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 Final Fantasy 7 remake was conspicuous by its absence from Square Enix's awful E3 2018 media briefing - so, should we be worried about its development? Is it even in development?
Speaking to , Tetsuya Nomura, the director of the game, moved to reassure concerned fans, insisting people at Square Enix are currently working on the game.
"It's not just in the early concept stages," Nomura said. "We are actually in development."

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.

The man behind the wonderful fake Kaz Hirai Twitter parody account has finally revealed himself - and it turns out he's a scouser.
The @KazHiraiCEO Twitter account, which for a number of years parodied roasted Sony while being followed by 128,000 accounts that include top PlayStation executives such as Shuhei Yoshida, retired this E3 with a charity blowout for .
With that done and dusted, the person behind the account took to Twitter to explain himself.

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.

You probably already have a pretty accurate idea of what Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, and not just because Nintendo spent nearly half an hour detailing the upcoming mascot fighter at E3 recently. The ...]

"Bandai Namco had a pretty solid lineup at E3, and as it's been the case these past few years, they're betting it big on anime, with big announcements like Jump Force and a new game based on the gigantic My Hero Academia franchise." - Eduardo Reboucas, Entertainium

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced the July 2018 lineup of free games for PlayStation Plus subscribers. Check Out the PlayStation Plus “Free Games Lineup July 2018” Trailer: PS Blog: Phew! Well, that was one heck of an E3. Not only did we get to show off a whole raft of awesome exclusives, we also kick-started...