The Road to E3 2017: Bethesda

Ah, my second E3 post this week.  It's almost like I have some vague idea of what I'm doing for once.  If you missed it, earlier today I also did a post on Windows' Microsoft's Xbox conference.  You can find that here, and you can find last week's EA post here if you missed it.

Our newest company to the E3 party, Bethesda made an unexpected announcement that they would be joining the big show a few years ago, and they've been a welcome addition ever since.  Last year the company showed off titles like Quake Champions which is meant to launch later this year, Dishonored 2, and Prey.   So what's the Skyrim/Fallout developer have for us this time around?

The Bethesda show starts on Sunday June 11th, at 7PM Pacific, 10PM Eastern, so we won't know for sure until then, but these are my guesses:

Wolfenstein: The New Colossus: One of the oldest FPS franchises in gaming underwent a revitalization when MachineGames' Wolfenstein: The New Order launched back in May of 2014 to both decent reviews and decent sales, serving as one of the few really enjoyable titles on current-gen consoles during a fairly dry first year for the PS4/XB1 generation.   With that in mind, a sequel was almost a guarantee, and they've had plenty of time to re-charge their batteries and gear up to get a new game out either this fall or sometime in May 2018.

The Evil Within 2: A Japanese job posting for "Psycho Break 2" (The Evil Within's Japanese title) went up back in mid-March, leading many fans to believe that we were due a sequel for the survival horror title, especially since the job posting was for a QA/bug report position, which would indicate the game was very near completion.  People could be playing TEW2 as soon as this fall...though hopefully they have the good sense to delay it, since launching it in a season with Call of Duty, Battlefront, (possibly) Red Dead 2, Destiny and whatever Nintendo and Microsoft will have planned will probably cause this game to die a more gruesome death than most of the ones in the first game.

Quake Champions: The return of one of the oldest FPS franchises in gaming, Quake Champions gives the franchise a shot in the arm by rebirthing is a hero shooter.  This game didn't come out last year so we'll get another look at it in order to keep hype up and hopefully remind some people it still exists.

The Elder Scrolls Online: The latest expansion to the Elder Scrolls Online world, Morrowind, will have just been added to this game for about a week by the time E3 happens.  When game releases occur that close to E3, publishers usually tend to view it as free marketing--you were already on stage to announce the existence of a new game due out in a few months/a year or two, why not throw in some info about a game that just hit store shelves less than a month ago?   So yeah, expect to see Morrowind plus anything else Zenimax might have on the immediate horizon for ESO.

Starfield: This is my longshot.  When Bethesda released a teaser image a few weeks back talking about their E3 press conference, they mentioned they had two new games that were "under construction".  If we're being completely realistic/pessimistic, they were talking about Wolfenstein and TEW2 and we can all pack it up, get over it, and go home.  But if we're being more optimistic and they're hinting at the future, we've already heard from Bethesda Softworks (the developer portion of Bethesda responsible for making Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series) that they're working on two projects right now that will have nothing to do with the TES series, presumably in order to give the tech a chance to catch up with their ideas.  (And hopefully create a new engine, but that's neither here nor there...)

If its the second option, then there's a good chance we could see Starfield this year.  A rumored title that's been talked about repeatedly for the past few years, Starfield is supposedly Bethesda's shot at an open-world sci-fi/space title.  I'm a pretty big mark for this kind of setting, so this might be the first time ever I've had any excitement for a Bethesda title, so I'm really hoping this shows up there.  Unfortunately, there's no chance of that unless this title is close enough to release we'll see it this fall...so hopefully they were working on it alongside Fallout 4.

Misc: Bethesda shows are never long because they're not that huge of a company.  So you'll likely get four or so "new" titles, and then after that you'll get information about any VR content they're developing, information about Skyrim for the Switch and a Fallout 4 GOTY edition peppered in-between their announcements.

Well, that's it for Bethesda's show!  If everything goes down like I'm guessing, is that good for you?  Or are you only satisfied if there's a The Elder Scrolls 6 confirmed to be on the way?   Let me know.  Next week I'll be back with Ubisoft and Sony's conferences before clearing things out the week after with Nintendo's.  Look forward to both of them!