E3 2012 Roundup – Sony Predictions

With E3 week officially over, let’s take a look back and see how well our crystal ball served us in predicting the show. Let’s take a look at Sony now.

• Heavy focus on Vita games – Sony actually didn’t focus nearly enough on Vita, with only a few minutes of the conference dedicated to game announcements for the new handheld. We got PSone classics and a couple game announcements, but that was pretty much it. But since we predicted Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty, we’re going to give this a very hesitant check.
• PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale characters unveiled – We saw two new characters for the cross-franchise fighter: Nathan Drake from Uncharted and the Big Daddy from BioShock.
• PSAS:BR Vita announced – Vita will be getting the game, complete with cross-platform play with PS3, and use of the Vita as a PS3 controller.
• Cross-platform PS3/Vita push – Sony touted the use of the Vita in such games as PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale and LittleBigPlanet 2, which will be getting cross-platform DLC soon.
• Move games – Wonderbook. Lots and lots of Wonderbook. Can we please move on now?
• God of War: Ascension – We saw a gameplay demo and it looks…unsurprisingly like God of War.
• The Last of Us demo – Sony closed their conference with an impressively brutal gameplay demo of Naughty Dog’s upcoming epic.

• Vita price drop – Despite slumping sales, Sony is firm on its $249/299 price point for Vita. Look for more bundles a la AC: Liberation that pack in a game and memory stick, rather than a price cut.
• 3D! 3D! 3D! – Surprisingly, not a word about 3D during the whole conference.
• BioShock: Infinite – Wasn’t even at E3, much less during Sony’s conference.
• BioShock Vita – Ken Levine has gone on record as saying it’s still in the planning stages, so it’s not surprising that it didn’t make an appearance.
• Dead Space 3 – The game was officially unveiled at EA’s conference earlier the same day, but it wasn’t shown at all during Sony’s event.
• LittleBigPlanet Karting – For a game that should have a lot of broad appeal, it’s odd that Sony skipped it entirely and never showed even as much as a trailer.
• New HD collections – With Ratchet & Clank Collection having just been announced a few weeks ago, Sony must have felt that there was no need of unveiling any new HD remasterings of classic games.
• Final Fantasy Type-0 – It’s really disappointing not to see this at E3, but with the PSP pretty much dead, an English localization seems very unlikely at this point. What a shame.
• The Last Guardian – Again, not a peep about this game. Can we officially throw this in the “vaporware” pile with Final Fantasy Versus XIII?
• inFamous 3 – We still don’t know what Sucker Punch is working on now, and that elusive “second major game” Sony is working on is still nowhere to be found.
• Uncharted 4 – We didn’t expect to see this since Naughty Dog is busy with The Last of Us, and we were right.
• Cloud gaming – Despite rumors to the contrary leading up to E3, Sony had nothing to announce about cloud gaming partnerships.

We didn’t do so well with Sony, only guessing 7 correct out of 19. Some of our predictions were long shots anyway (Uncharted), but the lack of no-brainers such as cloud gaming and LBP Karting downright baffles us.

Check back later tonight to see how we fared with Nintendo!