The Electronic Entertainment Expo, that fabulous, loud, crazy, expensive and fun event which filled the Los Angeles Convention Center from floor to ceiling with garish gaming goodness for several delicious days each May, is no more. Last year, several of the big gaming companies decided they were spending too much for too little and pulled out of the event.
Every press person I spoke to at the event seemed puzzled and miffed by the new, unimproved E3. There was a palpable “don’t rock the boat” feeling among us.
This year there was a brutally scaled-down version of the event, spread out across several venues in Santa Monica, and, theoretically at least, by invitation only.
Registration for E3 is confusing on a good year, and this year Randy and I were so baffled by the whole thing that we pretty much just threw our hands up. Luckily, we received a couple of invitations, which at least got me through the door. While there, my matchless networking skills got me into see a surprising amount of good stuff.
So what follows is what I managed to see over three very disorganized, chaotic, and puzzling days.
Handheld Gaming Goodness
Before I go into any specifics, I just want to mention that if you have yet to dip into the world of handheld gaming, there’s never been a better time to consider picking up a Nintendo DS or a Sony PSP. I think many gamers ignore these systems, thinking they’re just for kids. But the fact is, both platforms have become tickets to an ever-expanding amount of exciting gaming content of all kinds. Adventure game fans should be particularly interested in the DS, which is already building up an impressive library of interesting and diverse adventure titles.
The Konami Press Event
Konami, of course, is the purveyor of several important gaming franchises, including Silent Hill, Castlevania and Metal Gear Solid.
At the press briefing they showed a long trailer from Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PS3. The sequence was all done in-game engine, and it was technically and dramatically very impressive. The only puzzling thing to me was that, for a series famous for its stealth gameplay, it looked an awful lot like Ninja Gaiden. Has Metal Gear morphed into a fighting game? Odd.
Konami’s rhythm game Dance Dance Revolution continues strong with upcoming titles on all three next-gen consoles.
There are not one but two new chapters of the Silent Hill franchise coming up. First, for the XBox 360 and PS3, there’s Silent Hill V, in which a return war veteran has to search the town of Silent Hill for his younger brother.
Also upcoming is Silent Hill Origins for the PSP. I got to play a bit of this and it’s a title I’m really looking forward to. The graphics are amazing, the atmosphere creepy and the gameplay compelling. The game has more weapons than any other chapter in the franchise, and it includes one-shot weapons like smashing a monster’s head in with a television. I actually think the handheld is an odd platform for a horror game, but an interesting one. Other than the recent remake of Resident Evil for the DS, there haven’t been many horror-themed games on a handheld system. Will a game you’re holding in your hand actually be able to scare you? We’ll see when Silent Hill Origins is released late this year.
For Castlevania fans, there’s a great looking upcoming title for, you guessed it, the PSP. It’ll be called Castlevania: Dracula X.
Square Enix
Final Fantasy fans will have much to rejoice about, with several new titles headed for the handheld consoles. There’s FFXII: Revenant Wings, a sort of side-mission the PS2 title, on the DS. Also on the DS will be a new Dragon Quest monster-collecting game called Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. The one I’m looking forward to the most, however, is the upcoming sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the DS. FFTA is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, and I’ll be first in line to play this sequel.
And speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, a beautiful remake of the original PS1 game is soon to be released for the PSP. So fans of turned-based strategy RPG gameplay will have much to rejoice about when these games arrive soon.
WoW Killers
This past year, several Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games have challenged World of Warcraft for its dominant position in the genre. And though both The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar and Dungeons and Dragons Online received wonderful reviews, and the subscription-free Guild Wars got a second, well-received expansion, World of Warcraft still reins supreme.
This year all that might change, however. I saw two MMORPGs that, in addition to being beautiful, appear to be very thoughtfully constructed and full of cool ideas.
First, there’s Sony’s Pirates of the Burning Sea. Taking place in a fictionalized 1720 Caribbean Sea, the game allows you to play as one of four types of sailors: A Pirate, a Privateer, a Navy Officer or a Free Trader. Every player is captain of his or her own ship, and you can ally or fight any of several factions, including British, Spanish, Dutch and the Pirate nation.
Among the interesting ideas the game features include:
Intuitive and exciting ship-to-ship battles
Three different schools of swordplay
EVERYTHING in the game, from ships to clothes, made by the players
Strategy elements such as resource management from allied ports
Server victories in gameworld events
Perhaps the most interesting idea they’re developing, however, is their PvP (Player versus Player) model. To those unfamiliar with MMORPGs, most activities in these types of games are a mixture of two very different activities: Player versus Environment and Player versus Player. All MMORPGs achieve their own specific balance with these two gameplay elements.
In Pirates of the Burning Sea, everything is Player versus Environment UNTIL a particular port or town is besieged by another faction seriously enough that its security becomes compromised. At that point, the entire area around the port becomes a PvP area. Players of like factions can engage in huge fleet battles at sea and the port can actually change hands from one nationality to another. It all sounds very organic and compelling.
Another thing that will really make Pirates distinct from its biggest other new competitor, Age of Conan, is that swordplay is very strategic and methodical. It’s practically turn-based. This is a huge difference from FunCom’s “twitch” model for melee combat in Conan (more on that below).
The Return of Fallout
Bethesda Softworks was at E3. A year and a half after their huge success with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, they were doing invitation-only demos of their enormously anticipated new RPG, Fallout 3. I managed to get into the final demo of the show, which was given my game producer Todd Howard. Howard, though he looks twelve, has been with Bethesda since 1994 and was the project leader on Morrowind and Redguard.
Fallout is being developed for both the PC and the XBox 360.
For those of you unfamiliar with the series, the original Fallout was an award-winning 1997 RPG from Interplay. It was followed by a sequel, a strategy game, and a stripped down version for the XBox and PS2. Some time after Interplay went out of business, Bethesda picked up the license and has been working on the sequel since 2004.
Like the first game, the setting of Fallout 3 is a post-apocalyptic United States. Your character has been raised in a Vault, one of many such underground installations where people fled to avoid the catastrophe. Furthermore, the setting of the game is “retro-future,” meaning it’s futuristic in a way that might have been imagined in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Fallout 3 begins with your character’s birth. You get to make many decisions about your character’s looks – face, build, hair color, sex, etc. The story starts in earnest when you are a teenager and get summoned by your father, who is the Vault’s doctor. In a very nice touch, Dad (voiced by Liam Neeson) will be programmed to look like an older version of the character YOU design! Slick.
Soon you find yourself leaving the Vault and thrust out into the harsh, radiation-scarred landscape that used to be the area around Washington, DC. Fans of the original games: Just picture the world of Fallout fully realized with next-gen high res graphics. Built with graphics capabilities more advanced then those used for the stunning Oblivion, the look of the game is truly breathtaking.
In a major departure from the first games, the new Fallout will be played either from a first-person perspective or an over-the-shoulder perspective. The radiant AI from Oblivion is back, much improved, giving the non-player characters convincing, active lives.
The robust role-playing character development system, named S.P.E.C.I.A.L., for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck, returns, and Bethesda has licensed about 20 1940’s era songs to give the game that creepy, ironic, Fallout atmosphere.
The quest structure requires many moral choices with complex consequences.
Another departure from the original games is that combat takes place in something more like real time, rather than the old-school turn-based mechanic. However, it’s a hybrid system, as the player has the ability to freeze time and make tactical decisions such as aiming at particular parts of an enemy’s body.
Fallout 3 is due in fall of 2008.
Crush Your Enemies, See Them Driven Before You, And Hear The Lamentation Of The Women
I stupidly didn’t even realize FunCom (developers of the Longest Journey series) were at the show, but luckily I ran into our pal Ragnar Tørnquist who quickly ushered me into a demo of their upcoming MMORPG, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.
The first factoid which blew me away is that the gameworld is 185 square miles in size. Wow.
The demo wasn’t nearly as informative or detailed as Bethesda’s was for Fallout 3, so I mostly watched some (very fun-looking) gameplay sequences.
The look of Conan does a beautiful job of suggesting the brutal lushness of a low-fantasy Bronze-Age world. The forests are thick and ominous, the villages convincing, and the character models are unusual and compelling.
FunCom is experimenting with lots of new ideas in Conan. These include AI that can build its own cities! Also, players can build regular cities and Player versus Player cities.
Also, there are over 100 emotes in the game. Emotes are animated and/or spoken bits of character communication. What’s more, you’ll be able to “program” your emotes by building strings of them to use together.
Right now dungeon raids will be scaled by player number and will be playable by up to twenty-four players.
The game comes out for PC in October of this year, to be followed by an XBox 360 version next spring.
By the way, Jörgen Tharaldsen confirmed to me that a third game in the Longest Journey series is very definitely in development, but that FunCom isn’t talking about it publicly until Conan’s October launch.
In Brief
My two favorite developers for Sony hardware, Insomniac Games and Naughty Dog, both have something big cooking up for the PS3:
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, from Insomniac, looks eye-popping and fun You’ve got to love a game that has guns that a) turn your enemies into penguins and b) makes your enemies start dancing.
Uncharted/Drake’s Fortune from Naughty Dog looks to be a high-adrenaline jungle action adventure that lands somewhere between Far Cry and Pitfall. It’s still in pretty early development but looks very compelling.
Who knew there was ANOTHER Conan game in the works? This one looks a bit like God of War, with the muscle-bound hero battling all manner of Hyborian nasties in a beautiful puzzle-rich action/adventure for the PS3 and XBox 360.
And speaking of God of War . . . soon it’ll be on a Sony PSP near you! God of War: Chains of Olympus takes the bloodthirsty hero of the two PS2 games and shrinks him down to size for the PSP. The game looks gorgeous and fun.
Conclusion
When I think back to this year’s radically morphed E3, what I’ll most remember is the speech given in halting but clear English by Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. He spent most of his speech lamenting the passing of E3 and praying that it would return. I echo his wishes.
