Ubisoft began by showing off the next Rocksmith, which started with Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains performing a mini-concert on guitar. At first, I feared this was going to devolve into the all too familiar embarrassment of giving a game like Rock Band to someone from Black Sabbath and watching in sheer awkwardness as the band member fails at getting the controls right. Thankfully, the advantage to Rocksmith is that you use an actual guitar as a controller, allowing for Jerry Cantrell to avoid the trap of awkward controls. The real thing they were showing off here was that Jerry didn't actually pick a song, he chose a group of instruments and began playing on his own. From what he played, the game learned what he was playing and used the instruments to form a full band to play what he was playing. I liked this idea, although I really have no interest in these music games anymore.
The first real game they showed was Splinter Cell: Blacklist. From what I know about Splinter Cell, this game seems true to the stealth-action gameplay. There is an interesting plot of assassinations of different military officers across the world, but beyond that I hadn't much else to say for the game. The next game they showed off was Rayman Legends, which looked absolutely beautiful (due to art style, not just simple graphics alone). I also don't have much to say about Rayman, though. It will be a side-scroller, and to me it seemed like a heavily stylized, indie-game feel of Donkey Kong Country. They said "the different heroes will star in this game," which surprised me because I had no idea there were other protagonists in the Rayman series. I mean, I thought the viking girl and the weird alien things were side characters. Maybe they are and I'm overthinking it. The only Rayman I ever played was one for the Nintendo 64, though, so of course I have no idea what is going on. I liked how the viking woman was the one to save the Rayman in the trailer, though this is probably going to be overlooked as nothing in the long run of things.
The next game they (barely) showed was some game called The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot (I think). There was hardly any gameplay, but they did show a pretty weird trailer where one of the characters goes behind the scenes and talks about his castle and his experiences raiding other castles. All throughout this was some slapstick and somewhat juvenile humor, which only left me with camp in mind and barely a grasp at what the gameplay is like. And then immediately after, this game was overshadowed by the upcoming South Park RPG. Once again, gameplay was traded in for humor as all we really see is a scene where Randy shares with a pupil the martial art of the Nagasaki Fart. South Park may be stupid, but when you place the humor of South Park next to the humor of a game attempting humor, you've overshadowed that other game.
Following this was what appeared to be Ubisoft's following of the trend of showing off ANOTHER racing game. I was about to turn off the conference altogether, because I was sick of all the damn racing games, but Ubisoft actually managed to impress. Unlike every other racing game ever made, The Crew features something quite incredible: thanks to the power of next-gen consoles (people say as if computers lacked this capability), the entire United States mainland is an open world track for a racing game. That's right, from the Mojave Desert to the beaches of Miami to the Redwood Forest, the near-entirety of this country is accessible to your vehicle, presumably without any loading times. If this wasn't mind blowing alone, they have many other features not present in your typical racing game. Similar to Titanfall, which seems to incorporate story mode into multiplayer, The Crew will have this always online feature where you can simultaneously play the game on single player while your friends are out driving in other parts of the country. I think that, unlike the Xbox One (unless you play this on the Xbox One, for some reason), this game won't require you to always be online, so you can still play the single-player stuff.
But it gets better from there. Throughout the map are many different "skills" and challenges, essentially sidequests and other missions from the main missions in the game. These can be done to improve your vehicle's performance or get you some new and better equipment for you to build your car with. What they offer in this game which I have yet to see fully realized in any other racing game is the realism of having different cars for different situations. So let's say you are in a Lamborghini up against a Ford F150 FX2 Sport. Your Lamborghini, obviously, is not meant to be driven off road, but on a track (in this case, an actual road), your car will perform incredibly. Meanwhile, the Ford F150 is designed for off-road use, therefore the driver's optimal method of winning the race against you is not by road, but by driving off-road. This sets up for some really dynamic gameplay where the driver of the high-performance vehicle suddenly has his track crossed by the driver of the off-road vehicle, who emerges from a forest and zooms across the road and over a grassy hill on the other side.
Then there are missions where you can form a squad of different vehicles, each tailored to do their own thing and use their own skills to take down criminal vehicles, all while avoiding the police. That's right, this is a role-playing racing game! And then along with all this is the ability to customize your car on the go with a mobile device. I was so impressed by this fresh take on the standard racing game, and I really do look forward to seeing more of this game in the future.
The next game Ubisoft announces is Watch Dogs, which has an interesting concept. You play as a man who uses his smartphone to hack nearly everything in the city to track down criminals and bring them to justice. In the trailer, which was all cutscenes, we see this man nearly get arrested, only to secretly hack the whole city and cause a blackout before beating up the cops and getting away. There was no gameplay shown at the Ubisoft conference, but some will appear in the Sony conference.
I sort of dozed off afterward, however, because all of what they were showing was seriously uninteresting. Following the current trends, Ubisoft announced a TV show based off some video game, although they did add a little twist by also making it an interactive game. But it was still not all that interesting.
Next, Ubisoft discusses
Next, they showcased the next two installments in Trials, which will be linked between the console and a mobile device. However, these games are entirely overshadowed by the last big game they had under their sleeves to close with, called The Division (which also falls under the Tom Clancy titles). This game is also a fully integrated online-story mode experience, something of a recurring theme of this E3. It is set in a post apocalyptic, modern USA where resources are low and people fight each other for them. This is all pretty much the insane visions of the New World Order that my uncle and many other extreme rightists envision, but the cause in this game isn't actually economic collapse at its core. It's all caused by a flu virus that spread from a single dollar bill. Within two days, many people across the country fall ill, and then the day afterward, the economy just collapses out of nowhere. So right away we have a world of nonsense which, if it gets shoved in my face enough times, will make me see the game as the stupidest thing ever made and not worth playing, but thankfully the gameplay trumps this awful storytelling. Thankfully, it doesn't seem that story-telling is that big of a deal here.
This game is an open world rpg, kind of reminiscent of Dead Island. In the demo, a few players used some kind of map like out of Tony Stark's garage in Iron Man 3 to find the source of a conflict where possible supplies such as food and medicine were located. So the two players headed, at a ridiculously slow pace, to the building, where they met up with some other player and a friend who was controlling a scouting robot through a mobile device. Together, they took out some enemy NPC's before entering a police station, which offered the players some weapons from the armory. Honestly, this is the kind of game you have to see to get the full picture, as I can describe everything these players were doing and sound like I'm describing a typical shooter. Also, throughout the whole demo, the players gave the most wooden voice chat I have ever heard. Nobody talks like how they did when they played the game. This happens all the time with people who get on to play these demos, leading me to think that they really don't play games at all or they don't play with any people.
To close, the director of the game, I think, gives a dramatic little speech about how our world is already collapsing, and ends it by dropping fake money from the ceiling. Obviously, he was just being dramatic and not making a real statement about current society, but his tone was so normal that it sounded like he was literally trying to get a message across, haha. If he was, I have no idea how anyone would've taken him seriously after that whole nonsense of the virus from the dollar bill.
Coming up, I have a post on the two other conferences that mattered: the Sony E3 press conference and the Nintendo Direct at E3. This is where the heart of E3 lies, and I am looking forward to fanwanking on this blog about it. Also, I'll have either multiple posts specialized to single or groups of games, or one big post about all the games that I am interested in this year. Stick around, it'll be a while before I get to them.
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