Pre-E3 Press Conference Highlights
Welcome to E3! It hasn’t even started yet, and if you’ve been following along you could be forgiven for already suffering from game trailer overload. On Monday, we had press conferences for Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, and Sony. That’s a lot to take in, especially with each presenter throwing as much content as possible into your brain to see what sticks. Lets take a look at some of the highlights from this year’s E3 press conference!
MICROSOFT
The Microsoft conference started with Call of Duty, not an exclusive franchise but the XBox gets content for it first. This was a running theme at Microsoft’s press conference, with Assassin’s Creed and Dragon Age: Inquisition getting the same treatment. The other running theme was games. This may seem like a no-brainer but after last year’s TV focused debacle its nice to see that Microsoft remembers why people buy its shiny black box. The two highlights of the conference were Sunset Overdrive and Fable Legends. Sunset Overdrive is a fast, colorful, run, gun and slasher, focused on style, humor, and constant movement. The player grinds on rails, jumps, hovers, and bounces, while mowing down monsters with ‘wacky’ armaments set to a pounding rock sondtrack. To me, it looked pleasingly old-school and seemed to have more in common with Doom than any modern shooter.
Even the box harkens back to yesteryear
Fable Legends looks good for a different reason. It has asynchronous game-play (one of my favourite mechanics) where four players control heroes, and fifth controls the dungeons and monsters. This is the sort of next-gen experience I’ve been looking forward to, and might be the game that seduces me into buying a next-gen console. Also, Halo 5 looks nice. I still wish they would focus more on the actually-quite-cool Halo universe and less on what a BADASS MUTHAFUKAH Master Chief is supposed to be.
EA
Time to see what the multiple Worst Corporation in America Award winner has up its sleeves. The event opened with Bioware, which is awesome. Dragon Age: Inquisition looks nice, with a focus on an open world and fantastic landscapes. This is change from the same three rooms repeated ad nauseam level design of Dragon Age II. Also, there were glimpses of Mass Effect 4 and a new, ‘contemporary’ IP. This all looks fantastic to me, but I am literally not capable of judging Bioware games objectively. EA also gave us a look at new a new Sims game, a game which never fails to make me realize how empty human existence is, and plenty of SPORTS YAH!, including a UFC game. The Battlefield trailer was interesting; they’ve made a shift from “I WANNA BE CALL OF DUTY” to more of an extreme cops and robbers formula. Colour me intrigued. Plus they launched the Beta as well.
“Battlefield will cross all the lines, even the hard ones!” Its not the slogan but it should be.
UBISOFT
Ubisoft opens with Far Cry 4. It looks like a game of lush landscapes and psychotic personalities, just like the last one. Which is great! I loved Far Cry 3, and hope they find a way to work tigers back into it despite being set in the Himalayas. Also on hand was The Division, a multiplayer shooter about re-taking New York from the crazies after a plague, and The Crew, an action car type thing with extensive car customization and a virtual USA (also with a beta sign up). The Division trailer was the highlight of the show so far, and it gave me shivers. So did the Dead Island trailer, though, and we all know how that ended (hilarious soccer-riot style zombie beat-downs).
Abandoned cities, disaster, and looters. That’s my kind of party.
Ubisoft also showed off Assassin’s Creed: Unity (dateline: Napoleonic France. Wasn’t this series supposed to eventually go to the future?) and a Rainbow Six multiplayer, tactical, murder-fest call Siege. Also tossed in was a dancing game and fitness game to counteract the grim and guns.
SONY
Remastered Grim Fandango! That’s all you need to know. Ok, ok, there might have been some other stuff. Destiny had some interesting lore and good trailer, and I’d consider it to be the true sequel to Halo (as it is developed by Bungie). I think its very interesting that Bungie is throwing its weight behind the PS4 after Halo made the XBox a success; Destiny is still coming to the XBone, but Sony’s system gets first dibs. In the exclusive corner we have The Order, a steampunk, gothic shooter we saw last year. We also have Little Big Planet 3 featuring different types of Sackboi for co-op, and a game called Bloodbourne from the guys who brought us Dark Souls. It looks, appropriately enough, quite dark. We also get a dark, grisly Suda 51 (Killer Seven, No More Heroes) game. Overall, its quite a contrast to the lively colours that Microsoft displayed earlier in the day. The exclusive that I’m the most excited about? A procedural planet exploration game called No Man’s Sky. That’s the kind of thing that I could really sink my teeth into. There was more of a focus on hardware and remasters than in the Xbox conference. They talked about PlayStation TV, and how they are making exclusive TV content for the PS4. Seems a bit…cheeky to focus on this after they made headlines a year ago for mocking Microsoft for the same kind of thing. They ended with a flurry of trailers for Metal Gear Solid V, Batman: Arkham Knight, and Uncharted 4.
Like I’m going to show anything but Batman when I have the option to show Batman.
huff….huff…huff Hopefully we will be able to look at these games in more detail later on. Maybe take a little more time to focus on the individual games… Of course not. Nintendo’s conference is tomorrow.
