Next-Gen Garbage: Revisited

So E3 is over.  Now that Sony is done making Microsoft look like an ass and Microsoft is done making Microsoft look like an ass, it seemed like the perfect time to revisit this topic.  I know that I was originally pretty hard on both consoles, but this was also at a time where all we had to look forward to was a new Assassin's Creed, a new Call of Duty, and Watch_Dogs, which is releasing on both current and next-gen platforms.

Now, after press conferences from both MS and Sony, along with two major developers that will be releasing content on both platforms,  I have to say that I've got somewhat of a new outlook on the future of gaming.  That doesn't, however, mean that it's bright.

E3: Abridged - Part IV

So over a week after the fact now, I'm finally getting around to finishing this series.  I'd had plans to complete it earlier, but some personal illness got in the way of that.  Finally getting around to watching the last of the press conference footage and I've got to say that I'm significantly more enthused than I thought I'd be.  Roll up those sleeves.  Bring down the cage.  It's time for the Sony Smackdown.

E3: Abridged - Part III

So here we are at the one-week mark from E3 and I still haven't finished my write-ups.  You can blame The Last of Us and, by association, @Tsaikotyk for getting me on that train.  Expect to see Part IV tomorrow, as I should finish this series off before it becomes too irrelevant.

Electronic Arts (EA):

Chief Operations Officer Peter Moore kicked off "The Download", EA's press conference segment.  He stated that everything we'd get to see would be for the upcoming generation's Xbox One and Playstation 4 consoles.  He got things rolling with a "beloved franchise that, over the years, has captivated millions of fans worldwide".

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare - With a trailer opening that looked like it would be EA's cash cow Battlefield 4, we instead received a 4-player-cooperative-third-person-shooter variation on the PvZ franchise.  Goodie!  Just what every tower-defense player wanted!  Yet another bland, generic horde-mode shooter.  Dear PopCap, fuck you.  Nobody wanted this.  Your idea to take "everything we love about action games and blend it with everything our fans love about PvZ" (Brian Lindley, Producer) is a piss-poor excuse to pander to the OTHER masses.  The ones playing Call of Duty and Battlefield, and give them something.  Well guess what?  IT WON'T WORK.  Hardcore gamers already have their realistic shooters, 4-player-coop-shooter fans already have their Borderlands 2, and casual gamers already have the ACTUAL Plants vs. Zombies.  This is the kind of blind developmental stupidity that is causing so many studios to go belly-up.  When you try to cater to every demographic, your game loses vision, flavor, and becomes the bland forgettable first/third-person shooter #3234273 that nobody talks about.

Oh well, at least you announced Peggle 2, and that will keep you afloat for another 7-10 years.

Titanfall - Two games made their debut on stage during Microsoft's conference, and were later reshown during EA's own conference.  One of which was Titanfall (and the other being Battlefield 4, but who cares).  Having already shown us the semi-cinematic trailer, and some quality gameplay footage during Microsoft's stage time, Respawn gave us a little behind-the-scenes look at the game with some of the developers.  These people were working to create a fun game that blended the scale between the pilots and their mechs.  An attempt at creating a multiplayer game that still gave you the feeling of a single player experience.  And of course, redefining those giant robots.  Titanfall still looks awesome, and I can't wait to play it on the PC.  =)

There was a short blurb between presentations about EA's two new engines for the upcoming generation.  In-house you had the EA Sports division working with EA Sports Ignite, and you had DICE (developers of Battlefield and Mirror's Edge) using the new Frostbite 3 engine.  An engine that they'd be using in the upcoming game: STAR WARS: BATTLEFRONT 3.  YES IT'S FINALLY HAPPENING.

Need For Speed: Rivals - Coming on stage after Ubisoft gave EA a huge disadvantage for their racing game.  The Crew already promised to blend single and multiplayer experiences together in a living open-world racing game.  So when EA showed us NFS: Rivals, it was pretty underwhelming.  Through "AllDrive", they'd blend single, coop, and multiplayer modes together into one fluid experience.  The game also has some level of tablet support.

Then star of Breaking Bad, Aaron Paul walked on stage and got to talk a little about his role in the Need For Speed movie.  Fucking why?  We've already got 6 Fast and Furious films.  Why make another branded by EA?  The director Scott Waugh commented that "Need for Speed is accurate and authentic to real car racing culture".  This quote was immediately followed by footage of a police SUV being flipped off the side of the road, so I'm not entirely sure he knew what he was talking about.  The movie will be hitting theaters in 2014 and I plan to ignore it.  I will probably be too busy playing The Crew to notice.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - EA didn't give us a lot of details on Bioware's new RPG heading to next-gen, except that you get to lead an inquisition.  The trailer showed us the sky tearing open and all hell raining down, and that we'd see the game sometime in 2014.

EA SPORTS: "IT'S IN THE GAME"

Now, I'm not a fan of sports games.  I consider myself to be an actual gamer, and if you do too, then you also probably ignored this section of the conference.  Well, to bring you some of the best out-of-context quotes from EA's press conference, I actually watched the damn thing.  Here you go:

"It's always lacked the depth of true ball handling." - Sean O'Brien, Executive Producer - NBA Live '14

"Through major gameplay innovation, we've given players the ability to think intelligently and move more like elite NFL athletes." - Cam Weber, VP and GM of American Football - Madden 25

"For the first time players can now make intelligent decisions." - Matt Bilbey, Group GM - FIFA '14

"Lets fighters organically alter their strategies throughout the fight.  This is a huge part of fighting and it takes a unique level of intelligence."  - Andrew Wilson, Executive Vice President - EA Sports UFC

Battlefield 4 - Yes!  The moment everyone who is not me has been waiting for!  Modern military shooter madness!  EA showed off the newest installment in the Battlefield franchise yet again.  With "levolution", players can now "experience destruction and dynamic environments that react to your every move" (Patrick Bach, Executive Producer).  Yeah, we had the start of that back in 2001 with Red Faction, where were you?  Though to be completely honest, Battlefield actually surprised me, because it's one thing to spew words like "dynamic", which doesn't mean shit in the game industry.  It's just a filler word that execs use to sound more important.  I was impressed during their gameplay demo when their 64 person skirmish ended with the collapse of a skyscraper, destroyed by human player gunfire.  That was impressive.

Mirror's Edge - EA closed it out by showing us Mirror's Edge, a poorly marketed, visually stunning and elegant first-person parkour platformer for the last generation.  It's getting rebooted for next generation, and it looks even more stunning this time around.  Let's just hope they don't fuck it up this time.

Part IV should show up tomorrow when I praise Sony for kicking in Microsoft's door and laughing in their face.

E3: Abridged - Part II

So, first of all, pardon me for the late upping of part 2 of E3 Abridged.  Part 1 went up on Thursday.  Then Friday happened and with the release of The Last of Us, I haven't had much time to eat, sleep, breathe, or think, let alone work on another write-up.  It's been handed more perfect 10's than any game of note in my lifetime (GTA IV was not a game of note to me), and with the exception of a few mechanical glitches that I've encountered, it's deserved them.

I'll gush about it in a future post.  Right now it's time to dissect:

Ubisoft

Rocksmith 2014 - Ubisoft tried to grab our attention by bringing in washed-up grunge guitarist Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains on stage to play the solo from Man in the Box (featured in Rock Band 2 for those of you who were under a rock while the Fake Plastic Instruments genre was at its high point), and then introduce us to session mode, where you can jam on your guitar, while the game simulates the rest of the band for you.  Unfortunately, this is where having had friends that are drummers fucks with me, because the automated drums on Rocksmith are GOD AWFUL.  They wouldn't know how to keep a tempo if you did it for them.

We're then joined by Aisha Tyler wearing the most ridiculous shirt I've ever seen.  #girlwood *snrk*
Good for Ubisoft though.  They realized that their CEO's and lead developers don't exactly have stage presence and someone that's a professional actor/comedian is significantly better at sounding interesting.  With phrases like "Done a lot of dirty deeds to Alice in Chains" and "belly first, ass out".  Way to grab my attention.  Moving on.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist - Now I'm not really one to judge here because as previously mentioned, I'm not a big fan of stealth games.  However, I can comment that we got to see about 10 seconds of actual gameplay mixed in amongst a lot of pretty cutscenes.  Some vague concept of story was revealed with talk about a terrorist group called "The Engineers" and their attacks being labeled "The Blacklist", but that's about it.

Rayman Legends - Now I find it rather unfortunate that I still haven't gotten around to playing Rayman Origins, which I'm told is the "happiest most fun-filled game ever made".  So, logically, if the first one was good, the second will be better, right?  Well that's what we're hoping happens here.  Lots of more of the same.

Mighty Quest for Epic Loot - Didn't see much of this game besides it's rather humorous trailer.  It looks like a diablo-clone.  Just what this world needs.  Another diablo-clone.  As if I didn't already have Diablo III, Torchlight II and Path of Exile.

South Park: The Stick of Truth - An RPG for people who enjoy South Park.  Which isn't me.  Though I do have to give them credit for being able to poke fun at game delays and launch dates.

The Crew - I'm going to take a second to gush about this segment.  The Crew looks FANTASTIC, and not in the way that Forza Motorsport does.  Ubisoft didn't bring a two-of-a-kind McLaren P1 to the stage.  They didn't give us Driveatars.  What they did show us was a trailer of all kinds of illegal vehicular activity.  Street racing, off-roading, running from the cops.  To be honest, the debut trailer made the game look like The Fast and The Furious: The (good) Videogame.  They talked a little bit about how the whole US was your playground in The Crew.  Open-world racing where the end goal is to take down (or more likely usurp) this criminal organization.  They've created this online persistent world that blends single and multiplayer together.  You and your friends can band together at any time to form a Crew and take on cooperative missions.  Singularly, you can engage in all sorts of challenges.  One of the ones that interested me the most was where you had to race a single car in a point-to-point challenge.  The player was currently driving a high-powered street car, and his computer opponent was in a vehicle more suited to off-roading.  There was no "out-of-bounds".  Each vehicle applied it's strength in the point to point challenge.  The road course was longer, but the player had faster car.  However, the off-road was shorter, but required a different set up.  Ubisoft bragged about the level of customization you can apply to your car, and being able to completely take apart the engine and rebuild it from the ground up.  This is so much a part of the game, that they have designed an app for your tablet or smartphone that allows you to completely customize your car from these devices, and have it available as soon as you return to your console.  Overall, this game blew me away and I'm really excited to see it in the next generation.

Watch_Dogs - Watch_Dogs is back this year with absolutely no gameplay footage.  Just a fancy trailer.  They did unveil to us that Aiden Pierce (the game's protagonist) is effectively a superhacker, whose obsession with surveillance has turned him into a vigilante.  And that sounds badass.  Who doesn't want to be cyber-punk Batman?

Just Dance 2014 - I had to talk about Rocksmith, so I've gotta talk about this too.  Let's see, it's finally coming out as multiplatform.  We got to see a list of pop stars likely to be on the soundtrack, including PSY.  It will support 6-player dances, which is more than the number of controllers that can be connected to any system at a single time, so I guess that's impressive.  There's some weird system where you can supposedly DJ and remix the music by dancing.  It's the next generation of "your favorite party game".  They might need to re-evaluate that statement, because last time I checked, my favorite party game was Cards Against Humanity.

Rabbids Invasion - This is a kid's show with Kinect support built in.  Based on the fact that it is an actual TELEVISION show, with motion-tracking camera interactivity, I'm assuming (and will be pleasantly surprised if) this will remain exclusive to the Xbone.  Because honestly, who doesn't enjoy screaming with their kids at the TV?  Not me.  I'd rather just scream at the kids.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag - Ah yes, the pirate simulator that everyone's been talking about.  I've tried to involve myself in the Assassin's Creed franchise, but I've never seemed to be able to care.  The social stealth made sense when Altair's costume looked incredibly similar to the monks in the first game.  However, Ezio didn't blend in with a single goddamn Italian.  Being surrounded by 5 or 6 people while wearing an extremely unique outfit does not make you just "disappear".  Try again.  Sorry, off-topic.  AC4 was another game where we saw a lot of shiny trailerness, and not a lot of gameplay.  And the trailer didn't even contain a spot of blood.  There were people getting shot, stabbed, and bashed over the head with bottles, and yet no one seemed to bleed.  This seemed a little out of character for a franchise about ASSASSINATION, but more to the point, isn't that why most people play this game?  For the violence?  Anyways, Ubisoft brags that it's done it's homework on this one and created a realistic pirate experience.  I doubt that being a rapist and spreading untold amounts of venereal disease is part of the core game mechanics.

Trials Fusion/Frontier - The Trials franchise is back with better graphics and a mobile counterpart.  So you can eat shit and break your neck while indulging in impossible motocross feats in a whole new generation.

The Division - Yves Guillemot (Ubisoft's CEO) unexpectedly ran out on stage and interrupted Aisha to present this.  Yet another franchise with Tom Clancy's name slapped on the front of it.  Think of a post-apocalyptic world where a flu epidemic has caused pandemonium across the nation.  No, this isn't The Last of Us, it's The Division,  an open-world MMORPG cover-based shooter.  Now, while I'm getting kind of sick of the chest-high-wall-shooter genre, this game's unique HUD, interactive environment and MMORPG mechanics make me rather curious.

Part III will cover the EA conference.  If I can drag myself away from The Last of Us long enough to write the damn thing.

Rant: Next-Generation Garbage - Xbone and PS-Bore

This article was originally intended as a comparison between the released information on both the PS4 and Xbone, but honestly, after spending the better portion of a day thinking it over, I just couldn't bring myself to write a post about something I just don't give a fuck about.  The Xbone and PS4 just don't interest me, and I think it's partially because I won't be able to afford either but mostly because they're just not needed.  What does the next generation bring to the table that we're currently lacking, or would really benefit from?  Jack-shit, but lets break it down.