Ah, E3. Just about the only place where you (and when I say 'you,' I mean us) can see the most awesomest audio hardware ever on one day and witness geeks lining up in a restroom to shake piss-soaked hands with a famous Japanese game designer on the next day. Quite a motherfucking experience. Between avoiding 40 year old boothbabes trying to score a free lunch and running the slalom through stupid fucks that paid $250 a pop to attend, we saw some pretty cool stuff this year.
The Good
Hero's Journey is a sleeper hit. Simutronics gave us a closed-door showing, and it blew my pants off. First and foremost, the character designer owned me. Remember how everyone was warm in the pants over CoH's character designer? This totally blows that away. There are sliders for everything you can possibly think. Crank the "African" slider all the way up, and your avatar looks more black. Crank all racial sliders up and you just made Tiger Woods. There's even a slider for "deformation" that gives your avatar a nice Igor look. Above and beyond that is the way they are handling armor and clothing in game. Basically, they aren't visible at all. You pick out your outfit (and there's ten billion times the combos you can make with CoH) at creation, and go with it...but you can change clothes in the game, so you aren't locked into your Peter Pan outfit (completely possible, we saw it) once you figure out that you may not be a homosexual as previously thought. The last thing I'll say about HJ is the spellcasting. When you cast, say, firefield you get a cursor to target it on the ground. Ho-hum you say? Negatory. The cursor allows you to actually draw a fucking line on the fucking ground where you want the field to go. Sweet. Ness. It's similar for all other AEs, meteor swarm using a drawn circle, for example. I won't even go into the combos that are possible, though we did see one where a player leap-frogged his groupmate and did some sort of flying ninja kick. Uber cool.
Auto Assault. Auto. Assault. Just about what you'd imagine from the title. You can ram people, run over people, destroy buildings, and just be a complete badass. Very action-y, with RPG elements. I'll let other speak more of this one, and just mention that they have one of the best OCR people in the business.
Dungeons and Dragons Online. I'm saving this one for its own story. It's that good. Our beta accounts can't come soon enough.
Age of Empires 3 is going to be your RTS daddy. Havok physics engine is being used, and it's being used well. Fire a cannon ball and the ball rolls around and deals realistically based on what it's hit and how fast it's going. They're focusing heavily on MP. Huge sigh of relief. Formations are in, and they're useful. You can order your riflemen to fix bayonets and charge, for instance. One cool thing I saw was how queued up units pop out at the same time and auto-group together. Very nice. Positions of units in combat will mean a hell of a lot. Having artillery attack parallel to the enemy is devastating. I was really worried about the home base thing when the helpful MS developer showed us how you tech up and such there, but he assured me (and demonstrated) that you still tech up at your buildings and advance through the ages like all the other AoE games. This one is going to be cool as shit.
Prey and FEAR were very cool. Prey has this whole Indian spirit detachment thing going on, while you can pop off people's heads with the railgun in FEAR. Will be two very entertaining FPS games.
City of Villains looked pretty good. Of course, when the lead designer is in a cape and talks as enthusiastic as Statesmen, anything would look good. PvP, playable bad guys, robbing banks for missions...what's not to like? The lair building was pretty nice, though I have a feeling that the experience will be the exclusive domain of guild leaders. Rasputin actually plays CoH, so look for a real write up soon from him.
Saitek makes some awesome products. They love us ("Ah, Corpnews! We love you guys! Hey, you wanna see something that we are hardly showing anyone?") and we love them. In the coming weeks, we'll be reviewing some of their mice and keyboards and controllers and such. I just can't say enough about how great these people are. Not only did we receive exclusive invites to their wine and cheese party (best party at E3, with Pepcom coming in a close second), but they actively sought out our opinions on the aforementioned NDA product. It's still NDA and all, so all I can say is "HOLY FUCKING AWESOME GIVE ME ONE PLEASE!" We'll be giving a comprehensive review in a few months I'm sure.
NCSoft in general is absolutely kicking ass and taking names. We received four private showings of AA, TR, CoV, and GW. We were greeted with warm recognition each time, and all the developers were really into their game. We figured it out; NCSoft just lets the studios do their thing. No overbearing EA-like presence = quality products. Rasputin and I will be receiving review copies of Guild Wars Soon(TM), so look for a better write-up then.
VIA gave us a nice little private show as well. They've got a working SLI solution not based on the nForce chipset. All they're waiting on is approval from Nvidia to produce and sell it. Pricepoint should be around $120 retail, I believe. The other board they showed off is one that features both AGP and PCI-X. I'm personally psysched about this, since I've got a 9800 Pro AGP card, but only a 1700+ CPU. Being able to keep my current good card, but still be able to upgrade to a PCI-X card down the line while keeping my then-current CPU is a pretty nice feature. VIA will be sending one out to me in a few weeks; keep a look out for a comprehensive review.
The Bad
Dark and Light was pretty bad. In our demo with one of the heads of Farlan, he didn't show off a lick of combat. He tried to show off their dragon-based travel system, but the dragon kept running away. Literally. The killer feature for DnL appears to be the ability for characters to take a running leap off a cliff and sprout a hang glider from their ass. Color me unimpressed.
In space, no one can hear you NOT PLAY THIS GAME. My God, Imperator is bad. I'll just drop two quotes from the Mythic monkey giving us a demo: "We like to think of Imperator as a mix of all of your favorite gameplay mechanics from Camelot, but without PvP" - and - "We saw a lot of good thing from Everquest 2 that we'll be incorporating into the game." I'd be laughing if I wasn't crying and looking for the nearest straight razor and asking Mark Jacobs how you pronounce the name of his game.
There are, of course, a ton of other bad games at E3. I don't have the time to list them all here, so you're stuck with the two above.
The Meh?
Irth Online is due out in June of 2005. Hurrhhhh? Well, the game isn't that great looking graphics-wise, but it has some interesting systems. It's use-based advancement, with lots of PvP. Alan Chipura, one of the developers, said that Ultima Online was Magic Hat Software's main inspiration for making Irth Online. This could end up being a sleeper hit. Alan said he will be giving us a few beta accounts, so you will definitely hear more about this game from us.
Tabula Rasa doesn't have unicorns or asteroid-based dwellings. Nor does it have fire fields, though if they're smart they'll find SOME WAY for Lord British to die at the end of the beta test. The combat looked like crap when I stood over the shoulder of sweaty Mythic employee who hogged the public demo for the better part of a half hour, but it looked pretty interesting once we were in the demo room with Starr Long and Paul Sage. Basically, you have a targeting cursor. When you press left mouse, you fire your weapon. The cursor locks on to opponents within a certain radius, but you have to be looking vaguely in the enemy's direction. It's all push to fire, there's no auto-attack whatsoever. Your hit/miss result is based on traditional RPG mechanics - stats, levels, modifiers, etc. Oh, and you can fire your weapon at any time, so it feels more FPS-y, or something. There's a sort of limited magic system, but I didn't really understand it. Something about a blank slate and Richard Garriott creating a pictograph language. Anyway. It looks like much of the game is objective-based, with you and your NPC allies fighting against a pretty smart looking group of aliens to secure waypoints and such. An interesting thing they are doing is having drop-ships for spawns, instead of the aliens just spawning from thin air like in most games. What makes it more interesting is that you can destroy the mothership or wherever they're coming from to make them temporarily not spawn. They described lots of scenarios like this. I placed this in the meh category for pretty obvious reasons, but I remain optimistic. This is obviously a latter-half of 2006 product, but it looked pretty good for where they are at.
