It was cute at first. When Xbox head Phil Spencer took the stage at E3 2018 and announced the acquisition of five notable studios – Undead Labs, Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games and The Initiative – the air inside the Microsoft Theater turned electric. It felt like the company was righting a wrong in its business plan and finally building an internal roster of exciting games that it could offer exclusively on Xbox platforms. You know, a few friends to keep Master Chief company. Today's announcement that Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard, the largest third-party publisher in the video game industry, doesn't feel as harmless.

Those hoping for a glimpse of Elder Scrolls VI or the highly anticipated sci-fi adventure Starfield were left disappointed at Bethesda's E3 conference in Los Angeles on Sunday. But the publisher did make a couple of intriguing announcements, with new games from Dishonored creator Arkane Lyon and from the studio of Resident Evil legend Shinji Mikami. There were also new trailers for shooters Doom Eternal (out on 22 November) and Wolfenstein Youngblood, both of which look to be carrying on the explosively gory and adrenaline-fuelled legacies of their forebears. A massive update for beleaguered multiplayer role-playing game Fallout 76 was also announced, adding a battle royale mode called Nuclear Winter and human characters for players to meet. Elsewhere, the hack'n'slash adventure Elder Scrolls Blades, recently released on smartphones, is coming to Nintendo Switch, and there's to be a free-to-play smartphone return for Id Software's old platforming hero, Commander Keen, out in the summer.

In the early 2000s, game publisher Bethesda was best known for its Elder Scrolls series of technologically ambitious fantasy games. In the last 15 years, however, it has expanded greatly, snapping up several legendary video game franchises as well as starting an original series of its own. The company now produces the Fallout post-apocalyptic role-playing games; the iconic, hellish shooter Doom; tongue-in-cheek Nazi-killing romp Wolfenstein; supernatural steampunk assassin sim Dishonoured; and Rage, a Mad Max-style romp around a devastated world. At its E3 press conference last month, after showing new Doom, Rage, Fallout and Wolfenstein titles, Bethesda teased the next entry in its Elder Scrolls series as well as a new sci-fi role-playing game called Starfield. For both, 100 hours is a conservative playtime estimate.

It's Tuesday, which means the E3 show floor is now open. It also means we're finally at the end of a four-day slog of press conferences from some of the gaming world's largest publishers. While Activision Blizzard still doesn't do its own pre-E3 event, just about everyone else does, which means these 96 hours have been a deluge of announcements and reveals that we did our best to get our arms around. We didn't even cover them all: the Square Enix press conference was basically devoid of new information, and the PC Gaming Show, while compelling, was mostly a long list of indie game announcements--some of which we'll be getting to later this week. So, for now, here's everything you need to know about every press conference you need to know about.

It's been seven years since Bethesda debuted "Skyrim," but the franchise's fans won't have to wait much longer for the sequel. Just after previewing "Starfield," the company's first original IP in a quarter century, Bethesda had "just one more thing" for the assembled crowd: "The Elder Scrolls VI." The iteration number is just about all we know about the upcoming title so far but stay tuned to Engadget for more updates, we'll be reporting from the E3 show floor all week. We're excited to announce our next chapter, The Elder Scrolls VI. pic.twitter.com/3aF5evUsnY Andrew has lived in San Francisco since 1982 and has been writing clever things about technology since 2011.