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E3 is just a few short weeks away and, as such, devs and publishers are sending out press invites. Bethesda’s, which was made public by VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines, includes a picture: a map for a theme park.
Invites have gone out for the Bethesda E3 Showcase. Stay tuned for your chance to win tickets to join us at Bethesdaland on Sunday, June 11. pic.twitter.com/0Nu0qt1qJr
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) April 28, 2017
The map for ‘BETHESDALAND’ shows different areas of the theme park are dedicated to different Bethesda IPs. Directly in front of the gates is Fallout, with a jaunty Vault Boy and some Nuka-Cola mascots. Clockwise from there is Dishonored, with Corvo lurking in Dunwall and Emily in Karnaca; next to that is Prey, Morgan Yu leveling a gun at some spidery mimics. At the top is The Elder Scrolls series, with requisite dragon, then the red hellscape of Doom, followed by Quake Champions.
There are, however, two areas of the theme park that aren’t quite finished. Between Prey and The Elder Scrolls is an ‘Under Construction’ building site, obscured by wooden boards, and at the bottom, next to Quake Champions, is second one — this time with a chain link fence, and a sign reading ‘Coming Soon’. So what this means is that Bethesda is going to reveal two previously unannounced games at E3.
The smart money (at least for one of them) is on a new Wolfenstein game. This is smart money because Bethesda hinted at the next Wolfenstein game last year. A fake boot up screen opening the 2016 E3 conference listed all the Wolfenstein games in order, followed by ‘New_Colossus’ and a starred out date.
The year before that, in an interview in 2015, Alicja Bachleda-Curus (who played Anya Oliwa in Wolfenstein: The New Order) reportedly said ‘I’m working on a video game, first part of which I have already made. Now we’re making a second one, which will take two more years.’ So, counting on my fingers here, that puts a possible new Wolfenstein game at around… why, this year!
The aforementioned Pete Hines was a guest on the Kinda Funny podcast at the start of this year, and was asked how the new Wolfenstein was coming. Hines replied that ‘Machine Games has been hard at work on something,’ which he’s played, and it is ‘F***ing bananas.’
So we’re pretty confident in saying that one of those bits of the park is Wolfenstein World. Do not take your children to Wolfenstein World.
Another likely candidate is The Evil Within 2. The survival horror game from Resident Evil’s creator Shinji Mikami came out in 2014, to a mixed response. However, a couple of months ago NeoGAF unearthed a potential job listing, in Japanese, for a translator and Q&A position for Psycho Break 2, at Tango Gameworks. Psycho Break is the Japanese title for The Evil Within. If this job listing is accurate, the contract runs until October 31, which means The Evil Within 2 could be shooting for a Christmas release, or an early 2018 one.
These are the most likely candidates, but Bethesda could be about to announce a brand new IP. Reading the map extremely literally, for example, one of the building sites has a sign saying ‘Pardon our Dust’ and is surrounded by traffic cones. Bethesda has form with racing games, that’s all we’re saying.
But nah, it’s probably Wolfenstein: The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2.
