Square Enix took to the stage at E3 today with news on games both known and unknown, as well as announcing two mysterious 'in-progress' projects.
The press conference kicked off with a trailer for Just Cause 3, and between it and the one shown a few minutes later we're certainly not going to be short on video game explosions when it releases. Avalanche Studios were there to speak about the game and how they want to make it the best of the series up to date, listing the addition of a wingsuit and improvements to the grappling hook as things they'd done to work towards that. The second trailer also showed off a bunch of crazy stuff you can supposedly do that looked amazingly fun. The game will release globally on December 1st for Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC.
Rise of the Tomb Raider also had a trailer shown during the conference, with a behind-the-scenes section on how they worked to make Lara as lifelike as possible also being shown. Not to everyone's interest, but damn that detail was pretty. Tomb Raider also showed up in a new mobile game announced for phones and tablets - Lara Croft Go.
Deux Ex: Mankind Divided was also there, with a release time of somewhere around the early part of 2016 being announced as well as the platforms of Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC again. There was a reveal of what they called the first "in-game" trailer and we were informed that the game was built in a new game engine and focused around the 'evolution' of the main character.
One franchise I hadn't expected to see make an appearance was the Hitman series, and a new digital game was announced. The new Hitman game will release on December 8th and will feature new quests added regularly that have a time limit before the target vanishes and even if you do kill the target the way you do it will effect what new options become available in future. The game will apparently be updated depending on player feedback as well, which is interesting.
The two mystery projects both looked interesting, with one being announced as a new original RPG and the other showing nothing but a short trailer. The one with just a trailer was by Platinum Games Inc. and called "NieR New Project". The game itself was stated to be in a very early state of development so we didn't get many details about it during the conference. The other project was called "Project Setsuna" and was being handled by a newly formed studio - Tokyo RPG Factory. Again, details were sparse. Platinum did choose to make their presentation memorable in quite a unique way though...
... Dear lord. o.0;;
Obviously as one of Square Enix's biggest franchises Final Fantasy was incredibly visible. As well as showing off the Final Fantasy VII remake that was announced last night at Sony's conference again (with a promise of more details coming this winter), a 'Final Fantasy Portal App' was announced to be coming to devices this summer. It apparently acts as an information database for all things Final Fantasy. Finally the Final Fantasy game that had the most time given to it was World of Final Fantasy, a game with cutesy style characters (which can convert to 'proper' sizes too) that was intended as a way to help new players get used to the Final Fantasy universe without overloading them with the history of it. That'll also be releasing sometime in 2016.
Kingdom Hearts was also there, much to the happiness of the crowd (you could hear the "YES"es on the stream!). Two games were announced, for Kingdom Hearts Unchained Key, a mobile platform game that will be released in North America (no mention of Europe) and will link into the story of the other game: Kingdom Hearts 3. The trailer for that game was full of colourful scenes, fights, ridiculous moves (they included a train and TEACUPS for god's sake) and a game of chess. Really.
A new Star Ocean game was also announced, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness. Trailers were shown that included actual gameplay footage and a lot was made of the fact that everything was programmed to be seamless - no loading, no jumping from the action. There will also be two types of cutscene, the traditional one and 'dynamic' cutscenes. The game will release in North America and Europe next year.
The conference ended with a trailer listing all we had just seen with the creators coming back on stage to take one last bow. All in all, the conference contained a few surprises but was pretty much what was expected and because there was so much squeezed in, nothing really got a lot of focus which seemed a bit of a shame.
Watch it below: