It’s time again for E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
This is where, with the exception of Nintendo, who is breaking off to reveal their news with their Nintendo Direct videos, the big gaming companies in hardware and software show off their latest and greatest for the coming year or so.
Today in our geeky E3 coverage: Microsoft (9:30 am), EA (1:00 pm), Ubisoft (3:00 pm), and Sony (6:00 pm).
I’ll update this post throughout the day as the conferences happen. Or, check ’em out your own self at e3insider.com. =) Bud
Microsoft
For the current-gen Xbox 360, not much . . .
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
- World of Tanks, a 15-on-15 warfare game, free to download this summer
- Max and the Magic Marker: The Curse of Brotherhood
- Dark Souls 2. Enemies come outta mirrors. Mirrors!
For the upcoming Xbox One [first covered in the May 21 Xbox One geek-out], the lion’s share . . .
- RYSE: Son of Rome lets you direct entire troops, shown from within the thick of it.
- Sunset Casual, a Mirror’s Edge/Prince of Persia-like parkour zombie shooter featuring a gun which shoots vinyl records.
- Minecraft. Yup.
- A clip of Quantum Break, their game which drives an interactive TV show, showed two agent-types burst into a room where an explosion has been frozen mid-boom, and they freed a lady from the freeze by grabbing on to her. Pretty cool.
- D4, a very cool, line-drawn episodic murder-mystery, was quickly teased.
- Project Spark, a voice- and Smart Glass-controlled terraforming sim, was demoed.
- Next was Killer Instinct, a Street Fighter-like brawler with recording ability so you can edit, commentate, and upload.
- ooOOoo. They’re moving from Microsoft Points to real money. Cheers ensue.
- Crimson Dragon contains . . . dragons. But the clip contained no sound.
- Capcom Vancouver talked about Dead Rising 3, their open-world survival horror with lotsa wrenches, lotsa blood, and chainsaws-on-sticks you can throw to split zombies in two. There are also LOTS of zombies. Like, hoards.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an open-world RPG which feels a bit like Skyrim, but with very natural movement and a cool sawblade sword.
- The Battlefield 4 demo experienced technical difficulties and heckling but, once it started, it was a pretty intense shooter on board a battleship.
- Below is a fascinatingly-designed RPG-looking game where you see so much of the world, your hero is seriously wee.
- There was a beautiful clip of the new Halo game (no number or subtitle given) coming next year.
- And they closed with a teaser and gameplay footage of a mecha-tastic, symbiotic, human-throwing city shooter called Titanfall.
Xbox One will launch November 2013 for $500 USD.
EA
All games shown were for upcoming consoles Xbox One or Playstation 4.
Randomly, various presenters microphones were left on during the presentation. T’was amusing.
- Plants vs Zombies returns as Garden Warfare. It features sniper cactii and disco zombie boss battles.
- More from Titanfall. These mecha move fast.
- Star Wars: Battlefront was teased with a single AT-AT foot stomping down onto the snow on, we can only presume, Hoth. Nice.
- Need for Speed: Rivals was next. It’s cops vs racers, and races can start in single player and switch to multiplayer. Oh, you can be a helicopter, too. Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad came on stage to endorse it.
- The open-world Dragon Age: Inquisition looks pretty, and it’s coming next fall.
- New EA Sports titles are shooting for more realism than ever, and Kyrie Irving dribbled on stage for an awkward interview about NBA Live’s “bounceTek,” a dribbling-specific tech.
- There’s also Madden NFL with “True Step” for better movement, FIFA 14 with “Pro Instincts” for better, um, instincts, and UFC with “full body deformation,” for better face-punching ripples.
- Please forgive my lack of detail on sports gaming. Bud is the epitome of sports ignorance.
- Battlefield 4 supports 64 concurrent players, with “levolution” (lots of “new words” this briefing) for dynamic environments, and a top-down Commander Mode. They opened the curtains after the initial blurb to reveal 64 people playing the game. Whoa.
- And they closed with— oh, YES. A Bud favourite, Mirror’s Edge, has had a sequel announced. Fan-diggity-fricking-tastic.
Ubisoft (where the only thing Bud really wanted was details on a Beyond Good and Evil sequel)
- Opening the briefing was . . . Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains? Yup. To promote Rocksmith, their Guitar-Hero-but-with-real-guitars game, out in October. It’s voice navigable, and includes guitar, keyboard, and drum parts for your friends.
- Splinter Cell is back this August. The new subtitle is Blacklist.
- Rayman Legends, formerly a Wii U exclusive (now coming to all platforms), is shown off in all its silly glory. “Over 120 levels!”
- Something called The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is, well, about accumulating loot. Lots of it. Epic amounts, one might say.
- There’s another trailer for the announced-last-year South Park: The Stick of Truth. Two words: Nagasaki fart. This time, it has a release window of Christmas-ish. Maybe.
- The Crew, a MMO city racer coming out in the first quarter of next year, is shown off w/ police chases and crashes aplenty.
- The highly-anticipated (at least by this Bud) hacker shooter Watch Dogs got another trailer. This one’s real purdy. It looks like a CG version of Person of Interest.
- Just Dance was up next, and it’s coming in October. Psy’s in there. Oppa Gangnam Style!
- Rayman’s spinoff BWAAAAAAA-ing crazies are back in Rabbids Invasion, a . . . TV show (US-only, of course) which is also playable using interactive screens and Xbox One.
- Next, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, where you ARR a pirate. Well, you’re still dressed like a hooded badass but, this time, the game takes place on a ship.
- Trials Fusion (for consoles) and Trials Frontier (for mobile) were teased, showing a biker vrooming above the clouds on crazy elevated jumps. Both versions, of course, can talk to each other.
- They closed with Massive Entertainment demoing Tom Clancy’s The Division, an online open-world RPG which shows what would happen should our complicated world infrastructure fail. They also dropped money on the audience.
- No BGE 2? *sniff*
Sony
For the PS Vita handheld . . .
- Batman: Arkham Origins (also coming to the PS3)
- Doki-Doki Universe
- Destiny of Spirits
- Killzone Mercenary
- Tearaway
- God of War HD I and II (remaster)
- Final Fantasy X and X2 (remaster)
- Flower (remaster)
- Dead Nation (remaster)
- The Walking Dead: 400 Days (coming in a bundle, too)
For the current PS3 (it’s gonna be seven years old . . crazy, right?) . . .
- The Last of Us looks just as raw, bloody, and fantastic as it did last E3.
- They then completely switched gears with Puppeteer, a cartoon-y looking platformer where you play a kid who’s been turned into a puppet.
- Then, it was back to gloomy and depressing with Rain, where your character appears to only be visible while water’s falling on him
- Finally, the studio sequel to amazing 2010 title Heavy Rain got another trailer, with much more detail this time ’round. Beyond: Two Souls, starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, will come out October 8, 2013.
- And Gran Turismo 6 showed us lots of pretty and shiny.
- Grand Theft Auto V will be out in a PS3 bundle September 17, as well as a GTA V-branded headset
And, their next console, the PlayStation 4, was finally revealed in physical form. It’s much more parallelogram-y than its predecessor.
Of course, convergence of all forms of entertainment seems to be the focus for the future, so there was much talk of movies and music alongside gaming. Video Unlimited will be their TV/movie service, available when the PS4 launches.
Among the 30 games in development for PS4 . . .
- The Order: 1886
- Killzone: Shadow Fall
- The Dark Sorcerer (from Quantic Dream; see Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls)
- Outlast
- Oddworld
- Diablo 3
- Final Fantasy XV (formerly known as Versus XIII)
- Watch Dogs
- NBA 2K14 (with LeBron James talking to his CG self)
- Kingdom Hearts 3
- The Elder Scrolls Online
- Destiny
- And . . . Mad Max? Yup.
And, in an interesting jab to Microsoft, it was announced that the PS4 will support used games, unlike the Xbox One, which locks games to your console . . . and that disc-based PS4 games don’t need to be online to play, unlike the Xbox One, which requires authentication every 24 hours. Ouch.
The PlayStation 4 will be available before year’s end for $400.
