E3 2019 is officially upon us, and coming with it is one of the biggest events yet for PC gaming.
Hosted by our pals at PC Gamer, the 2019 PC Gaming Show promises reveals of some of the biggest PC games from indie studios and big blockbuster publishers alike.
How to Watch the PC Gaming Show
If you want to catch all of the biggest PC Gaming Show reveals as they happen, you can tune into the official PC Gamer Twitch channel on June 10 at 10 a.m. PT/ 1 p.m. ET. And if you're in the Los Angeles area and want to experience the show live at The Mayan, you can get tickets here.
PC Gaming Show Live Updates
Evil Genius 2: World Domination
After a long hiatus, the most evil strategy game has a sequel, developed by Rebellion.
Once again, you have an island lair and a bunch of henchmen to help you construct a base worthy of the greatest villains. From here, it looks like you’ll be sending out your crew to execute devious plots all around the globe, while fending off enemy agents who want to take you down, with the help of some spectacularly complicated traps.
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2
Another sequel, this time 15 years after the original vampire RPG, brought to you by Paradox and Hardsuit Labs and coming out in Q1 2020.
It all takes place in a darker version of our world with vampires trying to hide themselves from humanity while also having to feed on normal humans. Vampires have the ability to tell the emotions of their victims, and by consuming their blood can power themselves up with different buffs.
You aren’t the only new vampire around though, as there’s a large number of others also struggling to survive their new undead life, with whom you’ll be fighting for influence and resources while you also deal with your old human life that's been shattered by your transformation.
Starmancer
Chucklefish and Ominux together bring us a sci-fi management and base building game. There’s a tasty pixel graphics style, plus hints of some interesting story beats taking place over the standard cycle of gaining resources, sending your colonists out on missions and expanding your base. As you're playing a human hooked up to the station's AI framework, you might have unlimited power when it comes to controlling what happens to the colony, but if the people you're meant to be looking after become unsatisfied... let's just say they know where your body is kept.
Chivalry II
Tripwire and Torn Banner are collaborating to make a sequel to the brutal medieval first person fighter that began life as a simple mod. It looks as bloody as ever, but you aren’t just decapitating and skewering your foes. There’s castles to siege and villages to pillage too, plus you can go onto the battlefield with a total of 64 players, with horses available too if you fancy partaking in a swift cavalry charge.
The devs are also promising some real power-trip moments, with skilled players able to take on multiple people at once, just like your favorite swordsmen of history. There’s also the opportunity to use a chicken as a weapon too, just in case this was getting too serious. If you want to get on board, it’s an Epic Store exclusive, coming early next year.
Mosaic
This moody looking game takes place in a grey rainy dystopia, although it’s not clear what you’ll be up to yet other than slowly breaking out of this monotonous existence. It appears later this year, but for now, you can play BlipBlop, the mobile game from inside Mosaic, on iOS or Android right now.
Midnight Ghost Hunt
Coffee Stain Studios are taking a leaf out of both the Ghostbusters series and Garry’s Mod game mode Prop Hunt, with a team of hazmat suit wearing hunters taking on spectres in this asymmetric 4 v 4 multiplayer game. The ghosts walk around as spooky silhouettes, but can take over different objects either to hide or attack the hunters, stalling out until the clock strikes midnight, when the lights go out and all the ghosts power up. Fortunately, the hunters have plenty of tools of their own in order to help them find the ghosts’ location and take them down before they run out of time. There’s an alpha taking place in the summer if you want to try it out.
Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer’s Legacy
You’ll die over and over again as you explore an enormous unfriendly world looking for items and treasure, but you can at least appreciate the lovely bright artwork as the inhabitants of these hostile environments smash you to pieces. There’s multiple biomes to explore too, each with their own creatures. Each death means you come back as a descendent of the last character, ready to pick up the mantle and complete the story.
Samsung Monitor
You can’t have PC gaming without a monitor to look at your games with, and Samsung are showing off their fancy 240hz curved display, the C27RG5. There’s G-Sync too, to help avoid nasty graphical problems caused by fast moving gameplay. It's coming in mid-July, and will cost 'less than $400' for the basic model.
Funcom Announcements
Developer Funcom brought three games to show off. Mutant Year Zero: Seed of Evil is an expansion for the turn-based strategy game with new maps and a new mutant character to play. Conan Unconquered, a barbaric strategy game with some huge armies and enormous spiders and giants. Finally, there's Moons of Madness, coming out in time for Halloween, is a first person horror game, combining sci-fi tropes with Lovecraftian style monsters.
Conan Chop Chop
Originally believed to be an April Fool’s joke, this Funcom and Mighty Kingdom developed game is now a reality. It’s a cartoonish dungeon crawler roguelike, featuring the famous characters taking on hordes of cute baddies and scary (but still kind of cute) bosses too.
Last Oasis
This is a multiplayer game, featuring a player driven economy and player made vehicles walking on legs and powered by the wind. There’s PvP combat with swords and arrows too, but you’ll be wanting to spend your time on the siege weapon-equipped walkers, taking broadside shots and boarding each other like land-based pirates. And if you find time to stop fighting, you can gather some resources to upgrade your land ships and trade.
Age of Wonders Planetfall
The famous 4X strategy game has taken a sci-fi turn. With a choice of faction army at your back, including cyborg zombies and laser-armed dinosaurs depending on who you pick. After selecting your origin race, which are vaguely based on the traditional fantasy races, you can then progress through the tech tree, deciding what future you want to make for your people, but balancing that with the needs of your army.
Interested? It comes out on August 6 and can be pre-ordered now, so it’s not long to wait.
Zombie Army Dead War 4
From the team that brought you Sniper Elite 4, there’s another Nazi zombie horde, under the leadership of an undead Hitler of course, to take on as a co-op team. Lay your traps and keep an eye on all angles as the glowing-eyed undead lumber or charge in your direction. Happily, you have plenty of options, and can take advantage of what the elite zombies bring to the battlefield.
Remnant: From the Ashes
Gunfire Games have created a co-op fantasy shooter, set on a post-apocalyptic Earth and some worlds beyond it. The enemies are twisted monstrous versions of creatures you’d usually see in a magical medieval setting, but you’re armed with guns to even the odds. There’s apparently a lot of replayability, with many ways the game can diverge, meaning it’s good for multiple playthroughs or still interesting while switching between worlds as you play with different people. Dark Souls fans, this might be one for you when it releases later this year.=
Planet Zoo
Coming off the success of Planet Coaster, there’s now going to be Planet Zoo. The animals are authentic, with unique desires and behaviours, and the enclosures have enormous amounts of customization to help your animals live happily and give your guests an awesome experience. It’s a ‘modern zoo’ too, which involves promoting conservation and environmental care as well as just showing off fantastic creatures from around the world, As for the release date, it’s coming out on September 5th.
Shenmue III
Yu Suzuki has a lot of amazing games on his resume, but the Shenmue series is one that gets players excited like no other. Shenmue 3 is creeping closer to release, now coming out in November this year. The new trailer footage shows martial arts training, freerunning after petty criminals while rescuing people on the way, no doubt just a small segment of all the available things you’ll be able to do in the final game.
Songs of Conquest
Coffee Stain Studios and Lava Potion are the makers of this strategy game. Taking influence from the Heroes of Might and Magic series, there’s some stunning pixel art fantasy setting, which you’ll explore and fight through as you build up your town and army, which you’ll pit against rival ‘wielders’ in intense chess-like battles. There’s been some modernizations too though, such as a fresh magic system with multiple elements. The release date is late 2020, but you can sign up for an upcoming alpha now.
Vermintide 2
There’s new content coming to the co-operative horde game, in the form of a versus mode that lets you take control of hero units of both sides. The matches consist of two rounds, with each team playing the scenario from either side, with the winners being the team who progressed their objectives as the heroes the furthest. There’s a beta to sign up for if you want to get in as fast as possible before the full release next year.
Per Aspera
You objective in this game is to turn Mars into something more easily inhabitable by humans. As a drone imbued with human intelligence, you’ll start building up your base across the whole planet, creating robots and machines to turn desert to grass and valleys to oceans.
Ancestors
Telling the story of evolution itself, in this game you control groups of pre-human species as you fight off enemies in order to survive to become the world’s dominant creature. You’ll need the essential human characteristics of curiosity and ingenuity to keep reach the top of the food chain. You’ll be able to find out if you have what it takes to stay alive from August 27.
Auto Chess
Coming to mobile as well as PC (via the Epic Games Store), this strategy game is arriving later this year. It's based on a mod for DOTA, but now has a standalone so more people can experience the strange mix of hero-based combat and turn-based strategy.
CrisTales
The past, present and future collide in this JRPG-style game. As you see the events of the past, and take action in the present, you can see the impact in the future on the same screen. There’s a demo on Steam if you want to know more about how this mind-bender of a game works in practice.
Val Faris
Like heavy metal and deadly citadels? Then take your largest weapon and charge into Val Faris. It’s a 2D Contra-style game with enormous bosses and plenty of unique items and tools of death to find on your way to the castle’s heart.
Borderlands 3
We all knew this one was coming, but there’s some new info coming out of Gearbox. We now know more about Moze, the vault hunter armed with an enormous mech as her special ability, the more customizable grenades and shields, class mods that both enhance and give your character new skills, plus artefacts which change your movement abilities, such as making explosions while you slide from cover to cover.
The Guardian system is the new infinite progression system for hardcore Borderlands players, which give you extra skins and benefits for all your account’s characters, not just the one you’ve brought up to the level cap of 50. Boss fights have been overhauled too, with enormous beasts and multiple phases. Launch is set for September 13, so fear not vault hunters, you've not long to wait now!
Maneater
If you missed this up to now, Maneater is an open world RPG in which you play a shark growing ever larger and evolving new abilities by consuming fish and people. In the new trailer, we meet Scaly Pete, the best shark fisherman in the world who becomes the game’s villain, plus the reality show framing which helps tell the story of your fishy avatar munching its way through the seas, and even the beach if you get the right upgrades.
Terraria: Journey’s End
The 30 million copy-selling game continues to change, and now we have this new expansion. There’s now even more to see and do in this 2D mining and crafting game, with new items and enemies to see, acquire and defeat, plus a new even harder difficulty mode. And best of all, it's free for people who already own the game
Telling Lies
Flex your detective muscles with this game, which grew out of the critically acclaimed Her Story.. Using live video, you work out the relationship between the four main characters by watching webcam clips from two years of their lives, and figuring out what’s happened. It’s a unique way of interacting with a mystery, moving through the clips to learn more and more clues in your own unique path, based on what you find and what you want to pursue.
Warframe: Empyrean
Another expansion for the popular third person action game, which promises to be another massive step forward with huge-scale space combat across the solar system. You can learn more at a seperate Warframe event on July 6.
Genesis Noir
At the dawn of the universe, it turns out there’s a world of crime, dangerous dames and jazz to be found. In striking black and white, it’s both a story of the Big Bang and the complex characters you expect from the films which inspired this game.
El Hijo
Trapped in a monastery in the Old West, the player character, a young boy, must escape, using his toys as a means of outwitting the monks charged with looking after him. It sounds very serious, but the art style is cute, and the ways in which you can fool the holy men in your way are suitably childish.
Baldur’s Gate 3
The cherry on top of the PC Gaming Show is the return of this RPG series. With mind-flayers and other beasts awaiting you inside the hostile city, based on the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons but packed into a game that retains all of the possibilities of table top with the gorgeous (although sometimes hideous) presentation that Larian Studios, the developers behind Divinity: Original Sin can offer.
Speaking of table top, on September 17 there’s a prequel pen-and-paper module you can play in order to check out what’s been going on since we last saw the world of Baldur’s Gate.
For the latest news out of the PC Gaming Show and all of E3's major events, be sure to follow our E3 2019 news hub all month long.
