Sony at E3: Death Stranding, The Last of Us Part II, Spider-Man, Nioh 2, and More
Sony's E3 2018 showcase was focused on exclusive software, including The Last of Us Part II, Spider-Man, Death Stranding, and Ghost of Tsushima.
Sony opened the show with an extended gameplay trailer of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II. The company then unleashed trailers and gameplay clips from Kojima Productions' Death Stranding, Sucker Punch's Ghosts of Tsushima, Insomniac Games' Spider-Man, and several others.
The main event closed with Spider-Man, and there was also a new VR game from From Software was debuted with a trailer.
The Last of Us Part II
The Last of Us Part II trailer started with some distinctly pre-apocalypse looking times, with Ellie attending a party - before cutting to her stabbing some dude in the neck, then picking off the rest of a party of raiders one at a time. Then killing more raiders, and more raiders, and more raiders.
Notable details included environmentally contextual animations for combat, which Naughty Dog has played with in the past but which seem to have reached a new level here.
Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII
Next came the first third-party trailer, and it was Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII. Activision had its own reveal event last month, so actually there was teaser for a map pack of original Black Ops levels.
Death Stranding
Sony's presentation of the Death Stranding included some guy climbing up a hill, pulling out his own toenail, and slowly toting a robot across the desert.
The landscape looked desolate and hostile, but not entirely alien. In a cave, he was stalked by an invisible monster that seemed to have hands for feet, judging from its ominous footprints in the mud.
A later sequence showed Reedus' character walking through a shadowy landscape with a sensor dish emerging from his backpack.
The trailer ended with the new female character eating a strange slug.
Ghosts of Tsushima
First-party Sony studio Sucker Punch unveiled Ghosts of Tsushima, an open-world samurai game with what appears to be deep and bloody combat.
Again, Sony gave a very lengthy demo, although it probably left us with even more questions.
Control
Next up was Control, Remedy's latest game. It looks like a spiritual successor of sorts to Quantum Break, with a ton of weird and dreamy architecture, ghost enemies, ultraclean hallways, and so on.
Spider-Man
Sony closed things out with Spider-Man. The main demonstration didn't show us too many new concepts. We saw Spider Man grappling with a prison break: several of his supervillain nemesis broke out all at once, including Electro, Rhino, Vulture, and Scorpion. The demo showed him having a rough time, barely surviving fights and chasing villains through a prison on fire to stop them from escaping.
Other
- Capcom showed footage from a remake of Resident Evil 2. It's a ground-up overhaul with modern graphics and cutscenes, not just a 4K port.
- Square-Enix showed the Pirates of the Caribbean and Monster's Inc worlds from Kingdom Hearts III.
- Dreams, Sony's anticipated game and world creation platform, didn't get a proper demo, but creations from the game were interspersed between the bigger demos.
- Squanch Games finally unveiled its first full video game: Trover Saves the Universe, which got a short, funny, and not particularly revealing trailer. It's exclusive to the PS4, but while Squanch Games was originally announced as a VR-specific game studio, this game will have both VR and non-VR PlayStation 4 versions.
- Nioh 2 was announced, but the brief trailer didn't reveal much.
- A new VR game from From Software was announced. It doesn't look anything like the Souls games. The trailer mostly involved focusing on a flower sitting on a table. We don't know what to make of it, but it's called Deracine. It's PlayStation VR-exclusive.