The annual celebration of the gaming industry was pretty low key this year. A lot of games were introduced but a few ‘unexpected’ events occurred, contrary to their tradition. The main focus of the event were trailers and very elaborate and long ones at that.

Every year however a game developer ‘wins’ E3 with their fascinating reveal, so this article will highlight three of the most noteworthy for you to decide on your own.

Electronic Arts

This game developer’s press conference featured a host who kept repeating the words ‘you guys’ as they were feeling the anxiety themselves while revealing Battlefield V. The gist of their announcement was that the game would not have loot boxes and premium passes, which received with a thunder of applause from onlookers.

They announced a battle royale mode too, but like recently in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, they had nothing to show, making it feel like a last minute addition designed to cynically role with the battle royale announcement.

EA’s Andrew Wilson also talked about the new cloud-based streaming, which will let you “play games anywhere, anytime.” Next Respawn’s Vince Zampella popped up as a showstopper to tease a new Star Wars game called ‘Jedi: Fallen Order’, but used the plural ‘Jedis’, making us wonder if he’s the right man for the job. Then again, George Lucas has been known to call lightsabers—the thing he invented—’laser swords’, so maybe it doesn’t matter so much.

Microsoft

Microsoft took a different angle for their conference opener, talking about how amazing gaming is and how it “reaches across age, race, gender, and geography.” This was ironic because this was followed by a camera sweep across an audience of mostly white bearded men.

Incidentally, the audience at this conference was extraordinarily noisy. In the brief silences between trailers, one person also kept shouting “Xbox!” at the top of his lungs.

Todd Howard from Bethesda strolled out to talk about the multiplayer-focused Fallout 76, describing the map as being “four times larger” than that of Fallout 4. This was met with great roaring waves of applause, despite the fact that scale is a meaningless metric when it comes to the quality of an open world game.

This was followed by a huge number of trailers, and of some really great looking games. There was Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, A bit of Metro Exodus, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and Life is Strange Universe.

Microsoft also announced a bunch of studios it was buying, including Forza Horizon developer Playground Games, which was met with yet more rapturous applause. Then there was some Gears of War, some Tomb Raider, some Division 2, and finally that amazing Cyberpunk 2077 trailer that sent onlooker’s Twitter feed into meltdown.

Ubisoft

In this press conference Elijah Wood popped out of his Hobbit hole to talk about Transference, an FMV horror game that actually looked pretty cool. One of the highlights of the game was teased when he said “Have you ever dreamed of entering into someone else's consciousness? Exploring their darkest thoughts and most intimate secrets?”

Next gamers got a big, fat slice of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which the world is very excited about.. Origins was a great game which is why the series took off. Finally at the end of the show all the developers rushed out onto the stage and surrounded a clapping Yves Guillemot.