what to expect from this year’s conference.
• The premier event on the gaming world calendar, E3 began after video game companies got tired of being overshadowed at the Consumer Electronic Show. Here’s its origin story and a glimpse at where it’s going next.
• Earlier this week, Xbox announced its Game Pass streaming service will be availably directly through smart TVs and phones. It’s a strategy that first emerged when it began exploring backwards compatibility.
• Saturday’s schedule began with the E3 pre-show at 1 p.m. ET. Ubisoft (maker of popular franchises Assassins Creed and Far Cry) will get things going in earnest at 3 p.m., while Gearbox (maker of the Borderlands series) follows at 5 p.m. as the last major publisher showcasing today.
• The first big announcement of E3 2021 was actually about E3 2022, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti welcoming the convention back to his city for its usual in-person format next year.
Countdowns are an early E3 trend ahead of Ubisoft’s showcase
Ubisoft’s show begins at 3 p.m. Eastern time, and the producers of the E3 show made the strange decision to showcase long stretches of Ubisoft characters slowly navigating terrain in their respective games.
A short video about how Ubisoft thinks about accessibility when producing games was preceded by several minutes of a character from “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” slowly walking through the game’s map. After the accessibility short, we saw a construction worker from “Watch Dogs Legion” slowly fly over London.
The viewer chat on YouTube is famously impatient, and this seems to be their ultimate test. Since E3′s scheduled stream start time at 1 p.m. Eastern time, countdowns will have taken up about 90 minutes of airtime, with the pre-show broadcast logging about a half-hour of airtime so far.
Whatever the case, Ubisoft’s pre-show stream seems dead set on reminding us that the company creates really big worlds for players to navigate.
E3 2021’s first big announcement: E3 2022 will be held in person
The Electronic Entertainment Expo kicked off with high energy from its hosts as some attendees (including The Washington Post) reported difficulty in accessing the portal site setup. The Entertainment Software Association said it was experiencing issues “with the portal and app platform service provider” 11 minutes after the pre-stream show was scheduled to start.
The show’s first major news came from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti who promoted his city as a hub for the gaming industry and welcomed those watching the stream to visit L.A. for E3 2022, which will be held in person.
ESA CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis then continued with remarks in memoriam to Robert A. Altman, the founder of ZeniMax Media who died in February earlier this year.
Things to watch for as E3 gets underway
With the annual video game conference kicking off today, we’re expecting a lot of big news, from new games to potential new console announcements. Before the big show even started, we got a closer look at one of the most anticipated games, “Elden Ring,” from “Dark Souls” developer FromSoftware and “A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R.R. Martin. We also now know its release date is January 21, 2022.
On Thursday, Xbox executive Phil Spencer announced Microsoft is building its own game streaming device, and working with TV manufacturers to embed Xbox Game Pass into smart sets with no extra hardware except a controller. We could hear more from Microsoft on that during its Sunday event.
Last year’s E3 was canceled thanks to the pandemic, so companies put out their gaming news via livestreams and social media posts. This year’s E3 is all digital for the first time, with a similar lineup of streamed announcements, but this time it’s been condensed into one jam-packed weekend. Without the physical booths and chances for gamers to try out games in person, as they would during a normal E3, fans will have to get their fix through game demos made available early on Steam and tune into our live coverage from streams to articles.
We’ll be reacting to Ubisoft’s event later today, Microsoft/Bethesda and Square Enix Sunday, and Nintendo on Tuesday.
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