E3 2021: All the news, announcements, and updates from video games’ biggest week

It was a preseason game, Clint Oldenburg said. “Not a regular season game, not a playoff game.” The crowd in Seattle still annihilated his ability to think.

“When I was at the line of scrimmage, I couldn’t hear anything. All I could hear was the crowd,” said Oldenburg, today Madden NFL 22’s gameplay producer, back then an offensive lineman trying to make the Denver Broncos’ 53-man roster.

When Nintendo releases Metroid Dread for Nintendo Switch later this year, the 2D side-scrolling-adventure will also get a special amiibo release featuring Samus Aran and the killer robot known as EMMI.

Nintendo announced the new Metroid Dread amiibo Tuesday during its Nintendo Direct E3 2021 presentation, but didn’t say much about what it will do. Now that the Metroid Dread amiibo set is available for pre-order, we have a better sense of what amiibo collectors will get for their purchase.

Nintendo gave fans a fresh peek at the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Tuesday, but the company is clearly not ready to give us the final name of next year’s game. It’s still calling it “the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” in an official capacity. That’s because the title might give away too much, Nintendo says, about what’s going to transpire during Link and Zelda’s next adventure.

Nintendo of America senior product marketing manager Bill Trinen said in an interview with IGN that fans will “just have to stay tuned” for the final name, stressing the importance of the next Zelda game’s full title.

Making video games is hard — just ask the folks at Disney. After years of trying to make it work with studios across the world, the media giant shut down its game development business in 2016, transitioning exclusively to a licensing model. At the time this decision appeared to be surrender, but over the intervening years it’s begun to look more like brilliance. Today Disney has some of the world’s best game design talent working on its properties, all without having to worry about the actual financial risk of managing teams of hundreds across multiple contents. How did the Mouse pull it off?

The answer is bigger than Disney itself and spans a half decade of fundamental changes to how games are made, sold, and experienced.

After Nintendo’s E3 2021 press conference on Tuesday, the company streamed a Nintendo Treehouse Live segment featuring gameplay for Metroid Dread, a brand-new 2D Metroid game coming to Switch on Oct. 8. Metroid: Samus Returns developer MercurySteam is making the game, with Yoshio Sakamoto, who has directed several Metroid games, serving as the game’s producer.

The Treehouse segment opened with a video of Sakamoto describing Metroid Dread’s development journey.

Nintendo showed off a new trailer for its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sequel during its E3 2021 Direct. Not only did Nintendo’s new teaser show off Link’s sweet new hairdo, it also gave us the first look at some of his new powers.

After some world-building — complete with creepy red goop and a foreboding shot of Zelda falling into an abyss — we see Link diving through the sky. This is a bit different from Link’s usual jumps from high towers, as much of the gameplay we see in this trailer seems to take place on floating islands above the clouds. Link’s dive seems more akin to Skyward Sword’s skydiving sections than anything out of the original Breath of the Wild.

Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei 5 comes exclusively to Nintendo Switch on Nov. 12, as announced at the E3 Nintendo Direct on Tuesday.

The latest trailer shows a student in Tokyo who has been pulled into a different dimension. In it, we see them running through a post-apocalyptic Tokyo and sprawling demon wasteland.

Cruis’n Blast, the latest entry in the long-running Cruis’n franchise of arcade racing games, is coming to Nintendo Switch this fall, Nintendo announced Tuesday during its E3 2021 Nintendo Direct presentation.

Arcade publisher Raw Thrills — a company co-founded by Eugene Jarvis, the original designer of the Cruis’n series under Midway Games back in the 1990s — released Cruis’n Blast in arcades in January 2017. It was the first Cruis’n title since 2007’s Wii game Cruis’n. The Switch version will be a console exclusive for Nintendo, meaning that it could also be released on PC.

The Danganronpa series is finally coming to Nintendo Switch later this year in a bundle with four games in Danganronpa: Decadence, as announced during Nintendo’s E3 direct stream.

The bundle will have the three mainline games: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. It will also include an upgraded and standalone version of the board game from Danganronpa V3.

Nintendo’s sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is coming to Nintendo Switch in 2022, the company announced during its Nintendo Direct E3 2021 presentation on Tuesday.

Nintendo showed off a new trailer that featured Link exploring an all-new region of Hyrule not seen in the original game: the skies of Hyrule. The trailer also showed new weapons and abilities for Link, including the power to pass through objects.

Far: Changing Tides is the next game from Okomotive, a small independent studio out of Switzerland. The sequel to Far: Lone Sails, the award-winning game released in 2018, the game was announced Sunday as part of the PC Gaming Show. It will be published by Frontier Foundry, the new publishing arm of Frontier Developments (Elite Dangerous, Jurassic World Evolution).

Where Lone Sails asked players to navigate a sailing ship across a a long, dry expanse of land, Changing Tides takes place on the sea. Players will take control of a hero named Toe and must help them as they make their way through a drowning landscape. Players should expect a “meditative side scrolling” game with a “haunting soundtrack,” according to a news release.

Borderlands developer Gearbox Software is heading to E3 2021 armed with a new game, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands — the high-fantasy spinoff of its shooter-looter series — and a new movie. Gearbox fans expect to hear more about Borderlands — the Eli Roth-directed movie starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis — during its E3 Showcase on Saturday.

Gearbox Entertainment will take over the official E3 2021 livestream on Saturday, June 12 at 5 p.m. EDT/2 p.m. PDT. The event, which is expected to run about 30 minutes, will stream on E3’s YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Twitter channels.