25 Things We Are Excited to See at E3 2013 #5 – #1

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has shown up at plenty of conventions so far, but not in playable form. We know that the game will feature historical pirates and ports, and that building your ship, hiring your crew, and participating in naval battles will be a huge focus of the gameplay. However, we haven’t yet been able to experience this first hand. Hopefully E3 will have more for us than just a new trailer.

Speaking of trailers, Watch Dogs was revealed at last year’s E3 and all we have seen is trailers since. We have not yet been to any convention that has had an actual demo of this game available for play. The game is promising a lot, including an incredibly open world, and the ability to interface with your cellphone as an in-game hacking device. It’s time to see if Watch Dogs lives up to Ubisoft's promises.

If you want to talk about killer apps that could sell the Wii U, look no further than Smash Bros. This is the one game that both the Nintendo fan base and the fighting game community is looking forward this year. It’s being developed by Namco Bandai, who has a lot of experience making hardcore fighters, but will it appeal to the hardcore crowd? Will we see the balanced tournament fighter we have always wanted, or will we see more mechanics like random tripping and stage hazards that can kill you in one hit? Creator Masahiro Sakurai has said that his recent diagnosis of calcific tendonitis may prevent him from working on the franchise ever again. Is this the end for our favorite party brawler? Super Smash Bros. U has gamers at the edge of their seats, and if Nintendo doesn’t use this title to gain leverage over the PS4 and the new Xbox, they are playing their cards wrong.

Speaking of next generation consoles, this is the year we get to see them all. The PlayStation 4 is at the top of most people’s list at E3 because, well, we still haven’t even seen the console. We have seen the controller and we know all of the console's specs and capabilities, but we don’t know what it looks like. We also don’t know a price either. We can only hope that we won’t be seeing another $599 fiasco.

As much as the PS4 piques our interest, Microsoft's next console is even more of a mystery. We haven’t seen the system, much like the PS4, but we also don’t know what it can do. We don’t know anything about its specs, other than the fact that there have been rumors going around that the console may or may not include always-online for DRM purposes. We don’t know what format of media it will read, or what its controller will look like. We don’t know if Xbox Live Gold will still be a thing after the console’s release, or if it will be backward compatible in any way (especially for downloadable titles). Heck, we don’t even know it’s actual name. Durango? Infinity? We won’t know for sure until a Microsoft representative gets on stage and finally says “The Next Xbox has come.”