Enlarge / Insomniac’s Spider-Man is one of four major PS4 exclusives to be featured at this year’s Sony press conference. (credit: Insomniac Games)

For the 24th straight year, Sony will be sharing its plans for the PlayStation brand at a pre-E3 press conference. The event will take place at LA’s Center Studios at 6pm PDT (9pm EDT, 1am UTC) on Monday, June 11.

Sony has already confirmed a slightly different format than normal for this year’s festivities, featuring deep dives on four PlayStation 4 exclusives: Kojima Productons’ Death Stranding, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, Insomniac’s Spider-Man, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II. The PS4-maker is also promising “stellar announcements from third-party publishers and independent developers,” which we really hopes means a PS4 exclusive sequel to Downwell is in the cards.

Whatever gets announced or shown off, we’ll be ready for it and liveblogging all the announcements as they happen. Check for the link above when the countdown is complete to follow along.

LOS ANGELES—At a pre-E3 press briefing today, Microsoft teased Halo Infinite, the next chapter in its long-running first-person shooter series.

A roughly two-minute “game engine demonstration” featured scenes of exotic alien animals over lush rain-soaked caves, forests, and savannah. As four tired-looking marines limp along a beach featuring broken Halo gates, the brief tease concludes with a shot of Master Chief holding his iconic helmet at his waist before driving off into the sunset on a Warthog.

No release date or gameplay footage was revealed, and no additional details were given, save that the game will be using the newly announced Slipspace Engine.

Really hoping someone announces a follow-up to the best PC game of all time. (credit: Microsoft)

For the fourth year running, PC gaming hardware and software makers will be gathering together for a pre-E3 PC Gaming Show from the Wiltern theater in Los Angeles. The show will take place at 3pm PDT (6pm EDT, 10pm UTC) on Monday, June 11.

This year’s official list of presenters includes Star Citizen maker Cloud Imperium Games, Oculus, Crytek, Double Fine, Sega, Square Enix, Team17, and more. The presenters have also warned us to “expect some surprises.” Expect plenty of trailers for new content and a lot of long-winded onstage pseudo-interviews with developers about their upcoming projects.

Whatever gets announced and shown, we’ll be on hand and updating you as it happens. Check for the link above when the countdown is complete to follow along.

AUSTIN, Texas—“What sets this show apart from the other shows you’ve worked on?” asks an audience member decked out in a potentially questionably licensed Planet Express tee. As the other four panelists look to see who’ll field this, actor Phil LaMarr doesn’t hesitate.

“Most of the other shows I’ve been on haven’t been cancelled three times.”

Even if it did somewhat pioneer the practice of fandom driving another network to swoop in for the save, Futurama of course stands out for far more than its episode total. Which is likely why a partial cast of LaMarr (Hermes), Maurice LaMarche (Kif), David Herman (Scruffy), and Billy West (Fry, Zoidberg, Farnsworth, et al.) happily reunited with creator David X. Cohen on stage Friday night during the ATX TV Festival for a live table read and Q&A.

Enlarge / YOU. ARE. A. TOY!

For the first time since 2015, Square Enix will be doing a pre-E3 presentation, highlighting its coming year (and more) in games. The video presentation will be livestreamed starting at 10am PDT (1pm EDT, 5pm UTC) on Monday, June 11.

This year is all set to be the final coming-out party for Kingdom Hearts III, which was first teased way back at E3 2013. It’s been 13 years since Kingdom Hearts II hit the PS2, so expect Square Enix to make as big a splash as possible for the final unveiling of the big sequel. The coming localization of Dragon Quest XI after last year’s Japanese launch will also likely be a big RPG focus.

On the Enix side, we know that Just Cause 4 will be part of Square Enix’s E3 this year, thanks to a leak via a Steam ad this week. And Shadow of the Tomb Raider will surely feature heavily ahead of its September launch.

Enlarge / It’s time to embark in the next Desti—er, no, sorry, this is a teaser for BioWare’s new series Anthem. (credit: BioWare)

EA’s E3 press conference on Saturday ended with a big, Anthem-loaded bang. The first entry in BioWare’s next game series, an open-world online-shooter that looks like Destiny with jetpacks, was showcased with a alleged real-time gameplay demo and a release date confirmation: February 22, 2019.

The gameplay reveal focused largely on full jetpack control, which allows the game’s heroes (in suits called “Javelins”) to fly up, over, and all around giant worlds and combat arenas, along with bombastic, third-person combat against giant, handsomely rendered beasts. The reveal didn’t include hard proof of BioWare’s promises about story content in the game, however, particularly BioWare’s onstage assurance that Anthem can wholly work as a single-player experience.

A lengthy Game Informer feature story makes the game sound mechanically and structurally quite similar to Destiny and Destiny 2, particularly its calls for co-op requirements to get through higher-level campaign challenges and raid-like “stronghold” battles, along with a greater emphasis on real-time action over RPG-style combat and decision-wheel storytelling. Thus, Anthem is in the precarious position of making promises about an engaging combination of combat, plot, and endgame progression—a juggle that the Destiny series has fumbled time and time again.

Enlarge / Creepy kid is creepy. (credit: A24)

Every summer, stowed between the latest sequel to ComicBook Man Saves Everything and Johnny Depp Fights Special FX, Hollywood tries to sneak at least one interesting horror film into cineplexes. This week, we get Hereditary, a brilliant (and rare) mid-summer take on the slow-burn horror genre.

What, exactly, constitutes a slow-burn horror film? These employ the magic of cinema to turn everyday objects and activities into the most dread-inducing things you’ve ever seen. How? You can’t put your finger on it, but there’s a deep wrongness to what should be mundane. What viewers like me want is an ordinary house rendered unsettling through sound design and dissonant music. We want something banal like handwashing made threatening because of a camera angle. We want a casual stroll down a normal corridor to feel downright Satanic because of the lighting.

Hereditary‘s got allllllll that good stuff.

Enlarge / Games like Active Shooter will still be banned from Steam for “outright trolling,” Valve’s Doug Lombardi says.

Yesterday, we noted that Valve’s new “almost-anything-goes” policy for games on the Steam Store still includes a bit of subjective wiggle room in its ban on “outright trolling.” Since then, a few things have happened that provide some hints as to what Valve might mean by that nebulous term.

First, in a statement to GamesBeat, Valve spokesperson Doug Lombardi clarified that a game like Active Shooter—which was removed from Steam last week after generating days of outraged mainstream headlines—would still be disallowed under the new policy.

“We rejected Active Shooter because it was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence,” Lombardi told the site. “In addition, the developer had been involved in numerous misrepresentations, copyright violations, and customer abuses. There are no second chances for Active Shooter, or its developers. And to be explicit, while the developer behind it was also a troll, we’d reject Active Shooter if it had been submitted by any other developer.”

Enlarge / We’ll test Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn during this week’s episode of Ars Frontlog, along with two other 2D video games. (credit: Saber Interactive)

Ars Technica’s experimental foray into Twitch live-streaming continues today with our second episode of Ars Frontlog. The short version: tune in to our official Twitch channel today (Thursday, June 7) at 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT to watch me play games and join me in the chat room.

If you missed last week’s premiere, the show concept sees us picking out modern games that are anywhere between a week and a couple of years old, including those that we may have skipped for the sake of an article or those that have substantially changed since launching. While we strive to dedicate time to playing, reviewing, and writing about games that our readers care about, some games in the modern-software deluge fall through the cracks, including ones we love and ones we don’t.

Thus, we’re testing Twitch as a compromise: you can see us play and talk about “spillover” games during a live feed and ask questions while one of us is live on a mic, or you can come back later for an archived video and a brief text summary of what we thought.

Enlarge / A high-level concept diagram of how cloud gaming works. (credit: Venngage)

Better start saving up for that PlayStation 5, Xbox Two, or Nintendo Swatch (that last follow-up name idea is a freebie, by the way). That generation of consoles might be the last one ever, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. After that, he predicts cheap local boxes could provide easier access to ever-evolving high-end gaming streamed to the masses from cloud-based servers.

“I think we will see another generation, but there is a good chance that step-by-step we will see less and less hardware,” Guillemot said in a recent interview with Variety. “With time, I think streaming will become more accessible to many players and make it not necessary to have big hardware at home. There will be one more console generation and then after that, we will be streaming, all of us.”

That relatively quick shift to a streaming-centric gaming marketplace might seem hard to believe from the vantage point of 2018, where even streaming a high-end game from a console inside your own house comes with plenty of headaches. And while workable streaming services like PlayStation Now and GeForce Now have their niches, they don’t seem in imminent danger of replacing high-end local gaming hardware altogether any time soon