Square Enix stunned us last year with the announcement that its seminal Final Fantasy VII would be remade and released on the PS4, but the remake was unfortunately absent from its showing at E3 this year.
Instead Square Enix chose to focus attention on the upcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and the next episode of its Hitman game. Both fine games sure, but they're no FF7.
Finally, we've seen a tonne of PC games at the second PC Gaming show, and this year the focus appeared to be firmly placed on the quantity of games shown over the scale of any announcements.
Interviews, when conducted, were quick five minute affairs which simply outlined the games, but mostly the show consisted of trailer after trailer, until finally we had industry veteran Warren Spector took to the stage to talk about the resurgence PC gaming is currently experiencing.
It's not that we didn't enjoy the trailers for Giant Cop, The Surge, Vamyr, Superhot VR, Observer and Overland, or the interviews of the developers behind ARK, Dual Universe, Mount and Blade 2, Lawbreakers and Killing Floor 2, but no one announcement stood out above the others as being especially massive, and a large quantity of the games were early access titles from indie developers.
A brief respite from the deluge of games came when AMD CEO Lisa T. Su came on stage to announce AMD's new line of GPUs which are specifically targeting VR, but without any specific performance numbers disclosed it's hard to get too excited about the reveal. We also got another look at Alienware's PC backpack, which continues to look as ridiculous as ever.
So the PC Gaming Show might not have become the showstopper it set out to be just yet, but it's grown significantly since its debut last year, and if this development continues then it might just grow into a force to be reckoned with.
Our conclusion? A bit of a mixed year
E3 2015 was a groundbreaking year where it felt like all of our dreams could come true, and it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, for E3 2016 to live up to our expectations.
There were standout games, sure - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild is an obvious choice, and Sea of Thieves and Recore excite us more and more with each bit of information we receive. Meanwhile the thought of an Insomniac-developed Spiderman game is simply excellent, and the glimpse of Kojima's new game has us very interested indeed.
But what this E3 lacked was the shock reveals, the sudden unveiling of a new massive franchise from a well-known developer, or a small indie game that makes the entire industry sit up and take notice.
It seems like it'll take us some time more to fully work out what the idea of a games console even means in our post-Xbox One S and PlayStation Neo world, and that's without the massive impact PlayStation VR is likely to have at the end of this year.
So while it may not have been the most exciting E3 to have ever happened, E3 2016 was still an enormously exciting week, filled with some weird and wonderful moments, and more than a couple of games that had us itching for their developers to just get on and finish the damn things.
So long E3, we'll see you again next year.
