Photographs by Daniel Boczarski
Well, the time has come once again. It’s time again for E3. As usual before the actual show floor opens up, all of the major game companies get on stage during their own press conferences to show off what they have for the upcoming year, or in this case what games will be coming alongside with the new consoles.
Microsoft was the first to go this year and with that they had the most to show. Following a few weeks of disappointing news about the Xbox One, Microsoft took this E3 as an opportunity to show that they still care about gamers and are still very much in this console race.
Microsoft began their briefing with a show stopper. No more than a minute after the event started we got a look at the first game to be shown, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was finally shown off. The demo/trailer Kojima Productions showed off looked impressive to say the least. The demo took place in Afghanistan where Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller are continuing their fight to create their army without a country; Outer Heaven. The Phantom Pain demo showed off some new features to hit the series like more realistic movement, and stealth. Snake will now run, lean and just use the environment in general like a real person now instead of a video game character. MGSV also takes place in an open world. So the closed environments from the other games in the series are a thing of the past. As mentioned earlier the demo area took place in Afghanistan, where Snake had to infiltrate a base located a little further from his location. The demo showed Snake riding a horse while leaning from side to side on it to stay hidden from the troops. You could presumably get there by foot, truck, or even helicopter. After the few minutes in-game footage it changed into a trailer, where it briefly showed off what to further expect from the game which is more stealth, action, and a story that’s going to be crazy and leave you not knowing what to think but still wanting more. For anyone who’s been following the game you probably know that David Hayter, who has been the voice of Snake since 1998, was not asked to return to voice the character. Instead Kojima Productions asked for Kiefer Sutherland to do the voice work this time around. As a big fan of the series myself it was a little jarring and off putting to hear anyone else as Snake. However it will be interesting to see how new fans of the series handle this.
After Metal Gear, Microsoft went into Xbox 360 mode and showed off some titles that will be appearing on 360. First, they showed off a new free-to-play title for the Xbox 360. World of Tanks which is an existing free-to-play PC game. A basic rundown of World of Tanks would be that its a multiplayer, action and strategy game. The only difference here is that it’ll be on the 360 and require an Xbox Live Gold membership to even play it. Good for those who have a Gold account but for those who stay on Silver, well you might want to think about upgrading. Following that they showed off Max: The Curse of Brotherhood a 2.5D platformer that had the art style akin to a Pixar film. It looked very cartoonish, but very lively and full of spirit. The gameplay trailer didn’t show off anything besides platforming and Pixar-like some cutscenes but it definitely looks like something to look forward to.
After those couple of games and trying to convince the crowd that the 360 would still be supported, it was finally time to start showing more Xbox One games. The first being Ryse: Son of Rome. A third person hack and slash game set in ancient rome. Beyond that it looked fairly generic and pretty early in development. From the start of the demo all the way to the end the demo went from heavily scripted events, to standard hack-and-slash gameplay, to quick-time-events after each kill. Top all that off with a very bad framerate and you have the Ryse demo. A generic, and shallow looking hack-and-slash game that wasn’t quite ready to be shown in my opinion.
Microsoft showed yet another highly awaited title; at least depending on how old you may be. Killer Instinct finally made its well deserved return into the ever growing fighting game market. The new Killer Instinct didn’t seem to have any new features over the old KI games other than online play and looking like a modern game. Basically if you were someone who was clamoring for a new KI game then this is it.
Insomniac Games took the stage after KI and showed off a new Xbox One exclusive, Sunset Overdrive. We didn’t get much beyond a trailer but from what we we were given it looks pretty interesting. Stylish visuals and creative ways to use weapons both seemed to be present in the trailer. After Insomniac’s previous mediocre first-person shooter Fuse, Sunset Overdrive looks like a step in the right direction.
Capcom took the stage shortly after and showed off the next game in the Dead Rising series with Dead Rising 3. Dead Rising 3 looked like your standard Dead Rising game but with a more serious tone. Past games have had a pretty good sense of humor when it came to killing the hordes. Dead Rising 3 had a far more drab and realistic look to it. After playing these games for years now, I’ve come to expect my Dead Rising games to be a little funny. This didn’t seem to have any of that however but did just look like a better Dead Rising game. At the end of the day thats what counts though.
Respawn Games’ Xbox One exclusive first-person shooter was finally shown in detail. Considering it’s been made by the guys who created Call of Duty 4, it’s not that surprising to know that it is also a first-person shooter. But it does have unique qualities instead of just being yet another game from that genre. The first being that it’s actually a multiplayer game built like a singleplayer game, complete with story elements presented during multiplayer gameplay. The other unique quirk about the game is that you actually control mechs throughout your time playing it. The gameplay of the mechs looked pretty similar to playing as a ground soldier with the exception of you being much less mobile and having a couple of different abilities that are unique to your mech. It didn’t look as groundbreaking as Call of Duty 4 was but it does look it’ll be one of the better first-person shooter experiences to have when it launches.
A couple of other worthwhile things to note would be that Microsoft teased a new Halo game for the Xbox One. They didn’t show anything in the teaser besides Master Chief and a giant 100 foot mech. Well that and that the game is simply called “Halo”. It’s a safe bet to say that this will probably be called ‘Halo 5’ or ‘Halo: Insert title here’. Microsoft also said that they will finally do away with Microsoft Points when the Xbox One comes out. So finally doing away with what was a poor idea in the first place. All in all Microsoft had to really blow everyone away with this press conference. After all the horrible news about how the Xbox One will treat used and borrowed games they had to bring their S-rank game, sadly they didn’t really bring it as much as we would have liked them to.
