Enlarge (credit: Square-Enix)

LOS ANGELES—French game development studio Dontnod Entertainment didn’t make waves with its first big triple-A release, Remember Me. It took scaling down the scope of its projects to achieve real success. That success came with critically acclaimed adventure game Life Is Strange, which we at Ars liked quite a bit.

Dontnod and publisher Square-Enix announced The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit this week at E3. It’s a two-hour-long, free-to-download game for PS4, Xbox One, and PC that takes place in the same universe as Life Is Strange.

It’s not the first Life Is Strange spinoff. Last year, a multi-part prequel series called Before the Storm was released. But while that tied directly into the events of the first batch of Life Is Strange episodes, Captain Spirit is more tangentially related. Still, Dontnod Executive Producer Luc Baghadoust said that there will be hints in Captain Spirit‘s conclusion about what to expect from Life Is Strange 2.

Enlarge / Don’t forget, you’re here forever!

Epic accounts that have been used to play Fortnite on the PS4 are blocked from use on other console versions of the game, including the newly released Nintendo Switch version. The move is a seemingly untenable expansion of Sony’s long-standing unwillingness to allow cross-platform play between the PS4 and other consoles, and it’s drawing widespread ire among players.

“This Fortnite account is associated with a platform which does not allow it to operate on Switch,” an error message reads when players attempt to log in with a PS4-associated account. “Neither the Fortnite website nor Epic Customer Service are able to change this. To play Fortnite on Switch, please create a new account.”

A similar error appears if a PS4-associated account is used on the older Xbox One version of the game, though more players are discovering it this week as they try to take the game portable on the Switch. The incompatibility works in reverse as well—Epic accounts previously associated with the Switch or Xbox One can’t be used on the PS4 version. PS4 players are also locked out of playing alongside others using different consoles.

Sony opened its E3 press conference this year with an unorthodox bang, packing assembled journalists and fans into an ersatz, standing-room-only church to show off the newest gameplay and cut scene footage of The Last of Us Part 2. The gripping trailer transitions abruptly from a heartwarming scene of awkward teenage romance at a dance to protagonist Ellie’s brutal fight for survival against a gang of equally brutal adults.

Last of Us Part 2 co-writer Halley Gross told Ars this contrast in the trailer reflects a very conscious tension in the game and in Ellie herself. In the four or five years since the end of the first Last of Us, Gross said the now-19-year-old Ellie has been able to finally find a sense of normalcy and family in a world broken by the Infected hordes. “We’ve been able to invest in her relationships,” Gross says. “She’s been able to be a teenager, she’s been able to feel a real sense of stability that she hadn’t felt before the end of the first game.”

That stability means the opportunity for Ellie to explore her sexuality, as reflected in the passionate lesbian kiss Naughty Dog put front and center in the trailer. “Ellie’s a gay character and one of the things we’re really excited about with this game, as [Last of Us writer] Neil [Druckmann] started with the first game, is to show how complicated and complex and beautiful she is as a character,” Gross said. “Of course, she’s a 19-year-old. She’s gonna have… crushes, right? That’s one of the things we’re really jazzed to show. It’s a part of her character.”

Nathan Mattise

LOS ANGELES—After rival Microsoft showed 50 games from a wide range of genres in a very traditional E3 press conference yesterday, Sony promoted its PlayStation platform with a focused and unconventional presentation. There were only a handful of games, but they were nearly all heavy hitters.

The event started out in a small, church-like space with hanging lights—very unusual for this kind of press conference. It was here that Sony opened the show with an extended gameplay trailer of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II. It became immediately apparent why Sony constructed this unusual venue: it was plucked right out of the game.

Ron Amadeo

LOS ANGELES—Even as Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony hold events to promote games on their consoles at E3, a somewhat scrappier event to promote PC games takes place: the PC Gaming Show. This year’s too-long show was a barrage of trailers and brief developer talks. We basically lost count of the games, there were so many.

Battle royale? Check. Victorian steampunk settings? Check. Survival crafting games? Check. Crytek engine? Check. Lovecraft? Check. A lengthy plug for hardware from a gaming hardware company? Check. It was everything you’d expect from the PC Gaming Show.

Nathan Mattise

LOS ANGELES—Ubisoft held a press conference at E3 today to show off its upcoming slate of games. As is usually the case with Ubisoft, the conference was heartfelt, zany, and high on showmanship. The company announced very few new games, but it went deeper on a few that players have been anticipating from big franchises.

Here’s what they covered.

LOS ANGELES—Ubisoft didn’t do a great job hiding Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ahead of this year’s E3, thanks to a leaked promotional keychain of all things. But the game’s developers at Ubisoft Quebec redeemed the company by hiding the bigger news: that this annual Assassin’s Creed update actually feels ambitious.

Monday’s Ubisoft press conference saw the company telling players to “live your Odyssey” starting October 5 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC. Before that announcement, Ubisoft was gracious enough to give us nearly an hour of hands-on time with a pre-release build. That much time wasn’t enough to confirm all of the developer’s lofty claims, but it was enough to see serious Witcher-like aspirations for the series’ first true “open world RPG.”

Son (or daughter) of Nikolas

Ubisoft Quebec

Enlarge / Bethesda’s logo as carried by the publisher’s growing roster of mascots. New this year: Rage 2‘s punk rocker! (credit: Sam Machkovech)

LOS ANGELES—Video game publisher Bethesda hosted a rollicking pre-E3 press conference on Sunday evening with a number of game reveals from existing franchises like Doom, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Rage. But the publisher’s most tantalizing reveals were also its shortest ones: long-rumored game series Starfield. and the first mainline Elder Scrolls entry since 2011.

Bethesda Director Todd Howard closed the conference with Bethesda’s two-part tease of future games. The first, Starfield, was described as “a brand-new, next-generation, single-player game. This one is in an all-new epic franchise. Our first wholly original franchise in 25 years.”

Starfield‘s reveal trailer began with a cinematic look at a planet’s edge in space, followed by a floating satellite in its vicinity that is abruptly ripped through time. No release date was announced. Its description counters the repeated rumor that Starfield might revolve around smartphone play. Instead, Howard’s brief description may point to a wait until successors to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One reach the market.

Enlarge / It’s coming, Squid Boy. It’s coming…. (credit: Nintendo)

For the sixth straight year, Nintendo will forgo the traditional pre-E3 press conference in favor of a livestreamed Nintendo Direct video presentation. We’ll be on hand to deliver all the news straight from Nintendo starting at 9am PDT (12pm EDT, 4pm UTC) on Tuesday, June 12.

Nintendo has made no secret that the Nintendo Switch edition of the Super Smash Bros. fighting-game series will be a prominent focus of its E3 activities this year, so expect to hear a lot of details about that effort. We also wouldn’t be surprised to hear a bit more about upcoming Switch entries in the Pokemon and Metroid Prime series, which have been under radio silence since very brief teases at last year’s E3.

Outside of the first-party efforts, a credible leak suggests a Switch port of Fortnite will lead a lineup of coming indie and third-party ports for the system that includes Dragon Ball FighterZ, Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, Killer Queen Black, Paladins, and Overcooked 2. Don’t be surprised if that list is at least a bit incomplete, too.

LOS ANGELES—Microsoft used its pre-E3 press conference today to stress that, despite recent troubles securing high-profile exclusive content, the Xbox One can do toe-to-toe with the PlayStation 4 when it comes to games and content available on no other console.

Many of those console exclusives will come from newly purchased developers that are now part of the Microsoft Studios family. The purchases of Undead Labs (State of Decay), and Playground Games (Forza Horizon) were not all that surprising, given their previous work on Xbox exclusives. But Microsoft’s acquisition of Ninja Theory (Hellbalde), and Compulsion Games (We Happy Few, now coming August 10) we a bit more surprising, and a sign Microsoft is looking to bring new talent in house.