When at the end of Bethesda's E3 show, the message was clear: we're working on the game but it's a very long way away. We saw a very brief trailer of a mountainous, coastal environment, and then a logo, and that was it.
But what were we seeing? Was this the setting of the new game or a kind of red herring - a generic Elder Scrollsian scene made for the trailer? Has Bethesda Game Studios even settled on the region we'll play in yet?
I thought we'd wait yonks for an answer but as luck would have it I got one from Todd Howard at Spanish conference Gamelab this week.

How do you duck a question about the politics of a game which pits a citizen militia against a corrupt government in modern-day Washington DC? Well, you could start by talking about the weather. "I loved the coldness of the first game, and to be able to go to DC and actually get to feel the humidity and hot summer of East Coast weather," The Division 2's creative director Terry Spiers to Polygon at E3, when pressed about what it meant to stage an armed uprising in the capital of his own country. "That's what I'm most excited about."
This kind of chipper, non-committal platitude has become as natural as breathing for Ubisoft, even as its various Clancy properties bury their expensively accessorised noses in topics like the South American narcotics trade or the ethics of torture. It's all rather odd when you consider the pride, not to say enormous smugness, Tom Clancy himself took in the links between his stories and the shadow realm of superpower relations and national security. on TV in 1998, for instance, arguing for a change of law to permit the assassination of heads of state with reference to his 1996 door-stopper Executive Orders. in a memorably unsympathetic Washington Post profile, boasting of the "half-million" calls he received from admiring reporters in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm.
With their starchy casts of alpha nerds and special operators, visions of an America that is at once wargod and underdog and steamy accounts of missile launches and fleet manoeuvres, Clancy's books were warmly embraced by the military establishment. Colin Powell - former US secretary of state and one of the minds behind the bogus case for Saddam's secret WMDs - once declared that "a lot of what I know about warfare I learned from reading Tom". Ronald Reagan was also a fan: while negotiating with the USSR in Reykjavik, he recommended Red Storm Rising to Margaret Thatcher for its "excellent picture of the Soviet Union's intentions and strategy". Clancy, who never served in the armed forces thanks to acute near-sightedness, reveled in all this, name-dropping high rank contacts to reporters and railing against peaceniks and grifter politicians in speeches at academies and bases. You wonder what he'd have made of Ubisoft's determination to avoid seeing Tom Clancy games in any kind of context, to show us footage of democracies on fire while talking gaily of blue skies and "exploring a new city".

The developer of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has debunked what it calls "misinformation" and "oversimplified tales" about the way the game is developed.
The criticism here revolves around the re-use of certain assets across PUBG's maps, and the buying of pre-made assets from the Unreal marketplace. Posts like the one below occasionally pop up on the , alongside the accusation that the vast majority of the game's maps were bought-in. Some even accuse PUBG of being an "asset flip" game.
This debate kicked off again this week after PUBG creator Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene expressed his frustration at the "asset flip" jibe in an interview with Geoff Keighley at E3, saying it "kills me a little inside".

It was the E3 where we half-expected Sony to break cover with its plans for the next generation of PlayStation hardware, but come the hour, it was actually Microsoft that confirmed that its hardware engineers are hard at work architecting what Phil Spencer called "the next Xbox consoles". Implying that more than one new Xbox is in development right now is an interesting - and dare we suggest, deliberate - choice of words.
This was swiftly followed up by a report from Microsoft/Windows-focused website thurrott.com, describing a 'family of devices' currently in development under the 'Scarlett' codename, set to arrive in 2020. Thurrott's insider stories along these lines are typically well-sourced and the timelines tie-in with the arrival of the technological building blocks that will enable next-gen hardware. But with Spencer talking about new hardware in the plural and the Scarlett project reported as more than just a single console release, we have to wonder what form the next generation is going to take, and what separates each of these machines from a technological perspective. After all, in the here and now, Microsoft often refers to its Xbox One 'family' - similar devices in many ways, but with radically different levels of rendering power.
There are further strands to weave into the discussion here, with Spencer revealing his annual E3 interview with . It's well worth a watch, with the Xbox boss seeing next-gen as an opportunity to focus on higher frame-rates and to leverage the firm's existing work with variable refresh rate and 120Hz display technology. Spencer also sees the arrival of new hardware as the means by which CPU and GPU power can be rebalanced line with what we see on today's PCs, as opposed to the situation we have now where even Xbox One X - the most powerful home console - is pairing a six teraflop GPU with low-power x86 CPU cores originally designed for tablets.

Bungie has killed Cayde-6, Destiny's wise-cracking chief Hunter character. It's an emotional moment for fans of the game. Cayde, voiced by Nathan Fillion, has been with Destiny players since the first game came out in September 2014. Now, he's dead, as revealed by a new story trailer released for upcoming expansion Forsaken.
Why kill Cayde? That was my first question as I sat down to interview game director Christopher Barrett and project lead Scott Taylor at E3 this week. That and, is Cayde actually dead, as in good and proper dead?
It turns out Cayde really is dead, good and proper. That's what Barrett and Taylor told me, anyway, and they sounded serious. It's all a part of Bungie's drive to give Destiny 2 a darker tone after the series veered too far into jokey one-liner territory. And who's Destiny's jokey one-liner extraordinaire? Poor old Cayde.

Once more, we close the book on yet another E3. Whether or not you feel like you saw what you wanted to see, it was certainly the annual spectacle we've come to expect. At the very least, we've seen some Death Stranding and as such, it seems we now have the video game version of Kevin Costner's The Postman we've all quietly wanted for years. On top of all of that, we've got another batch of this week's best deals to check over.
As usual, we've got deals that'll work in the UK, deals that'll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let's get started.
The vast GOG Summer Sale comes to an end this Sunday but the lovely folks over there have gone and sent us a few hundred game keys to give away to folks just like you. To be in with a chance of winning (and there's a fairly good chance you'll get something), follow the link below and enter.

E3 is the sort of thing that publishers and developers spend the whole year planning for. It's grand gestures and big reveals. But sometimes it's also something much more appealing - quirky little moments in games, fleeting instances where you glimpse something truly human happening. Here, then, are the best individual moments of E3 2018, with GIFs where appropriate.
The Cyberpunk 2077 commuter with his head on fire
Is the follow-up to The Witcher 3 channelling Blade Runner? No - it's channelling Robocop, and this beautiful, comical, horrifying moment proves it.

The morning Inbox considers the benefits of profile sharing, as one reader thinks third parties let Nintendo down at E3.

I'm more than happy to team up with someone to take down a big enemy, only to try and blow the good guys up and steal their stuff...

shows how much potential this one has...