E3 is a special time of year for gamers. Known for jaw-dropping announcements and fan service by the bucket load, an E3 conference never fails to fill me with excitement from the minute the curtain lifts. In recent years, Sony has been the champion of left-field announcements, with most of their recent conferences leaving audiences stunned. This year, however, was different.

Always the masters of spectacle, Sony opened the show with a live recital of traditional Indian music. This led into a new trailer for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. It was a promising start that left me eagerly awaiting the “Wow!” moment. It came shortly after with the reveal of a Shadow of the Colossus remake by Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the remaster of Uncharted. It seemed to set up a bigger reveal later on, but unfortunately as the conference went on and more new titles were unveiled, few of these impressed me. That second big reveal never came.

Most of the new trailers shown were for previously announced exclusives (Days Gone, Detroit: Become Human and Spider-Man were all shown). All that was needed to get the crowd going were some release dates, but Sony did not deliver. Of the games that did get release dates, many are disappointingly far away. The highly anticipated upcoming God of War was given an “early 2018” window, while Detroit and Days Gone were given no release date.

The conference was rounded off with an impressive extended demo of Insomniac’s Spider-Man. It was graphically gorgeous, fast paced and lighthearted. It seemed like everything we could want from a Spider-Man game, so I was disappointed yet again when the footage concluded with an end-card reading “2018”.

Being so far ahead in both the console war and the annual E3 press conference war, Sony was bound to slip up eventually. While the conference was not a showstopper, it certainly was not a bad show. The conference provided a more detailed look at what PlayStation will have to offer in the future, even if it is further away than we’d like.