By all accounts, 2015 was a damn good year for E3, and the immediate future of video games is looking especially bright. But when we look back on the E3 that was, it's easy to see that - even though these many of these projects are all worked on in strict secrecy - they still share a lot of similarities with one another.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what causes everyone to suddenly jump aboard the same tracks of parallel thought. Maybe a few dozen grappling hook enthusiasts have wriggled their way into the gaming industry; perhaps everybody's got bigger budgets to spend on eye-catching CGI trailers. Call it coincidence, or call it the natural result of humanity's collective subconscious - these are some of the biggest trends that surfaced in the many amazing .

People watch E3 for the surprises, and this year was probably the best in recent memory to deliver on the impossible. Sony's conference was a megaton explosion of revivals, with the return of The Last Guardian, the arrival of Shenmue 3, and a remake for Square Enix's Final Fantasy 7. Square's own conference announced a brand new sequel to the cult-hit Nier. Microsoft even got in on the action, announcing the return of Rare to the world of game design and the arrival of backwards compatibility to the Xbox One. All of these things seemed unthinkable just last week. Now, they're more real than ever.

Look, this really shouldn't be considered a 'trend' - it should just 'be'. But this year's E3 was definitely a step in the right direction, as a good portion of the big-budget games we got to see star some admirable, . You can play as either a man or woman in Fallout 4, Emily Kaldwin is as much a main character as Corvo in Dishonored 2, Aloy slays mechanical dinosaurs in Horizon: Zero Dawn, Lara Croft was front and center in two press conferences, and many, many more games either star women, or at the very least allow players to choose their gender. Progress.

There's certainly no shortage of sequels that simply expand on prior ideas - Fallout 4 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided are basically like the old games but bigger - but several publishers are taking their beloved franchises in totally new directions. Persona 4: Dancing All Night takes the social-focused JRPG and thrusts it into the rhythm game genre. Two of Bethesda's biggest franchises are getting their own mobile titles: Elder Scrolls Legends takes the sprawling RPG and turns it into a collectible card game, while Fallout Shelter is a neat little life-in-a-Vault management game. Even Ghost Recon is transforming in a big way, taking a straightforward squad-based shooter and blowing it out to open-world proportions - much like Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain's own approach to breaking away from constrained level structure.

It's shocking how many CGI trailers we saw at E3 this year, but a lot of that has to do with how many games are slated for 2016 and beyond. We get it: publishers want to sell people on the high concept of their games, and they want to do it with some pizazz. Or maybe whatever game they're hawking isn't ready to be shown just yet. Regardless of the reason, CGI trailers are ultimately an empty promise. They're all style and no substance, filled with impossibly gorgeous visuals and highly-detailed action that will in no way be representative of the final, playable product. When you see a CGI trailer in a conference, it's basically your window of opportunity to grab a soda from the fridge, because other than the name, what you're seeing isn't going to exist.

If the popularity of Batman and Spider-Man tells us anything, it's that people love imagining what it would be like to swing off of anything and everything. And while trying to fashion your own real-life grappling hook will probably land you in the nearest emergency room, games let you zip around on a metal tether with all the freedom in the world. The grappling hook is one of the Just Cause series' biggest claims to fame, so of course it's back for ?

Seriously, Platinum Games went from making one or two projects at a time to making all of the games. They're working on Star Fox Zero for Nintendo, they're going to be working on Square Enix's sequel to the cult-hit RPG Nier, they're making a brand new Transformers game for Activision, and they've still got Scalebound for Microsoft (though we'll most likely see more of that at Gamescom). Three new announcements at E3 from a studio responsible for fantastic over-the-top action games. Everybody wins.

In 2015 and beyond, it's not just enough to play your games as designed. Publishers now want you to build and share your own creations made inside the game. With the popularity - or rather, cult-like devotion of millions - surrounding Minecraft, games have an increasing desire to cater to a generation of I'll-just-build-it-myself creators. Media Molecule's Dreams expands on lessons learned from its work on LittleBigPlanet, but that's expected. The bigger surprises come from companies like Nintendo and Bethesda. Super Mario Maker aims to be the only Mario game you'll ever need, as you can create and download custom stages across a variety of Super Mario styles. Bethesda's rolling out Doom Snapmap, which allows players to create their own arenas and gametypes within the ultra-violent shooter. Even , giving players the opportunity to construct their own settlements, and even do some light programming of their own.

They say that human beings are social animals, and while we all love to kill one another in multiplayer deathmatches, we also have an inherent need to unite and take out some aggression on emotionless computers. Many of the games at E3 2015 tapped into that sense of togetherness with tight squads of cooperative players squaring off against AI hordes. , and Star Wars Battlefront's co-op survival missions pit two Rebel players against an army of Imperial troopers. We would include The Division but... we've all seen how friendships crumble in those Dark Zones when there's loot to be had.

If you looked at the line-up with no knowledge of what came before, you wouldn't guess that the world was making sarcastic comments about how hard women are to animate less than a year ago. While it's still sadly common to see a press conference's worth of games headlined by a single gender, this E3 saw a slew of titles where women are taking center stage, either as integral and active participants or as protagonists in their own right. We may have expected Lara and a possible female addition to the Gears clan, but this year's showing blew right past that goal post and gave us a cheeky wave on the way out.

Gotta say, we like that style, and want to highlight those ladies that stand as the face of their games and the companies that created them. To that end, we've compiled a list of the most prominent female characters of E3 2015 for their adulation and your perusal. Who knows - maybe you'll find a leading lady whose story you'll want to follow.

It doesn't take long to figure out that "the old ones" Aloy speaks of in the opening moments of Horizon's reveal trailer refers to us, and we see soon thereafter how far mankind has fallen from grace: humans exist in tribes, vulnerable to mechanical beasts that roam the land. It's an imposing, intimidating future, and yet Aloy handles it like a pro as she hunts grass-grazing automatons and fends off a robot dinosaur. When the end of the world comes, Aloy is someone you want on your side.

Once a precocious little girl whose drawings could get very dark if you weren't careful about raising her up right, Emily is all grown up in Dishonored 2 and taking down targets of her own with magical and tech-assisted abandon. She strikes an imposing figure while tearing through mechanized warriors and turning into a shadow creature, breaking down every defense thrown in front of her. Plus, she does it all with elegance and poise. Her parents would be so proud.

We know almost nothing about the girl from Microsoft's new IP, Recore. Not her name, where she comes from, or what she's doing out in a desert wasteland filled with aggressive constructs. Still, in the game's debut trailer, we see her tenacity and the loyalty she inspires in her robo-dog companion, and that's enough to make us want to learn more.

You've been able to play as a post-apocalyptic guy or gal ever since Fallout 2, but some persistent rumors indicated that might be not be the case in . Bethesda showed off Fallout 4's new-and-improved third-person perspective with a bog standard white dude protagonist, but only after casually brushing aside said concerns with a great "step aside, honey, I got this" moment in the bathroom mirror character editor. Turns out the dude's wife isn't just an NPC - she's another blank canvas for you to customize and play as.

Beyond Eyes' ten-year-old protagonist isn't like the other super-powered, butt-kicking, free-running characters on this list. She has no preternatural abilities, no apocalyptic future to prevent. Instead, she's young girl without sight, on a personal journey to find her lost cat, Nani. But even without the use of her eyes, Rae's other senses let the world blossom around her like a droplet of paint bleeding across paper fibers. She sees things through the lens of her own imagination, which amplifies the beauty of the mundane - and the fear of the unknown.

Faith Connors was a female protagonist before it was cool, man. Back in ye olden days of 2008 when the original Mirror's Edge was released, we followed her on a quest to clear her sister's name from a murder she didn't commit. It looks like Faith will have bigger prey to tackle in the Mirror's Edge Catalyst reboot, but her unparalleled skills in parkour and hand-to-hand combat mean we're not worried one bit about her ability to succeed. Faith inspires … well, faith in us.

We've known about Evie's existence in the upcoming . Potentially more ruthless than her gang-leading brother, Evie gives any standing in the Assassin's way reason to be very, very afraid. As the second female assassin on our list, it makes us wonder who would win in a fight: Emily or Evie?

To Lara Croft, surviving catastrophic adventures is like eating a bag of potato chips: she can't stop after she's started, even if the results are highly unpleasant. After nearly falling to her death from a mountain cliff, she frantically outruns a blizzard as it rips the ground out from under her feet, right before she's buried in several feet of snow. Even when she emerges less than gracefully, coughing powder out of her lungs and stuck in the cold without any supplies or shelter, she still looks like one hell of a survivor. Good thing, too - something tells us that this game won't be any kinder to her than the last one.

It was hard to see much of anything in the Gears 4 trailer, since the developers took 'dark and gritty' to its literal conclusion, but we were able to pick out a new new Gears sneaking through the shadows. One of them is a woman named Kait (which we now know from the Gears Twitch stream), and from the clip we saw of her in combat, she seems every bit as snarky and capable as the Gears who've come before her.

Here's one we're not sure what to make of just yet. In an all-too-brief trailer for Xbox One game Ashen, we see a male decked out in adventurer's gear recruit a woman to help him explore a decrepit tomb. As the male character inspects some ancient treasure, he gets swarmed by monsters, and the female character gets separated. At the trailer's close, we see only the female character still alive, kneeling on a hilltop. We're not sure what it all means, but the twist of having the male adventurer seemingly die, then ending on a shot of the female character, is symbolic in its own way.

Fullbright is no stranger to female protagonists, focusing on the story of a girl named Sam as her sister Katie slowly uncovers its details in the stellar Gone Home. The studios' newest game, Tacoma, follows in that same vein, with a new, as-yet unnamed female protagonist who's tasked with exploring the remains of a space station to find out what happened there. She's a lot chattier that Katie, and has to be, because her only companion is a voice on her communicator giving her instructions from back at HQ. Other than that, she's on her own to discover the station's fate, and deal with that she might find (or, well, the other way around).

Much like Tacoma's astronaut, Delilah spends most of her time on one end of a walkie-talkie, only on the opposite one from the player. Delilah is a national park supervisor in Firewatch, and communicates regularly with her man on the ground, Henry (aka you), about the state of the forest and his watch. As one of two characters in the game (three if you count the wilderness itself), Delilah is an important part of Henry's adventure, and interacting with her is almost as important to the game as not falling off of a cliff or getting eaten by anything. Their relationship changes dramatically depending on how Henry responds to her, so it's worth your time to listen to what she has to say.

Rainbow Six Siege might've had us grimacing uncomfortably at E3 2014 when its only female character was a glorified flag you can use as a human shield. It's doing a whole lot better this year though, in no small part due to the introduction of the Rainbow unit's leader, a stern and serious woman named Six. Played by the timeless (and apparently ageless) Angela Bassett, she will be the voice of authority during the team's missions, organizing them and making sure everything goes according to plan. We're not yet sure how much of a role she'll play in the missions themselves, but we're sure to see more of her before Siege lands in September.

The diver from Abzu might seem effectively genderless, given that she spends all of her time in a diving suit, and it has no effect on her ability to ride on the fin of a giant manta ray. But when it's normal to dub an agender character male by default, it's nice to see the script flipped. In Abzu, this unnamed female diver's only goal is to explore the ocean depths, make friends with fish, and discover secrets buried so deep that the surrounding fish have headlamps. Not deterred by the thought of vicious sharks or a nasty case of the bends, this diver will risk life and limb to discover what lies below, all to the sound of a whimsical score.