E3 2016 – Ubisoft

For some reason, I always particularly look forward to the Ubisoft press conference at E3, and this year didn’t disappoint with its slick presentation and colourful dancing introduction. Aisha Tyler was once again the delightful host for the night, offering a message of support to Orlando and the LGBT community, before making a full 360 and turning our attention to the games on show.

Following on from colourful dance spectacle, of course it wouldn’t be E3 without the announcement of a new Just Dance game, due to be launching in October, a firm favourite for anyone who misses the days of the dance mat. The jovialities soon ended when Ubisoft went onto present a new Tom Clancy game, nothing of this really stood out for me, I’ve come to realise that I’m very picky about what games I tend to pay attention to, and it would have to be something really special for a shooting game to catch my eye. I mean I only really liked the look of Fallout 4 because of Dogmeat, and that wore thin pretty quickly.

Now for the next announcement, and I was very much looking forward to this one.  The sequel to South Park’s The Stick of Truth was unveiled as The Fractured But Whole (just say it, don’t think about it, say it out loud).  South Park creators and masterminds Matt Stone and Trey Parker took to the stage themselves to proudly introduce their new offensive baby, and whereas the last title was based around old school turn-based RPGs, this one is all about becoming a superhero. The story carries off from the last game, where the new kid is subjected to a sudden change in game trends and forced to take on a new alter-ego, though this time with super powers and hopefully a cape.  Whereas the combat in the previous game was static, this time you can move on the battlefield and get a bit more stuck in, something which the last title so badly needed.  Of course, it wouldn’t be a South Park game without harmful bodily odours being a feature, and this time farts are used to mess around with time – my kind of game.  It’s coming out in December this year, and if you pre-order then you’ll even get The Stick of Truth for free on the new generation of consoles, reckon that’s one offer that I cannot refuse!

Back to the guns now with some new Underground DLC revealed for The Division, and an expansion called Survival, both of which I’m sure will be welcome additions to fans, not so much for PS4 gamers though as they’ll need to wait a further 2 whole months for the DLC to hit their consoles.

Then something a little different came along, with an on-stage VR competition in the game Eagle Flight, which broke up the barrage of games quite nicely.  Two teams took to the skies, all controlling a majestic eagle as they flew through Paris to get the rabbit and return it safely to their nest. Oh, these eagles also had missiles to knock the others off course.  They seemed pretty excited on stage but it did get a little drab to watch veryyyy quickly, and seemed more like a gimmick of a title than one that you would play more than a handful of times.  Hopefully this was just a little show of how Ubisoft will indeed be catering to VR, but not entirely the scope of their games.

Carrying on with VR now, and Star Trek came to the fray, allowing gamers to take control of the ship (I’ve never really watched Star Trek so I can’t really say much more than that) in an experience that looks very much like Space Team on mobile devices (impromptu recommendation there, give Space Team a go with some friends over wifi, top entertainment), and looks to be heaps of fun if you can get 4 VR headsets in one room – expensive, but fun.

Something much more up my alley came next – For Honor, an epic bloodbath featuring three classes of hero to fight as, the Vikings, Samurai and Knights, who are all pitted up against each other in what proves to be some gruelling combat.  The team-based multiplayer brawls focus on melee combat and some beautiful weapon work, so this certainly seems like a game for me, epic battles and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the three factions will intertwine in a story of huge bloody proportions. But best of all, it’s due to release on Valentine’s Day 2017, and who said romance was dead?

A slightly unexpected reveal this year was a sequel to Grow Home, the stylised game where BUD the cute little red robot tried his hardest to go home on huge green vines and stalks.  Grow Up, the sequel, sees you using seeds to create bouncy plants, allowing you to reach new heights and aim for the moon.  I didn’t really get into the original game, though if I wind up getting it somehow I’ll give it a go, the mechanics of climbing and getting around really frustrated me before, so I’m hoping that they may have made it a little less scrappy.

What do you get if you cross Trials Motocross with Far Cry Blood Dragon? Trials of the Blood Dragon, that’s what.  Ubisoft released the amazing trailer for the game that they had secretly already brought out, full with throw backs to Saved by the Bell, old school action figures and plenty of cheesy animation. The footage of the trailer showed bikes zooming over the top of helicopters, free running, wacky stunts and riding along in a minecart like you’ve never seen before (sorry Minecraft) – this looks super fun.

Now, Watch Dogs 2 time. I got incredibly excited about the last game, the idea behind it was something unexplored in console gaming, with the promise of this huge futuristic city where you can control everything, but sadly the game didn’t pull through.  Watch Dogs 2 seems to be taking this to the next stage, with a group of cyber warriors taking it upon themselves to hijack politics and save the world from being corrupted by technology and social media… Sounds all a bit too close to home for me, but this sequel if it actually delivers, looks pretty damn amazing.  Fingers crossed this time they’ll get it right!

For some strange reason, Assasin’s Creed has been turned into a movie now, which makes sense as their games were slowly getting worse and worse, so hopefully this will see the break that they need in order to return with some fresh and exciting games. Watch Dogs is also supposedly being turned into a movie, which to be fair I believe would fit the bold plot a little better than the video game equivalent.

The final announcement for Ubisoft was their new snowboarding game – Steep. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a new SSX and so this seems to be taking over the gap in the market, focusing not only on skis, but also with snowboarding, wingsuits and paragliding added to the mix.  The graphics are ace, and from what I saw seems to be an open-world extreme sports game, with both multiplayer and solo gameplay.  It will be nice to see what the current generation of consoles can do for snowy mountains when you’re hurtling down them at break-neck speeds.

All in all, Ubisoft didn’t disappoint at this year’s conference, with South Park being my steal of the show and getting me excited for a new cartoon adventure, but also a strong showing from Watch Dogs 2, For Honor and the surprise announcement of Steep.  Not only that, but I love the set up that they have with Aisha Tyler hosting the show, it was overall a smooth presentation and not just loads of individual developers and spokespeople fighting to make the stand-out announcement of the show.

Want to check out a little more on the titles that I didn’t really pay that much attention to? Or maybe you want to check that the new South Park game title isn’t something I’ve plucked from my imagination? Well you can watch the whole stream here, and there’s plenty to see from this conference.

E3 2016 – Bethesda

I don’t really have that much to say on the Bethesda showcase this year, as I didn’t think that it was all too impressive, none of the games stood out for me so much as the other developers, but there was one gem in there for me, we’ll get to that shortly.

Before I get stuck into the reason that everyone flocks to E3 (the games, duh), I just wanted to say how amazing it was to see everyone in the Bethesda presentation wearing rainbow ribbons as a sign of solidarity for the Orlando shootings… This sign of respect really stuck out to me, and as a subtle gesture really showed how the community can come together.

So Bethesda opened their show with an upcoming title, Quake Champions.  I can’t say that I’ve ever played Quake and I don’t think that I ever would, but the rumour mill has been going wild over a new instalment to the franchise.  These rumours for once, have been proven as true, with a huge overhaul of graphics, gameplay and exciting tournaments being supported around the world.  Like shooting things? You’ll like this. I must say I got a bit excited when I thought that I saw Storm appearing, turns out I was wrong… That just shows what little I know!

Much like CD Projekt RED with Gwent, Bethesda are releasing their very own card strategy game focused on the characters from the Elder Scrolls.  Although they only showed the opening cinematic for Elder Scrolls Legends, the lore of Tamriel surely sets the scene for a great strategy game, which will be coming to PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices.  If you want to give this a go, then there is already a public beta doing the rounds, check out the requirements here.

Fallout 4 was the game of the entire conference last year, and so it was pretty much a given that the game would come up at least once in Bethesda’s showcase this year.  This time, they showed some upcoming features and DLC, including a workshop where you can create your own customer vault, and Nuka World.  This has been confirmed as the last piece of Fallout 4 DLC, but it sounds like a nice conclusion of the game, a huge theme park themed around Nuka Cola is there for the taking, it’s yet to be seen whether there’ll be hopes of a settlement here, but it sure does look interesting to explore.  As well as the main Fallout 4 game, there are some updates coming to Fallout Shelter and a new PC version, time will tell whether there will be more to this than the mobile version, and whether it will also be free to play.

Next up was their new game – Prey. A first person experience, it seems to be futuristic and dark, just what we’ve come to expect from Bethesda. This thriller of a game shows that you are the subject of an experiment in the future, and from what I could gather, you’re being consumed by something with every passing day, having to rely on mind-bending abilities to survive and claim your life back. It looks interesting, and the story based content that Bethesda is renowned for.

Doom has been making quite the splash since its come back to consoles, and so new DLC has been released, unsurprisingly. I must admit that personally, I’m still as uninterested in Doom as when I saw it at E3 last year, but that’s not to say that what they’ve managed to rekindle with this franchise isn’t amazing.

As an RPG fan, the Elder Scrolls Online was something I purchased not long after its release date.  Although a little let down by it initially, and the fact that the price of this title has come down drastically from release, they are still releasing new DLC, this time called Dark Brotherhood featuring the rogues legacy.  Their new feature, One Tamriel is also a welcome addition, meaning that once it releases, players will be able to explore the whole world without needing to pass through the story, or be limited by their level.  This is surely welcome for those who are new to the series but don’t want to wait an age to level up to go exploring with their buddies.  Good one Bethesda.

Of course, no E3 presentation in 2016 would be complete without the mention of Virtual Reality, and so it turns out that Bethesda is working on a VR version of Doom, as well as the VR version of Fallout 4, due to be released in 2017 in HTC Vive. They made it quite clear in the presentation that they intend to focus on first-person adventures in expansive worlds, so it certainly sounds as though they’ve been intending to gear their content towards VR for quite a long time. If anyone can be at the forefront of revolutionising VR, it would be Bethesda.

The final announcement (the final one that I can remember anyway…) was for Dishonored 2.  I remember this game from last year, where it was revealed you could either play as Emily or Corvo (yay for male OR female leads!) in this dark world, which if I remember rightly is somewhere in Europe… The gameplay demo revealed some of the abilities in the game, of which there seems many.  It seems hugely encouraged to go into situations stealthily, with abilities designed to affect certain enemies, making it possible to create chain reactions.  The design of the levels also seems to encourage travelling vertically and scaling the walls, making the combat compact and precise.  The gameplay showed the player switching between two different time dimensions, where you can flick between past and present, seeing where enemies are in the present, travelling to the past to get close and switching back to the present to get the kill.  This is innovation and hopefully just a slither of what’s to come in the game, though I do think that all of the abilities would prove to be hard to remember, I think I would be a bit lost.

So yep, that’s everything for Bethesda. Ah wait, no actually I forgot something. My highlight of their show. The fact that they are indeed bringing out a fully remastered Skyrim. The rumour mill for once was right and Skyrim special edition is headed to Playstation 4 and Xbox One, not only reproduced but completely overhauled.  They haven’t done the usual remaster thing where they make the graphics slightly better and HD, but they’ve added a lot more detail to make it look even more beautiful than it did before.  As if that wasn’t exciting enough, they’re also going to be implementing mod support for the console versions, much like Fallout 4 (though that’s still a bit of a sore subject for Playstation 4 gamers). I for one cannot wait for this, and I’ll be fully getting stuck into this world again.

That was about it for Bethesda, and it wasn’t a bad showing for their second trip to E3, if only for the announcement of Skyrim, even if I am a little biased.  There was plenty of new footage for RPG and Doom fans to get stuck into, maybe I’m just a little hard to please but I’d rather see games with a little less violence and maybe fewer guns.

You can check out the whole Bethesda showcase here, see what’s coming up, and see if you agree that their remake of Skyrim is what we were expecting.

E3 2016 – Sony

Anyone who knows me would know that I am a Sony Playstation girl, through and through. So, their E3 presentation is always the steal of the show for me, but I must admit that this year, they stood out on another level for me. Hold on tight – I’m going through my highlights, and there are a fair few.

So, the first game on the agenda, was one that I’ve heard of before, although never really looked into – God of War. From the crowd reaction, this was certainly high up on the excitement scale, and I can see why. God of War 4 was announced with a full orchestra providing the soundtrack, and beautiful scenes of Kratos with his son.  The trailer showed off the combat with wonderful graphics, physics and a lot of tension. The sheer emotion in this first showing, really set the pace for the show to come.

Of course, the game that stole the show last year for Sony was again featured this year, with The Last Guardian being shown off with a new trailer and even more footage, sure to wet any fan’s appetite.  This game will be coming out on October 25^th, and I truly believe it’s going to not only live up to the hype, but also provide a gaming experience that all gamers have been lusting after.  It looks beautiful, in its own special way, and I know for sure that I’m going to fall in love with the giant dog-bird creature.

Sony then showed off new gameplay from a title they announced at E3 last year, Horizon Zero Dawn.   Established as a futuristic RPG, you play as the female protagonist, crossing across a vast open world which does look rather prehistoric, before you come up against robotic creatures which have apparently malfunctioned.  It does look like a heap of fun, you can scavenge materials from the robotic creatures to create your own creations, and even hack into their coding to ride them. It’s also nice to not have an over-sexualised female character taking the lead, so fingers crossed it’s as huge as it looks!

One game which was shown off was a little different to all of the other’s that we’d seen so far in the show, and instead revolves around your decisions, as opposed to just being quick with a trigger. Detroit Become Human is an interesting premise where you play as an android who is designed to help humanity by taking over dangerous human police work. That’s all well and good, until one of the androids goes rogue and decides to take a little girl hostage – it’s your job to ensure she stays safe. The graphics look highly realistic even amidst the premise of androids, the characters themselves look completely photo-realistic. Quick thinking and keeping your wits about you is going to help with this one, let’s just hope the game lives up to the trailer.

Sony then went on to display one of the great franchises which helped to make them as successful as they are now – Resident Evil.  I’m not going to lie – I hate zombie games and Resident Evil in particular, so as soon as I saw that the trailer they were about to show was in VR, I averted my eyes.  Therefore, I don’t have anything to say about this, apart from knowing it’s name is Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and the whole game will be playable in VR.  That my friends, literally sounds like my worst nightmare…

Speaking of VR, Sony did show some more features and games for the upcoming Playstation VR, including a new experience with Star Wars Battlefront, a Batman experience called Arkham VR and showed some more footage of VR Worlds, which sees the gamer immersed in a high-speed car chase and their own adventure.  There’s still plenty more to see of Playstations venture into Virtual Reality, but I’m sure the reveals will come in thick and fast now that we’re slowly approaching October.

Final Fantasy XV was given a second showing at E3, first featured in the Microsoft showcase, and now with Sony.  The trailer for this game is certainly impressive, beautiful graphics and a huge world, and the big news – the whole game is compatible with VR, seems to be becoming quite the common trend…

I got incredibly excited about halfway through Sony’s presentation, when the stage became a beach, familiar music played and the shadow of Crash Bandicoot came walking across the stage – smashing some apples.  That’s right, Crash Bandicoot is coming back to consoles, with fully remastered versions of Crash Bandicoot, Crash 2 and Warped arriving on Playstation 4 in the future.  Hooray!  Crash is also due to debut in Skylanders in October this year, but let’s face it, it’s Crash that we need to see more of, in all his former glory.

Hideo kojima himself then took to the stage to say ‘I’m back’ with a look at his upcoming game – Death Stranding. The teaser showed a man waking up, nude on the beach surrounded by dead sea life and a crying baby.  This is the debut game of his new studio after leaving Konami, and considering this is the man who has been working on the recently cancelled Silent Hill game, I’m expecting this game to be incredibly freaky and disturbing.  The trailer certainly did convey this well, it seemed to be very unsettling.  They seem to be keeping the game under wraps for now, so there’s plenty more to come from this title.

As if Sony wasn’t catering for the masses with their reveals so far, they also randomly unveiled a new Spider-Man game (exclusive to Playstation), LEGO Star Wars, remastered Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and also Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. I do feel now that CoD has gone so far that it’s kind of lost its touch, although this new title appears to be a little different, with spaceship fighting and gravity taking its toll, this could mark the start of the return of CoD.

So I know that in this very post I have commented on how much I hate zombies, and how I wouldn’t play a game featuring them, but one of the trailers including those horrific demons did actually catch my eye – Days Gone. The trailer showed a beautifully rendered, post-apocalyptic world where you’re overrun by zombies, and when I say overrun, I mean overrun. There must have been like, thousands of those things running around in just the one area, they just seemed to keep coming.  The main reason that this really stood out for me was the sheer amount of action and bodies in the gameplay, and also the interactivity in the areas.  Everything that you could see had a purpose, a pile of logs to roll over a dozen zombies, an unstable wooden platform that just about manages your weight but crashes to the ground when fifty undead cross it at the same time.  The sheer numbers of these horrible creatures looks way too overpowering for me, though they do seem to go down after taking one bullet – quite the opposite to most zombie games we’ve seen so far.  Days Gone looks to be a huge battle to the end with armies of undead, with the trailer leaving the protagonist seemingly doomed with no means of escape.  Check it out, it really does like pretty interesting.

Needless to say, I was impressed with Sony’s offerings, the original titles that they’re boasting look astounding, with Horizon Zero Dawn, Detroit Become Human and even Days Gone (as much as it pains me to admit) look like the games of the future.  Partner this with the fact that they’re bringing Crash Bandicoot back, and Sony really did win E3 for me, every presentation had the height of drama – all killer, no filler.  Sure, they didn’t announce their new console, but they’ve proved that their current Playstation 4 can handle some great releases, so who can blame them for being a little more patient than Microsoft?

Think that I’m just hyping up the presentation because of my firm Sony roots? Well, you can check the whole thing out here, let me know if you think I’m looking through rose tinted spectacles…

E3 2016 – Microsoft

Microsoft’s display this year just wasn’t as exciting as last year’s offering for me if I’m honest, my prediction of the HoloLens being showed off was completely wrong, though they did introduce two new consoles being brought to stores, something which I’m sure is quite the dream for Xbox fans.

The latest updates for Xbox Live introduces Cortana to the console, something that I can’t say I really understand as part of a games console, I mean I very rarely feel the need to use it on my laptop never mind in the middle of a gaming sesh.  If they integrate it well, then it could work, say for example if you could ask Cortana for help in the middle of that damned difficult boss battle, but less so if it then takes you out of the immersion of the game to slowly load up the answer in a web browser.  Another update means that you can now play music in the background when playing games (much like Spotify on PS4) which is definitely a great feature.  They’re also introducing clubs, which if you have a PS4 is the same kind of thing as communities. You can find a club based on the games you play, including new people to play with and help you get those bloody online achievements.

Minecraft was then featured in a hugely awkward presentation, showing off the new cross-compatibility between Windows 10 and the Xbox One. With many new games releases, they will come with cross-buy as standard, so if you buy the game on Xbox One, you’ll also get a copy for Windows 10 and vice versa.  This is a bit of a weird one for me, with console and PC gamers well known for their constant bickering over who is the superior race.  Now you can have the best of both worlds, meaning you’re no longer limited to playing with just your friends who happen to own an Xbox, this works on paper, hopefully the technology behind it won’t let it down. The Minecraft demo in particular showed one world, where an Xbox One, a Windows 10 PC and a rare sighting of the HoloLens headset all combined in one session.

This was achieved in Minecraft Realms in ‘The Friendly Update’, a new feature to the game currently available on mobile and Windows 10 and expected to hit consoles next year. These worlds are part of a subscription service, where you create a unique world which is constantly online, and so your friends can pop on when you’re not there to join in. This sounds great, but I can only imagine that there will be many occasions where you log in to find your prized land dominated by 100ft tall phallic objects… Oh the possibilities.

Another game which showed off the cross-compatibility of Xbox One and Windows 10, was the new Forza Horizon 3, which actually looked beautiful. Players could join in with the action whenever they like and jump straight into the world, joining in with races or just speeding down roads through some beautiful countryside.

Microsoft also showed off some shiny new Xbox One remotes. Featured were some game specific controllers, for example the Gears of War 4 Elite Controller, where not only the aesthetic fits in with the game with the colours and damage effects, but the d-pad is specially designed with which weapons correspond with the buttons.  This, I can imagine, would be great to newbies to the game and franchise, sadly the £159.99 price tag on the remote might just put them off a little.  Also revealed was the Design Lab, where you can now design your own remote. The site for this is now live, where you can choose the colours, custom designs and even engrave lettering (Gamer Tags?) for quite the modest price of $90 with engraving… Orders are expected to be shipped out towards early September, you can check out what I would order if I had an Xbox One here.

Tekken 7 was then announced as coming to Xbox One in early 2017, to be honest I didn’t even realise this game was still a thing, I remember button bashing my way through it on Playstation 1.  Ahhh memories.  CD Projekt RED, the developers behind the ever popular Witcher series (another game I’ve been meaning to pick up) then made quite the crowd pleaser of an announcement with their new standalone game – Gwent. Based on the popular card game which features in The Witcher 3, Gwent is going to be a free-to-play download on consoles and PC with in-app purchases.  This seems to be quite a popular announcement amongst fans of the franchise, so I’m expecting this one to take off quite well.

Microsoft then went on to show quite a few of the independent titles and studios that they’re supporting as part of ID@Xbox over the next 12 months. This included titles such as Stardew Valley, a time based RPG which so far is available on PC, Figment which looks like an absolutely beautiful title with bright, wacky characters and Yooka-Laylee published by Wakefield’s very own Team 17, created by Playtonic Games, the same masterminds behind Banjo-Kazooie, hopefully set to bring classic gaming back to consoles.  These titles were shown amongst a busy showreel of upcoming indies, all of which looked rather interesting and definitely a few which I’ll be keeping an eye on for updates as the year goes by.

The next presentation by Microsoft was quite a subdued and dark affair – We Happy Few. The presentation featured a sole gamer showing gameplay on the big screen with no introduction, which certainly added to the unsettling topic of the game. We Happy Few appears to be based around the idea of ‘Joy’ a pill which inhabitants of a secluded centre take to be happy.  With the masked characters and the grim realisation of the piñata at the end of the clip, this certainly looks like it’s going to be an interesting, unique but altogether creepy game with a psychological edge, quite excited to see how the gameplay develops a little later on.

Another highlight for myself was the upcoming title Sea of thieves by Rare, an Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive where players take to the ocean as pirates.  Players are encouraged to play the game as they like, and were soon shown pirates exploring the seas, traversing undiscovered islands and of course, getting drunk on rum and ale.  Rare have made it quite obvious that they don’t want to place too many restrictions on those headed to the sea so they can be the pirates they always dreamed of being. I can’t say that I ever had dreams of life on a boat, but I find it promising when a studio doesn’t try to control the gameplay, instead giving this power to the gamer.

Now for the announcement that many were expecting but didn’t know how much we’d hear. Microsoft had already announced the Xbox One S earlier in the show, which is basically the slim, leaner version of the Xbox One which also supports 4K, and is due to be released this year.  This was overshadowed however, by the announcement of their new beast of a console headed to stores in 2017.  Project Scorpio (as it’s currently known) sounds as though it’s going to be the console of every Xbox fan’s dream.  The display at E3 was showing off the specs of their new console which apparently comes with 6 terro-flops (I didn’t think that they were real things, but apparently they are and they’re pretty impressive) and again, 4K support.  Supposedly, it’s going to be the most powerful console ever made, but from what I’ve seen, if you don’t have a 4K television then you’re not going to reap the benefits from this, as otherwise it remains the same of the Xbox One.

So, to summarise, Microsoft is bringing 2 new consoles to the mix and plenty of interesting new games to keep an eye on. I was a little surprised to not see more about the HoloLens, but maybe that will come a little later in the year.  Games wise, We Happy Few is probably the one which caught my eye the most, and Sea of Thieves coming a close second.  I felt the presentation lacked a little enthusiasm, and took itself all a little too seriously, quite the opposite of the gaming industry.

Want to judge for yourself? Have I overlooked some titles? You can watch the whole stream here, anything on there that you think I have missed?