The final day of E3 2013 has come and gone. It was a good day. I saved some of the best games for last! Want to find out what they were? Read on! 1. TitanFall I spent three days trying to get into this demonstration. Each time I was deflected until I decided to make this the first thing I saw today. I wasn’t going to leave until I had a chance to check this out. After the amazing demonstration at E3 I had to see this game for myself. To my utter amazement, this wasn’t a pre-recorded video with some extra scripted commentary. The team was demonstrating a full runthrough of the game in real time. The players we were watching on the screens died occasionally (they didn’t during the conference presentation), got a ton of kills, and really showed off everything that this game was about. It was awesome. I really can’t describe it in any other way. Infantry are just as powerful as the Titans, but having a Titan can be a huge advantage. Infantry and Titans are both extremely fast. The multiplayer matches are designed to be real missions. You’ll spawn into a dropship as it enters the area, you’re given commands by a commander, and then you’re dropped into the battlefield to try and complete the objectives. The missions end with some sort of summary to the event’s actions. It was extremely well designed and a welcome change to the standard “your name as you wait for match, spawn in, go kill, end match with scores”. This game decimates Call of Duty. It’s just as awesome with better close quarters combat and much greater level of variety. The missions make each multiplayer match a real experience rather than just an arena battle. It’s the kind of thing that I hope to see from more multiplayer modes in the near future. 2. Splinter Cell: Blacklist While last year I was shown a demonstration for this game, this year I actually got to test it out for myself. It was a very brief demo, but overall it felt very much like Splinter Cell: Conviction. The game definitely emphasizes stealth combat, but the player can go through killing everyone as well. The game will reward stealthier, non-lethal takedowns by giving the player greater amounts of experience points for these attacks, but it was a bit difficult to make them happen every time. For example, in one section a guard dog started barking at me, so I had to shoot him to keep from getting caught. The story is that some sort of very well organized terrorist group wants the United States to withdraw its military presence in every other nation around the world. I’m not sure why they want the US out of these countries, but I’m sure there is some sort of overall driving motivation involving a terrorist plot to take over the world or something to that effect (it is a Tom Clancy game after all). Fortunately, Sam is back with a new team to try and stop the terrorists from killing… people. Again, I’m not entirely sure who, but I’m sure they’re vitally important to the United States government. The game is designed to feel like a blend of the Splinter Cell games Chaos Theory and Conviction. Certain elements from Conviction were brought back (like the “mark and assassinate” ability), but otherwise it is evidently much more like Chaos Theory. Having only ever played the first Splinter Cell and Conviction, I can’t say how accurate this is. Stealth games aren’t really my thing (with the exception of Dishonored), but those who are into the kind of slow, sneaking gameplay present in almost every Splinter Cell game ever will definitely enjoy this game. 3. The Evil Within The Evil Within is a survival horror game developed by the man who created Resident Evil 4. As a Resident Evil fan, the look and feel of this game was very familiar. Players take control of a detective who is called to some sort of serious crime taking place at an asylum. The situation quickly tumbles out of control and the player is forced to fight for his life against some seriously messed up enemies. This game is definitely survival horror. Unlike Resident Evil 5 and 6 (and even 4 really), the player will have to carefully manage resources and figure out when it is best to run instead of fight. This is the kind of thing that made the remake of the first Resident Evil game so downright terrifying. It was suspenseful, but the fact that the player had to carefully try to avoid more enemies than he killed made every action have serious weight. The problem is that all of that suspense is mired in the incredible amounts of blood and gore visible in the early chapters. One of the most common pitfalls that horror movies fall into is that they mistake peoples discomfort with brutality and pain for fear. Seeing someone chopped into pieces with a chainsaw isn’t scary, it’s loud and gross. Then, to compensate for the overall lack of fear, these writers will throw in random “jumper” segments where things pop out at the player with a corresponding loud noise. It’s a really cheap, easy way of making the player jump when that isn’t what makes a great horror game. The original Resident Evil had some bloody parts, but the true horror elements came in with the combined claustrophobia, loneliness, and lack of any resources for self-sufficiency. While this game definitely includes all three of those, they aren’t emphasized in a way that is effective for the tensions necessary in truly scary games. This may have been because it was a demo or because it was being guided by someone who I knew was going to know what to do, but I couldn’t really get into the game. It may be something to try out in the future (for a review if nothing else), but I wouldn’t recommend this game to my friends based on what I saw. 4. Wolfenstein: The New Order I knew very little about this game going into its presentation. Obviously being a Wolfenstein game I knew that the player would be fighting Nazis, but other than this I was pretty much in the dark. Three things became quickly apparent during the presentation. First, the developers (who also worked on The Darkness 2) did an excellent job making the characters have personality. The player met a German female military commander and, after she had a brief conversation with him, was pretty much instantly identifiable as evil. That isn’t to say that the game is shallow, but her personality and her mannerisms made her a seriously vile person. Second, it was very obvious that the developers cared about the origin of the Wolfenstein games and wanted to keep true to as many details as they could. While they wanted to make an original story, the subtle elements they added into the game made a huge difference. For example, all of the Germans only speak German. No need to worry about horrible German accents, you’ll need subtitles for many of the conversations with enemy characters. This is the kind of thing that most games seem to avoid or forget in the pursuit of making the game more accessible for their audience. Third, I am getting shooter fatigue. After the cutscenes and conversations were over and the gunplay began, my E3 exhaustion and general overexposure to shooter titles caused me to become extremely bored. This looked like just another Call of Duty clone with a slightly different paint job. Then I left the presentation, picked up a controller, and tried it out for myself. And I had fun. As disappointed as I was in the presentation, the actual play itself was addictive. It was fast paced, but with certain puzzle-based elements that made me actually look around the level to try and see how to move forward. It wasn’t extremely complex, but it was interesting enough to keep me entertained as I moved from cutscene to cutscene. This certainly wasn’t the best game I saw at E3, but it definitely wasn’t the worst either. I’d recommend it to fans of shooters once they’re done with Battlefield, Titanfall, Call of Duty, and pretty much every other shooter that will dominate the market over the next year. 5. The Elder Scrolls Online The presentation of The Elder Scrolls Online left me hopeful but my common MMO concern was not addressed. How was this game going to make itself blatantly different than World of Warcraft? Fortunately, I have my answer now. I managed to test out the beta version of this game, which was very enlightening. The game felt a lot like Oblivion and Skyrim. The way that it is set up, the different races and classes, the inventory system, the items, the abilities, etc. all reminded me greatly of my hundreds of hours within the lands of Tamriel. The worldspace is gigantic, allegedly covering every nation in Tamriel. I played around in Daggerfall, which should be familiar to hardcore fans of the series. In addition, while my play was in third person, the developers showed video that proved that the game would work in First Person as well. And that’s the biggest difference between this and World of Warcraft. The first person element made this game feel less like Neverwinter and every other World of Warcraft clone and much more like an Elder Scrolls game. Even though the graphics aren’t nearly as good as Skyrim, they’re definitely good enough to make this game playable. I have two major concerns. First, combat was a serious emphasis of the missions and conversations that I saw. This didn’t fit well with Oblivion and Skyrim, which had a plethora of adventures that didn’t always involve heavy amounts of combat. To add to this, skills like “persuade” and “mercantile” seemed suspiciously absent, replaced with numerous combat-based powers and abilities. Conversations were extremely linear. All of this made me seriously question this game’s true depth. It is extremely likely that this game will fall into the same “quantity over quality” trap that Kingdoms of Amalur fell into. 6. Beyond: Two Souls This was one of the games that was highest on my list of things to try. I was fortunate enough to get a chance to test it out for myself. Instead of testing the tutorial level like everyone else, I jumped in with the veteran level to see the real meat of the game. Possibly a mistake, considering I’ve only ever played the demo for Heavy Rain, but I thought it was fairly enlightening. Most of the level I tried felt a lot like Heavy Rain. Most of the gameplay is basically an extended cutscene with various quicktime events. This means the player will have to hit the right button or direction stick at the right time in order to progress properly. This could be extremely difficult though. While the button prompts were pretty easy to follow, the directional “prompts” didn’t have an actual cue, so it was up to me to guess what direction the game wanted me to push. Sometimes it was relatively simple (if Ellen was leaning in for a punch, press in the direction of the punch), but other times it was much more confusing (if Ellen and her opponent are leaning in for a punch, what direction do I push?). But the nice thing is that the game takes into account what happens if the player fails. Or, it seemed to, I couldn’t really tell for sure. Heavy Rain had a similar system, so that’s what I assume happened here. Unless I was supposed to fail a section and get captured. But that’s part of the genius of the design. Despite the fact that I failed directional prompts repeatedly and ended up getting captured as a result, I’m not sure if that was as designed or another option in my path. I’ll need to play Heavy Rain before I attempt this game, but it is definitely on my list of exclusive titles to play. 7. The Division This was my most anticipated game of E3 and was the last new game that I saw. Unfortuantely, a combination of factors made the demonstration rather disappointing. The demo showed very little “new” content that wasn’t already shown in the Ubisoft conference on Monday, and what little new content they did show was to demonstrate the tablet capabilities with the game. Second, I found out that (to my utter amazement) this game wasn’t yet slated for a PC version. This is basically an open world MMO-ish third person shooter that isn’t scheduled to come out on PC. That isn’t to say it will never happen, but to have a game like this skip one of the most hardcore shooter markets seems a bit short sighted. But then again, I’m a PC gamer, so I’m biased. But the tablet content they showed was actually the best demonstration of the use of a tablet in any game I have seen so far. Unlike Watch Dogs, which made tablet use so pointless that it might as well not exist at all, The Division’s tablet user is basically a full user in the game. Tablet users appear in the main players’ game in the form of a flying drone. It’s basically a support character in this weird shooter MMO. The drone can identify enemy targets for players, heal allies, make enemies take increased damage, and even attack enemies with missiles and other weapons. Instead of seeing some weird map, the tablet user watches the entire game in a lower resolution but in real time. If the player is seeing a helicopter land nearby, the tablet user sees it too. Enemies move on the tablet in real time just as they move in the actual game. It was beautifully executed and actually made me want to get a tablet specifically for this feature. Other than this, I’m still really skeptical about how this game will turn out. I don’t know how much of this game will require cooperative gameplay. I don’t know how overcrowded the worldspace will get if the player has to fight against other groups. I don’t know if the player will be matched against enemy groups of similar skill. If that doesn’t happen, some groups are going to be repeatedly massacred. These are all concern that the developers will have to address well before the game is released. 8. Oculus Rift I have a friend who is helping to develop the Oculus Rift, but I have never actually gotten the chance to test one out for myself. The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset that uses motion sensors to turn the camera in the direction that you face. It’s an interesting idea that hasn’t been accomplished successfully ever. There were devices that tried to create virtual reality environments back in the 90s, but it was a poorly designed fad that quickly faded away. Oculus Rift is different though. I’m not about to hop out of my chair and buy one, but it was a much better experience than I expected. The lag is almost completely nonexistent. The only times when I noticed anything perceptibly wrong were the times when I turned my head too quickly, and even then I only knew something was wrong because I briefly felt motion sickness. I tested OR out on Counter Strike: GO, which was an interesting choice but was difficult to work around with the device. I could get a few kills in on enemies that were on the “extremely easy” difficulty level, but even when the enemies stood around for a good 30 seconds looking at me while I tried to shoot at them I knew that I was far less accurate with this device than I would normally be. It needs to use wireless controllers. Turning my head in different directions was good, but I was always tethered by my mouse and keyboard. It would have been an even greater experience if I could have turned around a full 360 degrees. However, the surprising lack of lag made the experience very interesting to try. 9. Shield If you don’t know what this is, don’t be surprised. Nvidia, one of the biggest manufacturers of video cards in the world, decided to try and create a handheld device that appealed to their core PC audience. The idea was creating a handheld gaming device that would play any modern video game at any time the player wanted. On paper, this was a great idea. The execution has been anything but great. The device doesn’t come with any 3G or 4G connection, meaning you have to be in a strong Wifi hotspot in order to actually play a PC game. You have to already own the game on Steam (which is fine for almost every current PC game). But the problem is that the game has to run simultaneously on your computer and your device. Supposedly you can start the game via Shield, but if something doesn’t work properly and you’re away from home you’re going to be out of luck. You also have to have a video card that is compatible with the shield, which means it has to be a relatively recent Nvidia card (not cheap by any means). You also have to pay for the device, which currently runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. Put those two together and you’ve got an extremely expensive piece of hardware. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the actual device. The Shield is about the size of the original Xbox controller. It isn’t as thick (fortunately), but the device features a built-in screen and all of the buttons and joysticks that one would find on a standard Xbox controller. But the device is very heavy. Surprisingly heavy. Most of that is because of the insane amounts of hardware that have to be fit in the device to make it function properly, but it’s going to be very difficult holding that around and using it as a true handheld device for any extended period of time. The other major problem is that the screen is ridiculously small for the games it’s designed to play. Picture yourself playing Borderlands 2 on a 4 inch screen. Shooting enemies up close isn’t an issue, but shooting enemies at a distance can be extremely difficult. And don’t get me started on trying to read text. I have great eyesight (an advantage when playing games), but even I had trouble reading the tiny text for my inventory in Borderlands 2. I couldn’t imagine trying to play on this device for any extended period of time. If you want a mobile device for playing PC games, get a laptop. It will slightly more expensive, but not much considering the price of high-end graphics cards. You’ll be able to play whatever you want, use your device for something other than gaming, and have even greater mobility and reliability than the Shield. Well that’s the end. Tomorrow I’m going to compile an epilogue to summarize my thoughts and try to draw some conclusions from the overall event. For now, I’m exhausted. Time to sleep.
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The Legendary Carmine
Andrew Clayton (a.k.a. The Legendary Carmine) is SSG's Executive Editor. He toils at the stone to make sure this site brings its readers valuable content on a daily basis. Like what we do? Want to see more? Donate to the site using the button below!
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