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E3 Wrap: Tuesday – Ubisoft, EA and others

I might not be lucky enough to be over in Los Angeles like some of the Stevivor team, but I’m still sweating every little bit of E3 information and will be wrapping up the days news and events throughout the week. Today is perhaps the biggest day of all for gamers, day zero, or press conference day. Here we look at the third party press conferences of Ubisoft and EA, and cover any other info that dropped today.

Ubisoft delivered a pretty solid show, again keeping it about the games. Aisha Tyler is a very entertaining host and lends a slick production value to the show, one that kind of feels out of place when she is surrounded by French Canadian game developers.

Ubisoft opened with a big surprise, a sequel to South Park: The Stick of Truth. You don’t get a much better name than South Park: The Fractured, But Whole even if it makes public discussion of the game a bit tough. It took over 15 years but we finally got a good South Park game, I’m all for them going back to the well here and superheroes is a great new setting to take the piss out of.

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It was a double for surprises when Ubisoft then unveiled For Honor, which looks to be a multplayer Dynasty Warriors cross Bushido Blade. It looks like a game you need hands on experience with but from the various stances available and the variety of sword strikes shown this looks to have reasonable depth about it. The two on one fight was a little ‘one at a time, please’ for my liking, I hope that if you blindside somebody you can just put a sword straight through their rib cage, but for now my interest is piqued despite Ubisoft’s insistence on telling us they have created a new genre here.

The Crew’s expansion seems interesting enough but it arrives a year after the original release, will anybody care at that time? Maybe it will coincide with a run on Games with Gold and PS+ of the original release or they could get cheeky and find some dark corner of the internet where it won a ‘Game of the Year’ award and do a special edition. I’m interested in checking out The Crew on the cheap and who knows, if monster trucks and bikes make it more interesting then I could grab this too. I don’t know what cats riding fire breathing unicorns has to do with Trials: Fusion but I gave up on Fusion for good when they still didn’t fix the leaderboard loading issues on Xbox One after several months, and the moment has passed for me. Trials addicts will be satisfied, the rest of us will need more than crazy non sequiturs.

The Division continues to show well and pressure is building for it to be the game that Destiny should have been. There will be a lot of show floor hands on impressions coming over the next few days that will tell us if we expect too much. The general public will get hands on next year with a beta before the March 2016 release.

Anno 2205 arrives in a post-Cities: Skylines world, that either means competition will be stiff for the detailed city builders first foray into the future, or an audience hungry for more strong building sims will be ready and waiting. I really liked the look of the teaser even if no gameplay information was revealed there.

Just Dance wisely becomes a streaming service, but the similar offering for Guitar Hero Live is of much more interest to me and a bigger library of songs won’t convince me that this is a better series than Dance Central.

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Rainbox Six: Siege looks great too, though these live stage demos always feature way more teamwork than I ever see a real group execute. The main viewpoint still felt very “hero” like, but that is probably intentional for the demo. It wouldn’t be much fun being the shield lugger while somebody else got to run around with the rifle headshotting everybody. Again this is another game where hands on impressions will be readily available so speculation isn’t worth much at the moment. I’m liking the look so far.

Trackmania suits the consoles as a game but the crazy server environment is one of the big appeals and that will be hard to replicate in the strict console space. The extras and procedural generation might make up for that, and that handling model hits me in the right spot.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate looked better at the Sony show and I said my piece on it in that recap. In short: wait and see, but it is a cool setting with interesting characters.

Finally there was Ghost Recon. Honestly I was hoping while watching this one that it was something completely new rather than another re-imagining of their old franchises. It looks like a Ubisoft game on steroids, multiple ways to attack objectives but a whole lot of map traversal and climbing towers or equivalent to reveal areas and scout targets. The setting is unique but this will come down to how much it sticks to the ‘Ubisoft template’ and how strong the shooting is.

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EA were coming off a pretty ordinary 2014 showing, a lot of CGI reels and concept art, not a lot of games. That changed this year but they still managed more dull moments than the other three press conferences combined thanks to a momentum killing “five minutes with Pele” chat show that could not have hit a less suitable audience and a long block of sports news.

Mass Effect starts the show but we don’t get any gameplay footage. We do get a theme and a name, Mass Effect: Andromeda, fitting for a game based on exploring a new galaxy. Some of that architecture looks Geth but really we didn’t get much from this other than the name and some pretty, old west style environments. Very Firefly.

I like the look of the new Need for Speed but I don’t know why it needed to be a reboot rather than another Underground game. That handling model is pure arcade, plenty of drift, plenty of neon. I’m hoping it is hands on this week to hear if it drives as good as it looks, and if the acting is as bad as we all hope. I don’t know why EA insists on CGI teasers before unleashing actual gameplay footage, you have the goods here now, let them speak for themselves.

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I think The Old Republic segment did its job because I am tempted to jump in to the Star Wars MMO after all of that. Maybe it is the promise of Bioware quality storylines, both when the game came out (I remember outlandish promises like “every character class has a KOTOR quality games worth of content”) and now with this expansion. Whether it happens is another thing, but for a teaser this hit all the right notes for Star Wars and to me justified the time given to it.

Unravel was beautiful and cute and most unlike EA. It’s good to see them supporting some more unique developers and content, much like Ubisoft has with games like Child of Light and Valiant Hearts. A lot of love has clearly gone into this one, I can’t wait to hear more.

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 got another decent stretch of time but I’m not convinced this game was anything more than a product of the slow start to the Xbox One when it was the only new game available. I enjoyed it and a simple, family friendly shooter is a great idea but I’m not sure it needed a sequel, especially one that looks so similar to the original. Maybe this was a bigger deal than I ever thought, but I feel like I saw a lot of Garden Warfare today.

I don’t care much for EA’s mobile presence and a Star Wars card game isn’t going to change that, nor is a Minions game despite it undoubtedly making millions for them. EA has to be doing very well out of mobile, I see ads for Sim City everywhere, but they’ve made their bed of “energy” driven free-to-play titles and that is something I’m never going to lay on.

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I don’t know enough about hockey to really comment on NHL, I’ll leave that to Steve. NBA Live focusing on the ‘hold the button to delay your shot’ mechanic was strange to me as I feel every basketball game ever has used that same system. FIFA and Pro Evolution will have one heck of a battle this year, while I like the inclusion of women’s teams in the game I hope they have something more up their sleeves. The ‘teach the game’ mode is a good idea but a year too late for me, I taught myself soccer last year when FIFA was made available in the EA Access Vault. Madden is another game that needs this kind of training tool but they need to make them fun rather than chore-like and patronising. I’m usually an ‘every other year’ Madden player and I spent a lot of time with Madden 15 so it will need to really impress this year to draw me in.

Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst looks rather ambitious, an open world that hopefully focuses on movement and traversal rather than combat. If they are going to go combat heavy, at least avoid the guns, please. It looked great and the narrative focus as an origin story for Faith shows some promise. We’ll see, but I think this is being done right.

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Star Wars: Battlefront continues to look impressive, hitting the right notes for fans with battles on Endor and now Hoth. There are a lot of questions; how does ship combat integrate with the ground battles, how do the special characters work and how are they balanced? I think we are ready to get hands on, the teasers have done their work and now we need to see for ourselves. I’m excited but can’t shake the nagging feeling that I’ve never really enjoyed the Battlefield style of multiplayer and Battlefront really could be that with Star Wars in third person.

A bit of other news came out alongside the press conferences, notably the PS4 getting proper DNLA support and The Walking Dead Season 2 getting further DLC with a Michonne based tie-in to the latest comic storyline. There was a new Xbox One UI shown on the Xbox Daily Show which I haven’t had a chance to see just yet. Rock Band 4 got a release date, 6 October, Microsoft’s Elite controller got priced at a ridiculous $150 USD, we found out Mojang is pronounced ‘Mo-Yang’ not ‘Mo-jang”. I’m not sure anything tomorrow could top that bombshell, but I’m sure Nintendo will try.


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About the author

Stuart Gollan

From Amiga to Xbox One, Doom to Destiny, Megazone to Stevivor, I've been gaming through it all and have the (mental) scars to prove it. I love local multiplayer, collecting ridiculous Dreamcast peripherals, and Rocket League.