The E3 Bulletin: Friday

This is the final E3 bulletin of 2019. Previous entries: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

Well, that was E3 2019. What have we learned? Top of the list: not having a Sony conference didn't make all that much difference. It is possible to predict 75 per cent of what would have been shown with 100 per cent certainty, and not mourn its loss: The Last of Us 2 is not going to be any more desirable, Death Stranding is not going to be any more comprehensible, its supporters all came out to stan for it regardless, and it will have saved a six-figure sum which it can put towards Kojima's tab at Forbidden Planet.

The main victims of its absence are VR gaming - as a concept, pretty much - and Call of Duty, it being most remarkable that the latter is literally written on the side of the LACC but almost nobody has bothered to talk about it. Everybody else has done fine: we've got some brand new games to look forward to, new reasons to look forward to those that we already knew about, and just about everything is coming out in the next 11 months. That's good news all round, although on the final day there was a noticeable lack of attendees all round, which might be causing the ESA concern.

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