When it comes to the big publishers E3 2016 was a little more empty than previous years. Out of the big five publishers – Bethesda, Activision, EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft – EA and Activision were not exhibiting on the show floor.
This has been Activision's policy since the 2008's E3, but for EA this decision was a new one which appeared to have been motivated by E3's 'press only' attendance policy. Instead EA hosted an alternative pair of events across both LA and London, UK.
In spite of its absence, Activision still managed to sneak into Sony's press conference with new trailers for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Skylanders.
EA meanwhile hosted a separate event on Sunday, June 12, where it showed off more of Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, Fifa 17 and more which you can read on the next page.
I'm sick of the silly console wars, what about the games?
Thankfully in the end the absentees didn't make too much of a difference to the overall E3 experience. The convention hall itself might have felt a little empty without EA, but there was still plenty of other games to get excited about.
Ubisoft's conference at E3 2016 was a neat collection of previously announced games peppered with just a couple of new announcements thrown in for good measure.
We'd already been teased with Watch Dogs 2 in the week prior to E3 but Ubisoft chose to show off a decent chunk of gameplay during its press conference, and the sheer scale of the world's hack-ability was a far cry from what was possible in the first game.
For Honor, the Viking 3rd person brawler was also shown extensively, and a sequel to 2014's excellent South Park: The Stick of Truth was shown off extensively. The game, which is subtitled The Fractured but Whole is every bit as puerile as its title implies. It looks hilarious and we can't wait to get our hands on it.
A new extreme sports game in the vein of Shaun White Snowboarding was also announced for the first time. The game, called Steep, features base jumping, paragliding and skiing in addition to just snowboarding. Shaun White didn't exactly wow critics when it came out, but we can hope that Ubisoft has learnt a few lessons since then.
The final segment of the press conference that impressed us was Star Trek: Bridge Crew, which allows you to team up with a group of friends to run the bridge of a Star Trek ship in full virtual reality.
We're unlikely to see many people being able to play the game fully thanks to the sheer cost of that many Oculus Rift headsets, but we can at least dream that one day we'll have the option of indulging in the ultimate nerd role playing experience.
These are just a couple of highlights from a Ubisoft conference that also featured appearances from Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Just Dance 2017, the Assassin's Creed movie, The Division and Grow Up, all of which nearly found their way into our roundup.
It was a surprisingly strong year from Ubisoft, especially considering it lacked any appearance from its traditional heavyweights Assassin's Creed and Far Cry.
Even by Activision's standards its presence at E3 this year was muted, with perhaps its biggest moment arriving during Sony's conference when it was announced that it would be developing remakes of the first three Crash Bandicoot games exclusively for the PS4. We also got to see new trailers for Skylanders and Infinite Warfare at the same conference, but overall it was hard not to feel that Activision didn't bring much to the table this year.
