E3 Day Four Podcast: Luke Smith On Destiny 2

The press conferences may be over, but E3 2017 is still going strong. Today on Kotaku Splitscreen, Jason sits down with two game directors: Destiny 2‘s Luke Smith and Days Gone’s John Garvin. Listen here: (Quick technical note: If you subscribe to our show, for some reason a five minute version of this episode initially…

Ashly Burch ‘Heartbroken’ She Won’t Play Chloe In Life Is Strange Prequel

As the longest strike in Screen Actors Guild history chugs on, video game voice actors are making painful career sacrifices to show solidarity with their union. 234 days into the strike, after Microsoft announced Life Is Strange: Before The Storm, fans immediately sussed out that award-winning voice actress and SAG-AFTRA member Ashly Burch will not…

Tim Rogers is back! Today in LA, our newest video producer gives you a tour of the Xbox E3 booth, the Ubisoft E3 booth, and the Square Enix booth. More to come later today.

The Sole Pokken Pro Won The E3 Pokken Tournament Invitational, Unsurprisingly

Nintendo’s Pokken Tournament DX invitational tournament at E3 this afternoon served as a way to signpost the game’s upcoming re-release on the Nintendo Switch. But instead of featuring a roster of Pokken pros, the E3 competition featured several popular YouTubers, as well as top fighting game players who specialize in other games. Allister Singh, the…

Women Play Video Games

Hello! I’ve come here today to explain something that apparently still needs explaining: Women play video games. I know, it’s a radical concept. (As plenty of you are doubtless aware, it is not a radical concept.) Yet here in the year 2017, it’s apparently still really easy to assume that despite the fact that A)…

I Can’t Stop Listening To The Mario Odyssey Theme Song

Metroid Prime 4? Shadow of the Colossus? I don’t know. For my money, the best thing announced at E3 is the Super Mario Odyssey theme song. You heard an abbreviated version of it during the Super Mario Odyssey trailer: a big brass band-backed swing vocal performance, a woman belting out earnest lines about jumping and…

Attack on Titan Inspired Action Game Looks Dope

Extinction is a fast-paced game where you parkour and maneuver through the air, trying to dismember giants with your blade. Instead of titans, you’ve got ogres. Naturally, these beasts hate humans and you’re the only thing standing in their way. Developer Derek Neal gives us a short walkthrough of some pre-alpha extinction footage below. While…

The New Spider-Man Game Won’t Let You Kill Anybody

This year’s Sony E3 conference closed on an impressive demo of Insomniac’s upcoming open-world Spider-Man game. I checked out an alternate playthrough and on the show floor, and while creative director Bryan Intihar was tight-lipped when it came to specifics, he did give me a handful of interesting tidbits. Spider-Man will never kill anybody You…

Inside The University Of Utah’s First-Of-Its-Kind Varsity Esports Program

Compete’s video team headed to the University of Utah to check out their varsity esports program, which began as a League of Legends fan club that grew into the student-run organization Crimson Gaming, which helped pave the way for the school’s official scholarship program for budding pro gamers. (UPDATE: 5:00 pm- This paragraph has been…

Seen at E3: this screenshot from Fire Emblem Warriors, which asks you to defeat the Cavaliers. Sounds eerily familiar

The Coolest New Gaming Gear Of E3 2017

E3 isn’t just about new games. It’s also about new headsets, keyboards, mice, controllers, speakers and storage solutions. Let’s take a look at some of the coolest new hardware announced during the show. LucidSound — LS15X Xbox One In-Ear Contour Gaming Headset The LucidSound folks have a bunch of new headsets for E3, including a…

The New Super Mario Odyssey Trailer Has Me Messed Up, Man

In the next big Mario game, our favorite plumber has a special hat. This hat allows Mario to take over the bodies of other creatures and objects. The more I think about the implications of this ability, the more I start to question the fabric of reality, if not Mario’s own existence. Here’s the trailer,…

Forty Minutes Of Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Shown off during Nintendo’s Treehouse stream yesterday, here’s a solid chunk of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which looks great and is hopefully more up my alley than the first game. (I imagine the portability will help.) I’ll be talking to the developers of Xenoblade 2 tomorrow here at E3, so let me know what questions you…

Battlegrounds Makes Fan-Made Zombie Mode Official

Normally in Battlegrounds, players crouch behind bathroom doors, waiting to shoot whomever bursts in. A few weeks ago, fans riffed on that theme with Battlegrounds’ zombie mode, where instead of hiding in crevices, players gun down hordes of ravenous player-controlled zombies. It was aninstant successin the community and on Twitch. Yesterday, Battlegrounds devs announced that…

Nearly 20 Minutes of The Life Is Strange Prequel In Action

The first gameplay footage from Life Is Strange: Before The Storm tries hard to recapture the drama from the original game. If you want to ruin something, keep adding to it: this is true of cakes, outfits and most of all fiction. Chloe Price in the original Life Is Strange had a lot of secrets—it…

After a somewhat sleepy show floor in 2016, E3 is very crowded this year, maybe due to the thousands of tickets sold to the public, maybe due to bad booth design. The event opened 15 minutes early on Tuesday to reduce the crush. That’s the Nintendo booth in the photo. A rep told us to…

Lego Worlds Rockets Into Space Next Month

Now that the game save-eating bug issues seem to be behind us, it’s time for Lego Worlds to do happier things, like announcing a Switch version for the fall and a content expansion that explores one of the oldest and most beloved themes in the toy line’s history, Lego Space. Lego’s been transporting children of…

The New God of War Might Finally Make Kratos Interesting

Sony may have shown more of the new God Of War at their press conference Monday, but there’s still a lot they haven’t explained about the game. A few things are clear: Kratos is a dad, and the focus had shifted from Greek mythology to Norse myth. I sat down with the game’s director Cory…

Splatoon 2’s Competitive Scene Has A Strong Showing During E3

An invitational was hosted yesterday on Nintendo’s E3 stream for Splatoon 2, featuring four teams competing for a sweet silver squid trophy. Surprisingly, it was a strong showing for the game’s competitive aspirations. E3 has had no shortage of “esports” presentations, from Electronic Arts showing off Star Wars: Battlefront II with a commentated live match…