e3 2012
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Massively's E3 2012 awards and impressions
E3 is a sweaty, seething mass of geekdom incarnate. There are other big-ticket gaming events, of course, but they don't quite compare. From its sunny, southern California locale to its tacky and omnipresent booth babes, there's the Electronic Entertainment Expo and then there's the rest of the circuit. And the people, oh-em-gee, don't get me started. The snippets of color you catch at a show like this are among the week-long highlights. "I love sushi," for example. This one exploded above the normal hum of conversation, it was heavily accented, and it drew hearty guffaws for minutes thereafter. Plenty of other noteworthies found their way onto my scribble pad, though tragically, none of these gems is printable. Oh, and next year, remind me to pack an extension cord, thanks. Anyhow, you're probably here to see Massively's Best of E3 2012 awards, yeah? Go on ahead past the cut; I've got to find a charging station. %Gallery-157784%
Guardians of Middle-earth brings MOBA to XBLA and PSN
Monolith Productions has one of the most varied histories in video game development. The studio first cut its teeth on first-person shooters, finding a cult hit in the popular No One Lives Forever series. Then, it was a vast experiment with The Matrix Online, before coming back to shooters with the Fear and Condemned series of games. And now, the company's trying to reinvent itself yet again with two licensed downloadable titles for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment: first Gotham City Imposters from earlier this year, and now Guardians of Middle-earth.Guardians of Middle-earth is a weird one. It's a licensed Lord of The Rings title, starring characters from Tolkien's series. It's a MOBA game, similar to League of Legends or DOTA 2, featuring Tolkien's characters fighting it out across a battlefield full of AI-controlled troops. And it's a complicated, deep online multiplayer title, designed for competitive play."What's so weird about that?" you ask? It's being developed only for consoles.%Gallery-157247%
Pokemon Conquest strategically designed to bring in new players
Going into my interview with Pokemon Conquest director Hisashi Koinuma, the DS strategy game seemed like the most inscrutably random agglomeration of properties imaginable. I couldn't begin to imagine a reason anyone would think to merge Pokemon with Nobunaga's Ambition, a strategy game about real Japanese warlords.Koinuma cut through the confusion without trouble, in an instant. "It would be nice if players would become interested in Nobunaga's Ambition," Koinuma said in response to my question about Conquest as a Nobunaga's gateway. "But as Tecmo Koei has created a lot of simulation titles, we wanted to introduce the genre of simulation games to children. It's not so much that we want them to start playing Nobunaga's Ambition as an entry point, but just as an entry point to the genre of simulation games."Of course! It all makes perfect sense as a first strategy game to pull kids into the genre. "Especially in Japan," he continued, "the number of users of simulation games has really dropped over the years, so in order to keep people interested in that genre, we hope that kids would play this game and would take it as a suggestion of 'oh, simulation games are like this.' Then in the future they'd continue playing simulation games."Koinuma believes that the hardcore nature of strategy/simulation fans leads the games to become ever more difficult and less accessible to attempt to satisfy said fans. "At the same time, there are people who want to start trying simulation games, well, now the games on the market are a lot more difficult, so it's a lot harder to learn how simulation games. Some new users are kind of turned off by the genre because it's too difficult."%Gallery-157211%
Fame is always just over the Forza Horizon
Ralph Fulton of Playground Games was very insistent that Forza Horizon is not, in fact, an arcade racing game. It may take place in an open-world version of Colorado, may be free from traditional Forza career modes and may feature a youth-focused licensed soundtrack (read: dubstep), but the actual driving is built on Forza's physics engine.The problem with arcade-style racing games, according to Fulton, is that the appeal of racing different vehicles is lost due to the fact that all cars have to handle roughly the same in order to preserve an "arcade" feel. By using Forza's existing physics engine, Playground Games hopes to circumnavigate this problem and preserve the series' pedigree for for automotive accuracy.That being said, the only car featured in the demonstration I saw was the 2013 SRT Viper, and as it was a hands-off demonstration, I was unable to compare its handling with my experience driving similar cars in previous Forza games. What I can say, is that the Viper did more than its fair share of drifting around Colorado's mountain roads, and that it racked up wicked popularity points doing so. See, in Forza Horizon, you're not just driving around for the hell of it. You're driving to get famous.%Gallery-157065%
THQ's new prez stands behind Montreal studio, though 'there may be empty seats'
When THQ announced its Montreal, Canada-based studio in 2009, the plan seemed a bit on the ambitious side. 400 new employees across five years, two big projects – one of which is overseen by ex-Assassin's Creed creative lead Patrice Desilets, the other being a followup to 2011's Homefront – and a brand new campus meant a lot of money needed to be spent, even with a potentially generous tax credit from the Canadian government.And that was long before THQ's recent financial troubles. It's in that context that we asked newly hired president Jason Rubin to address the future of the Montreal location during an E3 interview. "I think the decision needs to be made which projects we can do, what we can afford to do, and stick to it. Even though THQ Montreal's space may be bigger than what we need right now, there's nothing about that space that prevents us from succeeding," Rubin said.We asked Rubin whether THQ could fulfill the planned 400-person contract across five years in its current financial state. "There may be empty seats," he admitted, but he's not worried that those contractual obligations will affect THQ – nor the Montreal location's – long-term survival. "I'm not saying that we wouldn't fulfill our obligations," Rubin told us. "But assuming for a moment that we don't reach whatever our contractual obligations are, there are very specific clauses in the contract that say what would happen. And I've read the contract, I've gone over it, it was one of the things I did before starting. And there's nothing about the contract or our failing under that contract that would cause the company to fail."Rubin stressed that THQ under his leadership remains dedicated to the Montreal studio and its agreement with the government. "I love Montreal. I definitely wanna do right by Montreal, and I definitely wanna fill that studio. But having said that, if we fail to do that for any reason, that's not going to be a cause for failure for the company." He also addressed potential concern that other THQ studios employees could be moved to the Montreal location. "Were I able to pick up and move people without worry about their families, the projects they're working on, and everything else, I would fill that space in a second," Rubin said.Beyond the co-developed Homefront sequel and the unknown Desilets project, it is unclear what else THQ Montreal is working on, if anything.
Halo mastermind takes his sci-fi shooter chops to mobile gaming with Industrial Toys
Alex Seropian, Bungie co-founder and creator of the Halo franchise, has a new studio focused on creating mobile, hardcore games, and his first title is going to be -- wait for it -- a sci-fi shooter.As a hardcore game, Industrial Toys' sci-fi shooter utilizes Unreal Engine and will exist in a world similar in size to the Elder Scrolls or World of Warcraft universes, Seropian said. As a web-based title, it may have some similarities to Team Fortress 2, president Tim Harris suggested after we asked about any online multiplayer capabilities:"It's interesting you bring up TF2," Harris said, laughing.That's where the familiarity from Industrial Toys ends: Seropian and Harris, the latter formerly of Seven Lights, are looking to innovate the touchscreen-control space in a major way, while adding community features integrated on a level other mobile games can't, well, touch.
UFC 3 failed to break even at 2 million units, report claims
UFC Undisputed 3 failed to break even – which triggered the sale of the UFC license to Electronic Arts – THQ representatives allegedly said during an E3 investor meeting. "THQ sought to exit its UFC contract as the most recent iteration fell short of its ≈2 million unit break-even point," a Wedbush Securities report claims. THQ has yet to confirm the report.EA Sports executive VP Andrew Wilson recently revealed that THQ approached EA to first initiate talks on the deal.In related news, a quick search shows that a number of recently laid off THQ San Diego employees have listed work on "UFC 4" on their LinkedIn profiles. THQ's UFC series originally appeared to be annual with its first two games before the company planned an extra year to develop the latest game.We've reached out to THQ for confirmation on this information, and will update as soon as we learn anything new.
E3 2012: DUST 514 hands-on
Well, my first E3 is in the books, and though I got a good look at pretty much everything, I spent most of the time looking at shooters. MMO shooters came first, of course, and there was plenty of PlanetSide 2, Defiance, and even an 8v8 lobby title called Arctic Combat to be had (more on this last in an upcoming The Firing Line). There was also CCP's DUST 514. This is a title that I'm rooting for both because of my affinity for EVE Online and because the design document is outrageously ambitious. While my first hands-on with the game featured its share of warm fuzzy moments, it also exposed a few concerns about CCP's grab for the casuals.
Star Wars 1313 offers a peek into our very pretty future
Star Wars 1313 may be our first look into the next generation of games – at least the next generation according to Microsoft and Sony. LucasArts' internally-developed third-person shooter slash Uncharted-esque third-person action game is the very definition of "early" for a game in development. "We're in pre-production," said Craig Derrick, LucasArts producer, ahead of a PC-based demo.Further pushing that point: the team isn't talking platforms just yet, nor engine, indicating to many that it could be headed to Microsoft and Sony's yet-to-be announced console successors. The demo runs on an Nvidia 680 graphics card, which I'm told is the fabled "Kepler" architecture of the next generation. And the game is gorgeous for it. Both in cutscenes and in gameplay, the graphical detail is near-equal to that of Naughty Dog's latest efforts. Again, the game is in pre-production.Credit's due here to LucasArts' Industrial Light & Magic, as well as Skywalker Sound and LucasFilm Animation, who are assisting on the project – no doubt – but few games look anywhere near this good at this point in production.
Tank! Tank! Tank! is E3's least effective Wii U showcase, is fun regardless
Tank! Tank! Tank! may not be what I would have shown off at E3 with innovative new hardware. It's fun in a profoundly goofy, vintage-arcadey way, but it's hardly pushing any new ideas or making any graphical leaps. In fact, it's not even a new game -- it was originally released as an arcade cabinet in 2009.It doesn't make particularly interesting use of the WiiPad, either. In the demo shown in Nintendo's booth, one player saw the action from behind their own tank, while up to four other players could play on the TV with Wiimotes -- after everyone passed the WiiPad around to snap avatar portraits. The gameplay was the same -- even the view was the same -- just on another screen.%Gallery-157223%
PlayStation Plus 'amplified' with more games, all other offers remain in place
During Sony's E3 2012 press conference, Jack Tretton announced the addition of a bunch of new games to PlayStation Plus as part of an "amplified" PS Plus relaunch. However, it wasn't clear exactly how the service was changing, beyond the offer of LittleBigPlanet 2 et al. the next day. Is PS Plus all about new full-size games every month for members?We asked Jack Buser, Senior Director of PlayStation Digital Platforms, to clarify for us just what was changing with the "instant game collection." "Everything that you've enjoyed from PlayStation Plus remains very much the same. It's still the same PlayStation Plus," Buser said. "So if you love the huge discounts, if you love the exclusive access to betas, if you love the other things that are also delivered by the service, you're going to see that those other things are still a part of PlayStation Plus -- the cloud saves, the automatic updates, all that other stuff."Really, the only difference is more free games, which we think everyone will agree is an improvement. "What we've announced is that we're amplifying the free games aspect of PlayStation Plus," he said. "We are really ratcheting that up, because that's what the community told us they wanted to see." As before, everything you download will remain playable until your membership lapses, so if every month is like June, your game collection is going to get very big very quickly. If your PS3's hard drive can handle it, that is.
E3 2012: A chat with Final Fantasy XIV's Naoki Yoshida
Final Fantasy XIV's major upgrade had been announced well before this year's E3, but this was its first public showing. While many of the major changes were only appreciable by long-term fans of the game, what was there was massive, ranging from major changes to the interface to several dazzling new areas. It was a lot to take in, and needless to say, we had some questions. Luckily for everyone, executive producer Naoki Yoshida was on hand to answer some of those questions and discuss the game's pending update. Previous interviews with Yoshida have indicated that the version 2.0 update should begin alpha testing in late September, with a beta to follow not long after. He's also stressing the fact that version 2.0 is a major change for the game, almost an entirely new game in many respects, and while the live game has seen the fruits of a great deal of work there's still more to be done. As Yoshida put it, the game is an MMORPG, but it's an RPG before that, and a Final Fantasy game even before that.
The Mog Log: What we saw of FFXIV at E3
When it became clear that we weren't getting our 2.0 trailer at this year's E3, I sort of assumed that Final Fantasy XIV fans would have to be content without much new information. As usual, Naoki Yoshida proved me wrong in the most excellent way possible. So while we've only seen the tip of the iceberg about what's coming into the game, that tip is providing quite a bit of fascinating information all on its own. My first thoughts on seeing the screenshots for the second version was that it might as well be an entirely different game. It's familiar elements ported into an altogether unfamiliar setting. I've been looking forward to it before, but I think this was the first time that I truly believed that this was going to happen and that it would be awesome. So if you've been following along with the game's E3 coverage across the web -- and I know you have -- let's just dive into reaction.
IndieCade at E3: A Mother's Inferno
A Mother's Inferno begins on a train, travels through the juiciest bowels of Hell, and ends up somewhere in between, covered in neon blood and reeking of vomit and mental decay.It's a short journey, if that helps.A Mother's Inferno, a PC/Mac title at E3's IndieCade from Denmark's National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment, examines the five stages of loss as represented by train compartments filled with all manner of angry, illusive and violent demons.It's first-person, told from the perspective of a mother whose son is suddenly and violently possessed, thrown around their train compartment, and stolen into the leftover nightmarish world. As a red-stained landscape looms outside the train's windows, the mother attempts to reclaim her son, battling evil spirits with just a shard of glass and, we assume, her love.
The Road to Mordor: Breaking down Riders of Rohan's pre-purchase
This past week or so has been absolutely nuts with all the new information flooding in about this fall's Riders of Rohan. We've gotten confirmation about the release date, the expansion website, pricing information for the different expansion pack editions, a partial feature list, an official FAQ, word of a forthcoming instance cluster, and a first look at the mounted combat system. Expansions always rile up the Lord of the Rings Online faithful, and I'm pretty jazzed to see whether Turbine can pull off what's probably the most epic addition to the game since Mines of Moria. I'm going to save analysis of the expansion as a whole until next week because today I want to dive into the slightly confusing morass of pre-purchase options and pricing to see what's worth pursuing -- and what might be worth ignoring.
Check out Razer's Mechwarrior Online 'Artemis' prototype and other peripherals
Razer's E3 booth was fully stocked with both retail and prototype peripherals this year, the most interesting of which was the Artemis, an experimental controller array designed specifically for MechWarrior Online. The prototype, designed and built in a month, features a flight stick on the right, an array of buttons on the left and a 10 inch screen in the middle. Razer hopes to have a retail version of the peripheral ready sometime this year.The rest of the booth was populated by the company's ambidextrous, 8200 dpi Taipan mouse ($79.99, July), a Battlefield 3-branded, helicopter-style Blackshark headset ($129.99, July) and the Blade laptop, all of which can be seen in the gallery below.%Gallery-157589%
E3 2012: Hands-on with World of Warplanes
It was difficult to miss one of the most impressive booths on the show floor at E3. Wargaming.net established its dominance on the floor by setting up computers and allowing all E3-goers to play its latest games against the Wargaming development team. Its flagship title at E3 was World of Tanks, but I sneaked away to the team's press room to watch a demo of something similar. World of Warplanes is one title out of three that Wargaming.net is proud to show. For the unfamiliar readers, Wargaming.net launched World of Tanks last year, and its booth at E3 2011 wasn't quite as large as this year's.
E3 2012: the year of the lackluster blockbuster
The Electronics Entertainment Expo is no place for the easily distracted, every inch of convention center carpet devoted to capturing the attentions of calloused video game journalists. In spite of the customary flash however, it's hard to come away from this year's festivals without a creeping sense of disappointment, that for all the showmanship, we didn't actually see all that much at E3 2012 -- an in-between year that seemed lackluster even by those standards. It's diminishing to break such a show up into clearly delineated binaries like "winners" and "losers" certainly, but if impact can be measured by lasting buzz, Epic's certainly sitting pretty at the close of the event. It's telling, really, that Unreal Engine 4 generated some of the most excitement around the show. In a year when Sony and Microsoft are no doubt focused on churning out next generation consoles, one of the show's highlights came in the form of a gaming engine -- a backend on which the next generation titles will be built.
Dante's rebellion fights on in a new, familiar world with DmC
This new iteration in the Devil May Cry franchise is truly "new" in a variety of ways: Capcom handed over complete stylistic control to Ninja Theory, the UK development studio responsible for Enslaved, who proceeded to chop off Dante's hair, dye it brown and drop him in the middle of a contemporary setting named Limbo City.Ninja Theory's task is to make the new Devil May Cry accessible to new players and those who "may have abandoned" the franchise, chief designer Tameem Antoniades said at an E3 demo of DmC. If "fast-paced, demonic action with giant swords and guns" is "accessible," then Ninja Theory has nailed its market.%Gallery-156929%
E3 2012's secret trend: crowd-control strategy
A few trends have been identified at E3 this year, based on the trailers shown and games announced: shocking violence, scripted shooting, helicopters and bows. I noticed another one that has randomly bubbled up among Japanese companies: crowd-control strategy games.Of course, the most noticeable exemplar of this sudden trend is Pikmin 3, but it's not the only game to show up this E3 that is about guiding a swarm of little critters around to fight big enemies and destroy obstacles. XSEED showed off Acquire's rhythm-based Orgarhythm, in which a strutting god is surrounded by element-based troops, and Konami brought the Vita sequel to Little King's Story.Platinum Games sort of got into the act as well with its Wii U launch window game Project P-100, which is still about recruiting and controlling a bunch of random citizens; however, you have less individual control of them than in the other games, and instead you use their pure mass to form a weapon. It still totally counts for the purpose of an informal article, though.
