Well, that’s E3 all done again I guess. I didn’t get invited, again, but pretty much all of the links to the left have something to say about the thing. My personal recommendations for E3 coverage:
Aggro Me
Kill Ten Rats
Grimwell Online
And an excellent humorous anecdote about bodyguards and shouting at:
Broken Toys
It seems few of ‘our people’ were really impressed by the event, which by all counts seemed mostly about Consoles, less about PCs, and even less about PC MMORPG.
Highlights included the WoW Alliance race revealed at last. The ‘Draenei’, who bear no resemblance to the mudhut-dwelling mobs of the same name in northern Swamp of Sorrows, are the Alliances ‘Big’ race, supposedly to balance the Tauren. Just looks like Big Night Elves to me, but then I am very difficult to please these days.
EVE Online showed off their V2 ship models a bit – more here – and I’m quite impressed, although like the Warcraft expansion, it’ll be a while before we see them for ourselves, particularly as in EVE’s case, Windows Vista will be required to get all the shiney stuff. I’m less impressed with their planned Premium Rate Hosted Voicechat server thing though, although since I’ll probably never use it anyway, it seems churlish to object.
Vanguard got a bit of a beating, while Warhammer Online and Age of Conan seemed to go down well.
Mostly though it seemed to be everyone offering more of the same, mostly in the form of a somewhat intimidating tsunami of expansions. I take the whole thing with a pinch of salt though really, as looking back a year to the previous E3, it seems the thing I was most fascinated with back then, is still not out yet:
Ten Ton Hammer: Ryzom Ring First Impressions
It does all give the impression of it being a bit of a ‘slow news’ E3, or perhaps I’m just more interested in actual gaming experiences, than gaming news nowadays…