E3 2011: Who Won? My Verdict

In all honesty, this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo has actually been a bit of a disappointment, highlighting the ever-more prominent shortcoming that developers want to announce games earlier in the year to raise anticipation for their E3 showcase rather than bring the announcement as a surprise at the conference. Part of this is due to the possibility of leaks, as Microsoft unluckily discovered just hours before their showing when its entire contents accidentally spilled onto Xbox.com (can you say "oops"?), but more than ever it's the fear of being swallowed up in the week's line-up and losing potential consumers in the process. Trouble is, if everyone goes by this theory then barely anything new or unexpected is announced, and that's almost exactly what the first party companies Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo ended up doing, showing us software and hardware that had already been teased, leaked or formally announced before this week. And if we're being really picky at what was 'new', the much-hyped WiiU seems to be little more than a Nintendo Wii with HD graphics that will surely be matched or topped by the next Xbox or PlayStation, while the PSVita was really just an overly expensive PSP with improved visuals likely to suffer the same software shortage as its predecessor midway through its lifespan, and anyone that could call Kinect Fun Labs, Fable: The Journey or Kinect Disneyland Adventures a genuine reason to entice hardcore gamers to buy Kinect needs to have their mental stability checked. In fact, I might go so far as to say that it was the third party developers who 'won' the show (and I'm not the only games blogger who sees it that way)- after what we saw of Modern Warfare 3, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Battlefield 3, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City and Tomb Raider, not to mention the stunning Mass Effect 3, all multi-platform games developed by smaller branches of the video gaming world, there are very few people who wouldn't place those titles in their Most Wanted lists alongside or perhaps above Gears of War 3, Halo, Uncharted 3 and Zelda: Skyward Sword based on their footage, and to me that, coupled with the huge show-stealing cheers Arkham City and Creed got when they were announced for the WiiU line-up, suggests this was the year for the somewhat lesser-known companies to step in and show their best stuff, something which each of the three big names failed to do in one way or another. I'm not dismissing this year's E3 as a failure, though, quite the opposite: this was a great opportunity for third-party developers to take the helm and prove their worth, and if anything it'll probably convince Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to kick things up a gear next year.