BE3 2017 Recap

Bethesda’s presentation this year came at an unusually late time – midnight EST. Here’s a link to the full thing, if you’re interested.
Overall it was a smaller presentation than their previous two, without anything too earth-shattering, especially with regard to The Elder Scrolls.  We weren’t expecting ES6, after all, considering how at the last E3 they said that BGS is working on two major projects the size of an ES or Fallout game before then, and not to expect ES6 for years.  There was still some news about some new games of theirs, and DLC for the existing Elder Scrolls games.
We live-tweeted the presentation, and had people chatting about it and reacting to it on our Discord (we recently were accepted as a Discord partner, btw!), but here’s a somewhat more in-depth description of each, with links to trailers and articles they released afterward. Take a look after the break:
 
 

 
Before the show: This year their theme was “Bethesdaland”. From what we’ve heard, they had a Ferris wheel at the event, artists making balloon creatures, and there were also collectible pins and a metal stein. In previous years they’ve done a pre-show before the presentation, talking to people outside and so forth, but this year all they had was a “will begin soon” message with Fallout-inspired music about a half hour before the show. They announced in advance that people who linked their Bethesda.net and Twitch accounts could get currency and card packs for ES:Legends, though as far as those of us in the UESP Discord are aware, they only gave one, right at the start of the event when they started the music  (I got a Legendary Card Pack; it contained a Blood Dragon).
When the show started, they showed a clip of kids of employees, talking about what their parents do for work and so forth.  One that we chuckled about was a very young girl: when everyone was saying “it’s showtime!”, she said “I don’t know what ‘showtime’ is.” Afterward, Pete Hines came on stage and opened the presentation.
 
DOOM VFR & Fallout 4 VR
Pete started talking about virtual reality, and showed two trailers: DOOM VFR and Fallout 4 VR, as expected. No release dates given for these yet as far as I’ve seen.
[video:youtube:JYOasB6aI_A]  [video:youtube:jspdtha3t1k]
The rest of the presentation was one long video.
 
Elder Scrolls Online
They featured ESO next. They started with clips of reaction videos to the cinematic trailer – unfortunately for Bethesda, the community’s having some fun with a screencap from this bit.

The actual trailer mentioned that the game has 10,000,000 players, and recapped the existing DLC, and had a few seconds of clips from new DLC: “Horns of the Reach” and “Clockwork City”. They’ve got more information about it here.  Horns of the Reach is the Q3 DLC, coming in August, and adds two new Skyrim-themed dungeons: “Bloodroot Forge” and “Falkreath Hold”.  There’ll be a free update at the same time, adding the “Arcane University” Battleground arena and “Chaos Ball” rules for people who have ESO:Morrowind. Clockwork City is the Q4 DLC and is a content-based update, and does not require you to have purchased Morrowind.
You can see the whole trailer here:
[video:youtube:I-legjoLKDY]
 
Creation Club
Creation Club is a new platform for mods (for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition) that will be curated by Bethesda – some will be created by them, apparently, and some will be from third-party creators. They’ll actually go through Bethesda’s team and will be fully compatible with all save files, achievements, etc; you have to apply to get into it and mod creators get paid. You also have to buy “credits” to download these mods.
From the FAQ on the official site for it:
Is Creation Club paid mods? No. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.
This is coming this summer. As you can imagine, this is possibly the most talked-about thing among the ES community so far. Here’s the official site if you want to read the FAQs and stuff yourself.
And here’s the trailer for that:
[video:youtube:XRkrascT_iM]
 
Elder Scrolls: Legends
For this one they announced that in-game tournaments will be coming, and that Android and iPhone versions are coming next month. They also announced a major card expansion: Heroes of Skyrim, which will be available for purchase on June 29. The announcement article can be found here.  This does not include new story content, as in the Dark Brotherhood DLC, but it includes 150 new cards and some new keywords. Some of the announced ones will be Aela the Huntress, J’Zargo, and Delphine, and there’ll be more based on things such as the College of Winterhold and the Civil War. Dragon cards will have synergy with other dragons, there’ll be “Shout” cards that power up by playing them repeatedly, some of the Companion-themed cards will change into their Beast form when you break a rune.
Here’s the trailer:
[video:youtube:8_37vi96t1Y]
 
Skyrim: Nintendo Switch Edition
They showed a brief trailer with Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch (which some of us here at the UESP are calling “Switchrim”). Nothing too new or surprising on this – no release date – aside from the fact that there’ll be Amiibo compatibility: they showed the Zelda: Breath of the Wild Amiibo being used, and a treasure chest appearing in the game; the character then had the Master Sword and Hylian Shield, and Link’s outfit from Breath of the Wild. Sounds like it will only be compatible with Zelda amiibo, possibly only Breath of the Wild. (EDIT: Nintendo’s website confirms that it will only be Legend of Zelda amiibo, from all of their various amiibo series.) Here’s the full article.
[video:youtube:_7980ZPK8Dg]
 
 
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
This is a standalone Dishonored game, featuring Billie Lurk and Daud.  It’ll be released on September 15th. The official site can be found here, with more information.
Here’s the trailer for it:
[video:youtube:mQuHpdUbq6U]
 
Quake Champions
They led into this one by talking about e-sports. There’ll be a Quake World Championship on August 26th in Dallas, Texas, with a $1 million prize pool. They revealed that the beta will be live 24/7 now, and they’re adding BJ Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein as a new Champion. Here’s the official site for the game.
[video:youtube:Pfp0Z6xVTRc]
 
The Evil Within 2
This was one of the two “under construction” sections from the map image, and it was leaked through Reddit ads earlier in the day. They had a trailer for it, though they didn’t really say anything else about it – it’ll feature a “save your daughter” storyline, and it’ll be released on October 13th, which happens to be a Friday the 13th. They gave a link to the site here but it does not appear to be live.
[video:youtube:f7JbFBq4NAo]
 
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus
This was the other new game, which was also leaked earlier, this one by Amazon. The trailer starts with what almost looked a clip from an old TV show – one of us guessed Lassie – and indeed, it ended up being a parody called “Liesel” with a giant robot dog. All in all, this was the longest trailer of the event, at eight and a half minutes. This will be released on October 27. You can look at the official site here, and see the whole trailer here:
[video:youtube:xHht8480cEo]
 
EDIT 6/12/17:
Skyrim VR
The Playstation VR edition of Skyrim was revealed one day later at the Playstation presentation.  It has its own trailer:
[video:youtube:q8Ggl421myE]
 
What are you most interested in out of this year’s featured games?

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