Sony is skipping next year’s E3, ditching its traditional booth and press conference in a move that will have a significant negative impact on the video game industry’s annual trade show.

E3, a show in which the future of gaming pretends to be in the present, is in the past. Those demos that may or may not represent the final quality of the games they preview? All locked up. The previews and round-ups by writers who hit reasonable deadlines? Published. And then there’s me, straggling along. I did see…

Dying Light 2 takes parkour zombie slaying to a new city, and there’s a reason for that. Where the first game, released in 2015, was about dealing with a viral outbreak in real time, the second will deal with the aftermath years later.

As with most games shown at E3 a couple of weeks ago, it’s too soon to say if Concrete Genie will be what its demo hints that it can be. But it’s clear that it’ll be an easy game to root for.

Which games had the best E3? The data folks over at Thinknum (a site, full disclosure, run by my friend Josh Fruhlinger) have some charts showing how game companies and their games did. The biggest trailers were for Cyberpunk, Fallout and The Last Of Us; the worst backlash was to Command & Conquer.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is pretty long name for a game with a straightforward pitch: what if XCOM but with animorphs? While it’s based off of a pen and paper role-playing game popular in Sweden during the 80s, developer The Bearded Ladies have made it their own by injecting the inspiration’s DNA into a…

I would like to tell you about a mortifying encounter I recently had with a very well known figure in video games. It’s a better story if you don’t know who it is until the end.

Sometimes you go into a game demo, and it’s just absolutely not what you were expecting.

At first glance, the PC game Black Future ‘88 looks like too many other indie games, with its pixel art, synth music, and neon-infused cyberpunk aesthetic. But below the familiar surface is a well-defined roguelike with a surprisingly distinct identity forged in large part by the sheer force of creative will imposed…

The developers at Croteam, the studio that makes the Serious Sam games, are looking to do the unthinkable with the fourth numbered installment in the series: render 100,000 enemies on screen at the same time. Watching a hands-off demo of the game behind closed doors at E3, I was excited to see that feat in action, and…

Our train slowly chugged to a halt. Something was apparently blocking the road up ahead, possibly put there by a rival band of survivors. The captain sent my character out to investigate. Moments later, I was killed by a giant floating orb of static. Post-nuclear Russia is not a place to explore blindly.

I managed to survive E3 2018, my first one in fact, and I can even remember most of the games I saw and played. There’s too many to name them all, but below are the most notable ones I got a chance to check out. I’ve written about some of them already on Kotaku, but there is also a handful of others I haven’t yet had…

In an room in need of air conditioning in the Los Angeles Convention Center last week, game developer Nate Fox held out his left hand, palm down, paused and then slapped the top of it with his right. “Do you know—[slap]—that?” he asked.

With E3 now open to the public, the show has a lot more things in it for people to buy. The most conspicuous were all the carboard boxes people carried around. These boxes contained mysterious amounts of loot and were all the rage. Plenty of comparisons and contrasts to be drawn about that. 

At Microsoft’s E3 press conference on Sunday, Sea of Thieves studio Rare showed off some of the latest DLC coming to its piratey Xbox One/PC game. Later at the show, we talked with the game’s executive producer about how the studio plans to keep that pace up over the months to come.

I’ve never been a Dark Souls fanatic, but I appreciate the vibrant new mini-genre of Souls-likes it’s helped inspire. The Surge is one of those, and from what I saw at E3 2018, The Surge 2 looks like it’ll be a big improvement with some new ideas of its own.

Jump Force has been a surprising hit at E3. Who knew? Our own Tim Rogers went and investigated the Bandai Namco booth at E3. What did he learn about Goku and friends?

For Honor is getting a free new mode on October 16 as part of the game’s Marching Fire update, and after getting a chance to try it at E3 it’s the only For Honor mode I want play. Inspired by games like Dota 2 and League of Legends, Breach is an asymmetrical siege mode with a bunch of little wrinkles that completely…

Rise of the Tomb Raider, released in 2015, was an excellent game, so it’s no surprise that the new Shadow of the Tomb Raider being demoed at E3 looks and plays a lot like it. There were, however, three small changes that delighted me during the press demo I watched.

Skate fans were hoping for a Skate 4 announcement at E3 this week, and when it didn’t come, folks were bummed. Anyone watching Twitch’s official coverage of the show earlier tonight, though, were treated to a few moments of delicious hope...before having it snatched cruelly away once again.