E3 2012: Microsoft and EA

So it’s day 2 of E3 and we’re already more than halfway through. With all the excitement that I get from this time of the year I’m going to be genuinely sad to see it go, but it’s been excellent while it’s lasted. The list of games I’m excited for is so long it’s ridiculous and I know plenty of other people have enjoyed the show, so in that spirit I thought I’d take a customary look back at the press conferences. Here are my self-indulgent reflections on Microsoft and EA.

Microsoft

It was great to see Microsoft open so strong with Halo 4. The level they showed was somewhat reminiscent of the first level of Halo 3, but it was encouraging to see 343 bring at least something new to the table. I wasn’t entirely sold on the enemy designs, but the graphics looked great, they managed to mix up the gameplay, and it was all-round a really impressive look at the game.

The Blacklist demo showed a Splinter Cell going for a rather different style this time round, and it looks like it has some potential. Like Halo 4 it had some really well-crafted animation, and while I’ve never been a big fan of the games, they do seem to be taking it in a more action-oriented direction I could get into, I only hope that stealth games aren’t a genre we see die out entirely. The Kinect support seems a little unnecessary, but at least it’s unintrusive if nothing else.

Like a lot of people I tuned out a little throughout Microsoft’s sports game showcase, but it didn’t seem as though they were doing anything particularly new, and I do have to wonder how much of the sports game crowd really care that much about using Kinect in their games, but hey, maybe that’s a thing. The trailer for the new Gears of War showed fine, however, I was a little surprised by the lack of any kind of demo, and having played three Gears games already this generation, I’m not sure I’m quite ready for another.

The subsequent slew of media apps shown was something I expected after the way Microsoft have handled such things in previous years, although the section dragged on far too long, and as Gizmodo points out they do seem to be giving customers a bit of a raw deal by making them pay for Xbox LIVE Gold to access the ability to then pay for additional streaming services. While the Kinect content also wasn't particularly exhilarating, I must say I was expecting more of it than they showed, and the Kinect fitness game looked like a Kinect fitness game, but at least we were free of creepy plastic families dancing up and down in artificial living rooms this year. The Smartglass section, again, too lengthy, but it looks like they really have something there and it is a clever way to combat Nintendo’s Wii U. Fortunately, things got a lot more exciting when Tomb Raider got its stage demo.

Video games are often so much about empowerment that we’re used to seeing a protagonist be able to just pick up a gun and start mowing down hordes of enemies without breaking a sweat, so to see a character that even later into the game, is still struggling to progress through the world, is refreshing. While running through a jungle getting shot at is something we’d consider par for the course in another game, and is something we’ve become largely desensitised to, Tomb Raider gives a great sense that Lara really is going through hell, perhaps to the point where the level they showed was a little ridiculous, but it was still effective in what it did. Using environmental hazards to take out enemies also looks like great fun and the whole section they showed had a really fantastic flow to it. I hope that game turns out as good as it looks.

I can’t say I’ve been a big fan of Resident Evil but the demo for RE6 seemed fine and Capcom certainly made true on their promise of making things more actiony this time round. Wreckateer didn’t look like a game I’d particularly want to pay money for, but for a Kinect demo it was reasonably inoffensive. I’m a little sceptical of what the quality of the new South Park game will be like, but visually it’s absolutely spot-on and it was cool to see Stone and Parker take to the stage to speak earnestly about what they’d created. I’m rather surprised that with all the complaints about things during the press conferences that weren’t to do with games, the Usher performance got the kind of appraisal it did, but it’s still great to see Harmonix being given the opportunity to do what they do with Dance Central 3.

Finally, when it came to the Black Ops II demo, I thought the “sniper section” they showed was a big mistake for a live press conference, but it’s cool to see people trying to do something a little different with the CoD series, and the chunk of the game they showed, much like a lot of the recent CoDs, did a good job of making you feel like you were seeing a frantic warzone unfold before you. Altogether, I thought it was a pretty great conference, even if the whole “Showing Xbox as a complete media platform” element seems to be getting a bigger and bigger part of these pressings.

EA

I really wasn't sure what to think of EA’s showing of Dead Space 3. I don’t think co-op in Dead Space is necessarily the huge negative that some people have painted it to be; it may be inherently less scary, but I see no reason why the series can’t present a less scary multiplayer mode alongside a more horror focused single-player. However, if the quick flash of moments from the game they showed before the demo is anything to go by, it looks like they could be taking away one of the biggest strengths of Dead Space by sacrificing the creepy, claustrophobic corridors for large, open spaces. I hope that isn’t the case.

The demo of Madden 13 was a little weird, but I can at least appreciate that they didn’t consume vast amounts of the conference this year re-showing sports games from Microsoft’s presser. As for SimCity Social I think it would be easy to dismiss it as just another Facebook game, and I suspect it will have all those same problems we’re used to of social games wanting you to spend real money or drag in friends to advance, but it looks like they may have something deeper and more fleshed-out than a lot of social networking games. It’ll be at least interesting to see the final product.

It was the “SimCity” SimCity that really shone though. I must say I didn’t expect to come away from EA’s conference so excited about a management sim. It’s always great to see a game that differs from the norm of what games portray but still looks like great fun, and I think it would be a real shame if we lost what a franchise like SimCity can bring us. With all the messing about Maxis have done for the past few years with shallower, more easily accessible versions of Will Wright’s games, it’s great to see them come back to one and make something that looks like it will really appeal to the “core” crowd. This is the exact kind of thing which makes me wish I had a more powerful PC.

The Battlefield 3 content, I have mixed feelings about. It’s cool that EA are offering people a way to get their DLC a third cheaper, but I think it would be a mistake to look at this and go “Wow, see how generous EA are?” when the standard price points for DLC are rather poor to begin with. None the less, it was still better than seeing one of the Bioware doctors take to the stage to more or less say “Please play more of our Star Wars MMO”. Bioware are a great company but God knows what happens to The Old Republic from here.

EA spent some considerable amount of time with the new Medal of Honor, and while I’ve seen some people say they’re expecting great things from it, I thought the demo was unrelentingly bland. It looked like “Generic brown-grey modern military shooter”, especially after Battlefield 3 and Black Ops II, and this is a kind of game we already have more than enough of. The idea of having the different countries battle against each other is kind of cool, but there just wasn’t enough original about it. The modern military FPS has already been done very well, to top that you either need to do it to an inconceivable standard of quality, or do something new with it. Warfighter showed no evidence it was doing either.

With FIFA 13 and UFC, again, sports games, it’s a cliché of the nerdy gamer but you know how I feel on this one. I did think it was rather funny though, how we were told FIFA 13 was going to be mind-blowingly innovative and then were shown new ways players stumble, slightly different dribbling, and not much else. Fortunately, Need for Speed: Most Wanted stepped in as another very pleasant surprise. I loved what Criterion did with Burnout Paradise and to see more of that combination of high speed driving with a fairly low-angle camera, a big open city, and spectacular wreckings of other vehicles and the environment, was great. The whole thing closed up with Crysis 3 which didn’t blow me away but looked like a fine game.

Overall, I thought EA did a surprisingly good job. That is admittedly, due to some pretty low standards on my part, but when I thought it would largely be repeat showings of content from other conferences, motion control games, social games nobody cared about, Origin, and other nonsense, they instead managed to really make it about the games and showed some great new stuff. EA get themselves into a lot of unsavoury business with the way they treat their consumers, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that they’re not all doom and gloom, and do bring us some genuinely wonderful titles.