EA Play
The good
Following up last year’s collaboration with the very nervous
developer of Unravel, EA has taken things a step further with EA Originals, an
initiative designed to serve promising indie developers who wish to get their
games wider recognition. Only one game was shown; “Fe” from Swedish developer
Zoink Games. It’s good to see EA broaden their reach in the indie space and
expand on something they brought into play last year.
Though it wasn’t part of EA’s official show (and the
repeating of trailers did raise some eyebrows), Battlefield 1’s multiplayer
debut was without a doubt the best moment they had to offer. The three match
setup had 64 players playing on the sides of the British Army and German
Empire, with some of the major highlights including the changing weather
patterns, destructive tanks and gargantuan airships flying overhead. It may
have been pre-alpha but from my point of view, EA has almost nothing to worry
about this year; Battlefield 1 is looking to make a big comeback from the
failures of Hardline and Battlefront, while also seeking to trounce Call of
Duty Infinite Warfare in the process. As long as DICE ensures the net code and
servers are ready and stable for launch, we could be in for a brilliant shooter
later this year.
The bad
The most disappointing aspect of EA’s conference was the
small amount of information given about Mass Effect Andromeda. After almost
four years in development, it was a shame not to see proper gameplay or any
details on story. The game is looking fantastic based on the thin sets of
footage we saw, but the fanbase wanted to see more than a simple behind the
scenes look. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst suffered from this same issue last year
where more effort was put into showing the development teams, rather than
something concrete about the game itself. With the game itself less than a year
away, it's a little suspicious that we haven't seen any information about the final game.
We all knew Titanfall 2 was on the way at EA’s conference and
what we saw at E3 was competent at best; the game looks and sounds as solid as
its predecessor but it failed to do anything beyond that to really impress. It’s
hard to get excited when the game is A. Fairly similar to the original; B.
Living in the shadow of other movement focused shooters such as Call Black Ops
3 and C. Offering little in the way of surprising new features and components.
While it’s true they are offering a single player campaign alongside six new
titans, Titanfall 2 will need to do more in order to stand out when it releases
on October 28th this year.
While the sports presentations were toned down, the
developers of FIFA were still content with babbling on about the same old
“improvements” that are constantly displayed every year. It’s all marketing
hype and no development substance. At the very least it didn’t drag on like the
last couple of conferences presented by the gaming corporation, but surely EA
could reserve this information for the FIFA game website rather than clogging
up their conference with it? It’s the one aspect of EA’s press conference that
came close to dragging the whole thing down.
In conclusion
EA’s pressers still have a sizeable hill to climb before they
reach the heights of the other companies. In all honesty though, their 2016
offering was a fairly decent improvement over previous years. The greatest
strength EA had this year was better pacing; the sports games and pointless
mobile sections were drastically reduced whilst Battlefield 1 picked things up
towards the end. Despite the celebrity appearances still being quite intrusive,
they weren’t complete wastes of time like Pele was last year. To push on, EA
needs to follow up with some stellar games later this year, but as for their
conferences I would expect more exciting things to be shown off in the future.
For example EA’s collection of upcoming Star Wars games whizzed by in less than
ten minutes without much attention paid to them.
Rating: 6/10 (Fair)
Bethesda
The good
The classic FPS trifecta is complete… With great success on
Wolfenstein: The New Order and the more recent Doom reboot, Bethesda is now turning
its sights on the arena focused multiplayer shooter Quake. The series hasn’t
been seen since 2005’s Quake IV and it served as a strong opening for
Bethesda’s presser. The trailer was entirely computer generated, but there were a few
hints of what Champions is going for; it’s aiming to update the formula with
defined characters and specific abilities to make each of them more mobile. Considering the amount of effort Bethesda has poured into the other two shooters, it's reasonable to expect the same for Quake Champions.
Arkane Studios had a big presence at E3 this year; we all
expected to see the sequel to Dishonored, but first they came out with
something unexpected. A strange trailer showed a man’s repetitive cycle, almost
as if he was living the day over and over again. Things started to get sinister
as the man’s eyes became bloodshot; an alien infection perhaps, before transferring
to a dark and gloomy space station where a questionable experiment is taking
place. The new Prey appears to be a mixture of first person shooting and maybe
a fair bit of survival horror. While it has abandoned the Blade Runner-esque
tenets that made Prey 2 so promising, I’m nevertheless excited to see what
Arkane Studios can do with the license. Having already proved themselves with
Dishonored, another solid title should be on the way in a year or two.
Dishonored 2 had a strong follow up to its debut last year with a full on tour of the game's setting following by plenty of proper gameplay. Assuming the low chaos ending of the original game, the demo
began with Empress Emily Kaldwin and her protector Corvo getting caught up in
another flurry of assassinations and political schemes. It then transferred to
the island of Karnaca, where Emily proceeded to sneak through the dust district
to assassinate a target. While the powers Emily Kaldwin possesses are
definitely new and interesting enough, the story already looks highly
intriguing; how will things change depending on whether you choose to play as
Emily or Corvo? How will the conflict between the Overseers and the Howler gang
factor into the missions? What imaginative steampunk settings await in the new
setting? With another stand-out art style and building on strong
foundations, Dishonored 2 looks to be a strong sequel in every way, though I’m
guessing they’ll save the whole “freedom of choice” thing for the stage demos
on the E3 show floor.
The bad
- · A fair bit of time dedicated to showing off awards and accolades
Bethesda’s conference last year was strong because it got
straight to the point with all the games we wanted to see; this year’s pacing
was a step down from that. Bethesda saw fit to lavish praise on all the awards
games such as Fallout 4 and Doom received. It’s nice that these games got great recognition but it ended up distracting from the games at Bethesda’s
conference. If the company is going to have another press conference next, they
should consider cutting this down to free up more time for more exciting
things.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is arguably the biggest game ever
released by Bethesda Game Studios; it’s also one of the most popular, still
clocking in a huge following five years after its release. Remasters have
been a popular trend in this console generation and now the gargantuan RPG is
next in line to receive this treatment. The problem? Why should Skyrim
Remastered be released on PS4 and Xbox One when mods on PC can improve on its
presentation several times over? While Skyrim is set to continue Bethesda’s
push towards mods on consoles, these will be extremely limited; despite the new
release, both versions will already be obsolete when compared to its PC
counterpart. It’s one remaster that may make sense for console owners, but to
me it isn’t worth paying out full price again.
In conclusion
Bethesda’s conference wasn’t as good as last year’s but that
was a tough act to follow. The games shown were relatively solid, with the
return of Prey being the biggest surprise offered up. Dishonored 2 was also
particularly strong, though I would have liked to have seen multiple
playthroughs of the same level to show off the game’s freedom of choice. A
solid presentation all around, just lacking a wow factor that would have made
it more memorable. We could have done with less promoting of the awards won by
Bethesda games as well.
Rating: 7/10 (Good)
Microsoft
The good
- · A strong variety of titles on show
Microsoft’s show this year pretty much picked up where last
year left off; once again it was all games and no gimmicks only this time there
were all kinds of games to show. We started off with Gears of War 4 right away,
before bouncing around all kinds of different titles from fighting games to new
IPs. In terms of presentation, it kept me interested as I was never really knew
what was coming next and kept watching as a result. There’s no doubt that
Microsoft has realised that they need more than just the same franchises over
and over again; they’re willing to diversify, even if the strong variety wasn’t
quite backed up fully. I’ll get to that further down.
Microsoft’s online gaming service has long been known for
making top standards in online multiplayer and this year they saw fit to
improve on it further with smart features that set it apart from PlayStation
Network and bring it more in line with Steam. Forming a sense of social community
was a key focus as three main features were announced; “Clubs” which allow players
of specific games to meet and chat with others, “Looking for group” which aims
for easier pairing up in multiplayer focused games and finally “Arena”
Microsoft’s foray into the tournament scene open to anyone on Xbox Live. Making
the £40 subscription worth paying for is always a positive step and it's clear that Microsoft is still intent on delivering that.
Microsoft closed out it’s presser with a big announcement,
that their next console is on the way and it plans on being the most powerful
console ever built. With a whopping six teraflops of power, 320 gigabytes of
memory bandwidth and 8 CPUs overclocked to apparently outmatch even the PS4 Neo,
Phil Spencer touted Scorpio as “the console 100% for you guys”. There’s some
big promises being made here and if Microsoft can pull this off, they’ll be in
for a chance to get fully competitive in the console market again. More to the
point, it shows that Microsoft has completely shut the door on the deeply
flawed approach that threw them to the rear of the pack three years ago, once
again being focused entirely on games rather than gimmicks and multimedia.
The bad
Microsoft’s strong variety came at a cost though; there were
simply too many trailers and not enough gameplay demos. Battlefield 1 had
nothing to show, opting to repeat the same trailer featured at EA’s event.
Tekken 7 and Killer Instinct didn’t have any matches on stage and DLC trailers
for games like The Division had little to no impact.
The few demos that did get shown were either brief or
simplistic, just as they were last year. From a gameplay standpoint I felt that
Gears of War 4 bears some resemblance to the Gears 3 demo five years ago,
only with flashier storm effects and some pretty corny dialogue thrown in for
good measure. If Microsoft is looking to stave off franchise fatigue, this isn’t
the way to go about it; their biggest franchises need to be progressive,
showing proper innovation, especially with several of them debuting on current
generation hardware. Final Fantasy 15 and Scalebound both blended together with
both games featuring third person action as the characters took on gigantic
beats with the help of comrades. Rare promised that their IP Sea of Thieves is
one of their most ambitious titles to date, but the brief gameplay shown came
off as quite simplistic. Microsoft needs to back up their strong pacing with some proper demos as well as trailers next time.
The cringe worthy moments from Microsoft’s E3 pressers have
been abandoned in recent years, but one particular moment came close to
regressing to it; Minecraft was presented in a very awkward way by two
presenters who were perhaps trying to appeal to a younger crowd. The “Mictrick” as Jim Sterling calls it was once again used to ill effect as the
presenters attempted to relay how people play Minecraft. It isn’t as
overzealous as Ubisoft, but it was noticeable and ended up overshadowing the announcement
of cross-play and new add-ons for the wildly popular indie game which Microsoft
purchased in 2014.
- · No Crackdown 3
Following its announcement two years ago, many were expecting
the first gameplay of Crackdown 3 to make an appearance at E3 this year.
Unfortunately the long awaited sequel was conspicuously absent, leaving other
exclusive titles such as Sea of Thieves and Scalebound to fall back on what
little gameplay they had to offer. The lack of Crackdown 3 is a disappointment
because it is promised to be a showcase of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology
with complete freedom of destruction, something which none of its competitors
can offer or match. I haven’t seen games do destruction so well since Red
Faction Guerilla in 2009 and Battlefield 4 in 2013; it was an opportunity to
show off how Xbox is pushing the boundaries and Microsoft failed to capitalise
on it.
In conclusion
Microsoft’s conference was quite good, though that was mostly
down to the wide variety of games they had to show. Their biggest weakness was much
like last year’s; despite having a good pacing, many of the exciting bits came
from games which weren’t exclusive to Microsoft systems. Sure, some of them may
be coming to Xbox first but the console as a whole needs to do more than come
out with new hardware to stay relevant. Heck I couldn’t spot a single game
that was a true exclusive on the current Xbox One console.
It seems that Xbox itself is becoming more and more like PC every
year with Microsoft having accepted that they won’t ever catch up to
PlayStation 4 this generation, so instead they’re integrating with PC to make
up for their failings. In the process, this has drastically reduced the Xbox
One’s prospects; why buy the less powerful console when you can play many of
its games on PC anyway?
As for Project Scorpio, it’s a sure sign that Microsoft is on
the right track from a business standpoint, but without any exclusive games at
the moment, I’m left more puzzled than excited for it; with all this PC integration
and the subsequent reduction of exclusives on Xbox One, can we expect Scorpio
to stand on its own rather than joining up with Windows 10? And how long can it
last before PC hardware catches up? We’re bound to find out more over next year
but if Microsoft wants to carry on in the console business, it needs to have
those killer games that can only be done on Scorpio, something which the
company is still lacking.
Rating: 7/10 (Good)
Check back later this week for the other half of my thoughts on the E3 press conferences.
(All images used for the purposes of review and critique under fair use)
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