If all this talk of games that sound a lot more casual has you squirming a little, it doesn't mean we'll be seeing a shift in emphasis from Sony, especially at E3 this year. With the success of Horizon already established, and the top games on the platform being FIFA, Grand Theft Auto V, and Final Fantasy XV, we'll be seeing lots of big, epic games although many of them were shown last year at either E3 or Sony's own event in December. The God of War reboot from Sony's Santa Monica studio will be central to this its new, more narrative-focused, open-world approach with a grizzled, bearded Kratos coming as a direct result of Sony's new global thinking. While always popular in North America, past games in the series just didn't do it for players elsewhere. "It's a franchise that has historically acutely underperformed in Europe," Ryan says. "Hack and slash games tend to not do so well in Europe, so the narrative this time around will make a big difference. European gamers love narrative games. And Singstar."
Alongside God of War Layden confirmed that we'll also see Naughty Dog's Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Insomniac's Spider-Man, Days Gone from Sony's Bend Studio, and Polyphony's Gran Turismo Sport. Sadly, we couldn't get a rise out of him on what InFamous and Sly Cooper developer Sucker Punch is working on, or whether there'll be any word of Sony partnering with FromSoftware on Bloodborne 2. "You can ask," he quipped but wouldn't say anything further. We may get another glimpse of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding, though. "We're partnering with him and financing development of Death Stranding. His team has taken the Decima engine that Guerrilla built for Horizon Zero Dawn and they're using that as the base for Death Stranding. Both teams are working from a joint code base now and building on it. It's kind of like a holy grail in game development. Some studios outside of my world have invoked that kind of discipline "thou shalt all use this engine" but we've sort of left it to our studios to find the engine they need within the technologies that we have available."
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Sony will also be pushing its partnerships, "We have a Call of Duty partnership, a Destiny 2 partnership, Red Dead partnership with Take-Two and Star Wars with EA," says Ryan. While unwilling to specify the nature of these deals, it's likely we'll see trailer premieres at the very least.
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