I wasn't overly impressed with any of the announcements. Nintendo totally flopped for me, as the only surprise of interest was Mario Tennis, and a lot of it is 2016 stuff (Fire Emblem, SMTxFE, and some other stuff I had no interest in). Nintendo just needs more IPs to work from. I mean, we're not getting Pokemon this year? That's pretty indicative of how poor their options are right now.
Sony was very multi-platform-heavy, thanks to minor exclusives from Destiny, BO3, Arkham Knight, and maybe another game or two I forgot. The rest isn't interesting to me. I've never played the Uncharted series, so the new one doesn't interest me. Horizon: Zero Dawn looked like a neat Witcher-Crysis mash-up, but lacked any general release window or serious details. The Last Guardian was highly vague and not an attention-grabbing title for me. The Final Fantasy stuff doesn't register with me. So, it's basically one far-off exclusive with little details that interested me, the rest is stuff I know Sony's fans wil like, but I haven't experienced the stuff and am not dying to at all.
Microsoft was better, but only because I'm living in their ecosystem. Forza 6 kind of showed what a joke of a rushed tech demo Forza 5 was, given the car and track counts and other features (weather, night cycle, etc.). Still, I can only enjoy racing for so long before I get burned out, so we'll see how long that redundant circuit racer holds my attention. Halo is what it is, and I didn't need it shown to make me want it. Warzone was uninteresting, as those hectic, luck-based multiplayer modes never get me excited. I'll need more details before I even slightly consider stepping into a lobby for it. ReCore gave us nothing, Gigantic looked kind of lame, and Sea of Thieves didn't grab my attention, leaving me with nothing to enjoy, in the realm of new IP. Rare Replay is really sweet, but I'd rather they announced a remastering of those games that would release in 2 years or something. I'll still gladly toss my $30 at it, but it could have been better (they're wasting a lot of established IP with a lack of new releases under those IPs, we all know it). Gears of War might just be dead to me now. That $40 price tag on a remaster of a single game is pathetic. It just screams to me that Microsoft needed some quick turnaround on revenue, after buying the franchise from Epic. Plus, the Gears 4 trailer was really lame, as the characters were just awkward and uninteresting. I don't care about Rise of the Tomb Raider, and the devs' sellout exclusivity honestly turns me off to them. Minecraft was fun to see on HoloLens, but it is still a game that I got bored of in a week, and I don't see that tech changing it (especially when HoloLens has no real release date or price tag). I don't care about Fable: Legends, as I don't yet trust its free-to-play model won't be DLC-heavy, and I generally don't gravitate towards fantasy RPGs.
Ubisoft is still leading the way for me, if I pick a preferred developer. The Division is coming, and it looks awesome, like always. Rainbow Six: Siege has a lot of potential. Ghost Recon: Wildlands seems pretty awesome, but I'm not convinced it's not a 2017 wait, or a late-2016 release at best. It's going to be an awkwardly redundant mix of The Division's gunplay and Watch Dogs' open world stuff, I fear. We didn't even hear about Watch Dogs, making me think The Division is early-2016, Ghost Recon is late-2016 or early-2017, and Watch Dogs is early- or late-2017, so keep them spread out.
I think the worst part of E3 was the clear gender pandering, though. So many established series are replacing men with women, or at the very least, adding women to traditionally male rosters (Assassin's Creed, Dishonored, Fallout, FIFA, Deus Ex, NieR, and probably others I'm forgetting). On top of that, most of the new IP that we saw for the first time pushed female leads. ReCore did it. Horizon did it as well. There really wasn't a new, surprising IP that had a male lead (The Last Guardian had it, but it's a title that started nearly a decade ago). It feels like some kind of overcompensation for the outrage by females (and not necessarily female gamers) over the past few years, given the number of male-led games pushing females as a real feature, but female-led games not bothering to add a male option.
I ended this E3 SO JADED from that matter. I don't mind female lead characters. Horizon looked really awesome in its short demo, and if I ever get a PS4, I'd totally look at getting it. Still, I'm not enjoying the industry's decision to act like male characters are a problem, and that we should distance ourselves from being guys. Even Assassin's Creed's "choice" put the female up front, made the male a background voice, and established the female as really being the flagship character of Syndicate (Dishonored 2 did something similar). Engadget bothered to actually write an article about Deus Ex's inclusion of female characters, and acted like it was a huge deal. Maybe this is an awkward mix of the worst of the media and a one-year pushing of female characters, and E3 2016 will have some more male-led IP. If this is just going to be the norm, and we're going to turn gaming into a politically correct equality-fest, it might be time to abandon ship, before gaming becomes the remake, politically correct nightmare that movies often are, in too many instances.