It was an A for production, design, and presentation, and a B- for content - mostly because like more than half of it was recycled. I'm hesitant to ding it too much because it really was paced so well and what's there was great - along with the worry that it'd be a reflexive response to Sony's incredible but unsustainable last couple years - but it is kind of hard to believe that there wasn't some heavy hitter out of left field.
SotC remake and a Monster Hunter game are great, but they're known quantities. I don't need a new From announcement, but something mid-tier like an Until Dawn sequel or some RE2make news or a DQ announcement or just something from Square Enix would've done a ton to round it out. It wasn't that there was any problem with the conference, but there are so many more avenues that you could reasonably hope for them to explore, and them hitting none of them isn't just "Oh, they didn't say it" -- it's disheartening, because it gives the impression that there's nothing there on any of those fronts.
Thing is, we DID get what was essentially an Until Dawn sequel but it was stuck on the pre-show.
Weird show from Sony. I can understand why they may've wanted to hold back Sucker Punch's new game and whatever FromSoft's working on till some other point but their three biggest announcements were Monster Hunter, the Horizon expansion and Shadow of the Colossus and they failed to build a show around them. Hell, they failed to even make the Horizon expansion come off like a big deal, in stark contrast to the Uncharted: The Lost Legacy reveal at PSX 2016.
On top of that, the pacing of the show was too fast, especially given the really short length of the entire thing. They could've easily fit the pre-show announcements into the conference AND added more gameplay demos and it still wouldn't have been a long show.
Having said all that, I did really like the above three announcements, God of War, Spider-Man, Days Gone, Uncharted, Detroit and a couple of the VR games. They had good content, I just think they did a poor job of bringing it all together into an entertaining show.
I still thought it was far better than Microsoft's conference though, as they at least have a good exclusive lineup, they didn't have to pad their show out with a million timed exclusive indies.
So I guess I'll give Sony a B-. Not great but not bad either.
Who would've thought Ubisoft, of all publishers, would've had the best conference of E3 just a couple days ago? It's madness.
