Ubisoft
Breaking the trend of starting the show with a high-profile shooter, Ubisoft started things off with flashy laser lights and dancing to Maroon 5’s Moves Like Jagger, then a performance by Flo Rida. It was all for Just Dance 4, and even if it’s a “casual” title it was still an impressive kickoff.
Cue awkward hosts Aisha Tyler and Tobuscus. On their own, they probably would have been really good hosts, but put together, they had no chemistry whatsoever. Thankfully, they take a backseat to the games themselves and aren’t nearly as obnoxious as Mr. Caffeine from E3 2011. A raunchy and violent demo of Far Cry 3 might have gone a bit overboard for an E3 audience, but the gameplay looks pretty solid. Rayman Legends looks amazing, and ZombiU could be an impressive Wii U launch title.
A highlight of the conference was the Assassin’s Creed III demo, showing off the new hunting gameplay – your foes now have four legs as well as two. The dynamic assassinations are impressive, and we’re really digging the Revolutionary setting. Other games we saw over the course of the show include Avengers: Battle for Earth, the just-announced Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and Shootmania – whose demo dragged on a bit and was set up by an awkward challenge between the hosts.
By far the best part of the conference, and perhaps the most promising game of E3, came at the end. Ubisoft unveiled its new IP, Watch Dogs, which features gameplay centered around hacking. It takes place in a world after the 2003 Northeast power outage. A centralized operating system controls everything, and everything…and everyone…has a digital shadow that you can tap into and find out anything about them. You can identify targets this way, manipulate the environment, or do practically anything. It also seems like it will have seamless online play, which is promising. Watch Dogs stole the show for many people, including us.
Summary: Ubisoft did nothing but show off games, games, and more games. Impressive gameplay demos, new game reveals, and the show-stopper that was Watch Dogs made for an impressive conference that was only barely set back by the slightly-annoying hosts and overly-long demo of Shootmania.
Final Grade: B
Sony
Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream kicked Sony’s conference with a reveal of its next game, Beyond – Two Souls. While Sony could have shown a clip that was more indicative of the gameplay instead of a rather long opening cutscene, what we did see looked very promising.
PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale just looks damn fun, and the announcement of a Vita version with cross-platform play was a nice, if predictable, announcement. Vita was given a fairly lackluster showing, unfortunately, with only two games being announced: Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified and Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. New PS3 and Vita bundles for the Creed games also were a welcome announcement, as was a gameplay demo of Assassin’s Creed III on PS3 that showed naval warfare for the first time – and it looks so good.
The conference came to a screeching halt in the middle though, where Sony decided to spend a good 20 minutes showing off its new Wonderbook peripheral and its bundled title Book of Spells. While the concept is intriguing and definitely something that will appeal to the target demographic, the presentation was horribly dull and dragged on way too long.
Following Wonderbook, a brief look at PlayStation Suite – including a rename to PlayStation Mobile and an announcement that it would be coming to HTC phones later this year – led into a demo of God of War: Ascension. It looks like, well, God of War.
Sony ended its conference with the much-anticipated first gameplay demo of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. While the run-and-gun gameplay didn’t show us much of the interaction between the two characters that we look forward to, the gameplay is still very impressive and the graphics are gorgeous. Just hope you have a strong stomach – it’s quite brutal and grisly.
Summary: Sony had a strong showing, chock full of games we’re really anticipating, and Jack Tretton is always an amiable host. However, it faltered in the middle with the overly long and dull Wonderbook presentation. A disturbing lack of Vita games, right when the handheld needs a boost, was a disappointment too. But except for those 20 or so minutes, we got a ton of gaming goodness.
Final Grade: B-