Of all the trends we witnessed at E3 2017, one stood out immediately as a sign of a larger shift in the gaming community: Bears.
Sometimes lovable, often aggressive, and always furry, these monuments to nature and its raw fury are often relied on for big roles in games. In fact, 2017 felt like the year of the bear. You know. Kinda. If you squint real hard.
This panda made a brief appearance on stage at Ubisoft’s press conference. The bear has appeared in the Just Dance games before as a recurring character, and made the transition to the real world to help ring in Just Dance 2018. He certainly had the moves, but didn’t have the same viciousness and drive as the other bears on this list. Plus, we’ve seen him before.
Moving up the scale to a much more frightening contestant, the Metro: Exodus trailer finished off with what can only be described as a mutated, monstrous bear. It charges the player, taking several crossbow bolts to the face without flinching, before the player flees over a zip-line. Not exactly a prestigious finale for such a majestic creature.
The Elder Scrolls bear actually made its debut in the weeks leading up to E3, but that didn’t stop it from making a heroic, show-stopping performance at the Bethesda press conference. It took down several mechanical monsters, plus took arrows to the back and lived to tell the tale. It’s a totally badass bear, and it easily earns a spot over the Metro: Exodus bear for helping humans, rather than fighting them.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Days Gone bear takes home the second place trophy for being absolutely devastating. Wrapped in barb wire, with a fence post stuck through its chest, this bear threatens Deacon St. John and his friend Manny at the end of the game’s E3 2017 trailer. The infected bears in the final game will be dynamic, and part of the living ecosystem, making them all the more surprising and monstrous.
As the only game we found at E3 2017 that was actually focused on a bear, Disco Bear easily wins the titles of “Best Bear.” It might’ve won even if it had a peer, because the short game serves up a delightful story, original, funny gameplay, and an insightful message. It was created by two students from USC as a class project, inspired by the likes of odd physics games like Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Plus, it’s already available to play on any desktop at the Disco Bear website.
We spied another bear at the Indiecade booth, and while it didn’t heavily feature bears, there was a small plastic figurine of one by an unmanned laptop. The game is called Oikospiel Book 1, from David Kanaga, developer/composer of Proteus and Dyad.
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.