E3; Ubisoft vs EA
On the first day of E3 as well as the explosive fallout from this latest console war EA & Ubisoft had their own talks which covered some of the games to come in the next year that neither Xbox nor Sony got around to, so here’s a look at what may have been missed:
EA:
EA started out with what seemed a very serious almost over the top teaser to what looked like it may have been the next Battlefield only to have the wool pulled from our eyes to reveal it was actually Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, a 4 player co-op 3rd person wave survival game. Players get to play as several different plants all that have their own specialisation e.g. the Peashooter – essentially your average grunt, the Cactus – the PVZ version of a sniper and so on.
EA then moved onto Titanfall – See my previous post for more info on this game.
In incredibly large news that had the entire audience clamouring for more was the unfairly short teaser for the next Battlefront game, something I am looking forward to seeing as I’ve never played the previous versions despite how popular they are. This next BF game will be coming probably 2015 or AT BEST late 2014 and is being made by DICE so hopefully we’ll be able to have fully destructible Deathstars and the like.
The next Need for Speed game was announced and is called Rivals, something interesting about this new NFS game is the `All Drive` multiplayer, it sounds like an open world full of players where games happen by chance and collision. One awesome thing about the talk was that Aaron Paul came out to talk briefly about the NFS movie soon to be out.
In truly awesome news Dragon Age: Inquisition was shown off and it looks truly awesome, a vast open world which is supposedly much larger than the previous iterations of DA.
EA sports then came out afterward to run off their list of yearly releases, NBA, NFL, FIFA (for which Drake was brought out for no apparent reason 
) and also UFC which was initially announced by the hype man Bruce Buffer which I thought was actually a cool funny gag to use, however the talk did get weird as 2 champions were brought out for no reason, just like Drake, and Dana White got weirdly `Macho`. However in terms of the game one feature did sound cool, it’s called MMAI which essentially means on the fly change in tactics from enemy AI as if they had a real Corner Man telling them what to stop you from doing, hopefully this’ll make for some more fun & challenging fights.
EA then showed off Battlefield 4 and their Commander Mode – a top down view for mobile devices to help out in multiplayer matches. The demo they did was much better than the one at Xbox mainly due to the fact they actually had 64 people demoing the game. It looked incredibly dynamic in terms of game play as they were able to take out a pillar underground and the tank on the street fell through, so hopefully maps are full of these little awesome traps.
Rounding off the EA talk they announced Mirrors Edge 2, in the short piece they showed off you could see the same wonderful minimal style in terms of colour that makes the game stick out so much. The only annoying thing was the last screen image “Coming….. When it’s ready”. I felt a little annoyed here as even though it’ll probably be late 2014 or at worst 2015 I’d still want a date to look forward to, but then maybe this is just to hopefully avoid push-backs.
In order: Battlefield 4, Battlefront (believe me there wasn’t much in that teaser), Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mirrors Edge 2
Ubisoft:
Ubisoft started out their talk with Rocksmith being demonstrated by Alice In Chains, a cool feature is that the game band reacts to you. The tag line that was repeated was “The fastest way to learn guitar”. It was a fairly impressive display if quite over the top, but then again this is E3 and Over the Top is all part and parcel.
Aisha Tyler was hosting the talk and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want H. Jon Benjamin to come out shouting “lana, Lana! LANA!”, unfortunately this didn’t happen.
Anyway they then moved onto Splinter Cell Blacklist, however not much was actually said about it, I feel Ubisoft put it in just to remind people that it’s coming soon.
However they then moved onto Rayman Legends, it has the same classic look & feel to it, now with daily challenges and some competitive fun such as racing against `ghosts` of your friends or playing football.
Then came a game I’d heard nothing about but looked amazing which was Might Quest for Epic Loot, essentially you get to build a castle and fill it with mobs and such before choosing a hero, then you get to rob friends & strangers alike (and vice versa). So you’re objective is obviously to steal peoples loot whilst defending your own. It wasn’t very clear if you could then use said loot to improve your castle or gear for next time you go looting. Either way it looks an awesome game and a must buy.
Then Ubisoft quickly reminded the audience of the hopefully soon to come South Park the Stick of Truth via a little clip of a move called the Nagasaki Fart… yea on odd one but classic South Park humour.
Ubisoft then moved onto an interesting new game with a new take on the 4 player heavy co-op games (i.e. payday, Left for Dead) called The Crew. You play as one in a four player car heist crew. It has fully customisable cars in an Online persistent world, you can compete against other crews, work as a team or work singularly. Each style of car has specific types of goals and challenges for you to complete.
Next up on stage was Watch Dogs & Assassins Creed 4 – See my previous article for the read up on the live demo at the Sony conference.
In awesome news the team behind Trials are releasing 2 new games called Trails Fusion and Frontier for Next Gen & Mobile, respectively. In the short show of gameplay the player got points for tricks which may point to a new game type where you trick as much instead of just flips or racing. Both versions are meant to work & compliment each other.
To round off the Ubisoft conference they showed off a new Open world online RPG which is based on the idea of our fragile & delicate systems that the world currently runs on and what would happen if a new dangerous pathogen broke out and the modern world collapsed. It’s called The Division and is a Tom Clancy game, truly looks amazing and a must buy.
In order: The Might Quest for Epic Loot, The Crew, The Division, Trials Fusion.
So that wraps up all of day one pretty much. In the next week or so I’ll be doing some more pieces in depth on some of the games, grouping maybe 3 or so into one article.
Thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed this E3.
Fred Garrett-Jones
https://twitter.com/magicalfunbus
http://willza99.wordpress.com/
