E3 2014

It's that time of year again when all the gaming goodies that the industry have been working on behind closed doors get their first public airing. Yes it's E3 time and the internet is fit to burst with all the shiny new things being unveiled. I've not had a chance to watch any of the keynotes yet but I've had a good look at a few of the trailers and gameplay videos coming out of the Expo. Ubisoft seem to have stolen the show with what looks to be a triumvirate of blinders: Tom Clancy's The Divide; Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege; and Tom Clancy's Assassins Creed: Unity. No wait, that last one isn't a Tom Clancy one. Yes, the man who still wishes the cold war was in full swing so he could write another thousand page action blockbuster about it is also having a very good show despite not even being there, (probably, like I said, I haven't seen the keynotes yet. Although, seeing as he died last year probably not).



Another big theme I'm noticing in a lot of the games being announced is co-op play. All of the three games I've mentioned so far have gameplay footage released of co-op action. Strictly speaking Rainbow Six is PvP, but it's intrinsically team based and seems to require a lot of co-operation between team mates so I'm including it. Then there's Far Cry 4 which has a much more limited form of co-op in that it seems you can call on a friend to help liberate an enemy fortress, but not help with any missions. There's also Evolve, the 4-guys-versus-1-huge-beastie game, which seems to be ALL about the co-op. Fable Legends is a multi-player/co-op spin off of the classic series from Lionhead studios and Crackdown is back with all of the crazy co-operative shenanigans that that entails. I like the idea of the level of co-op on offer in Assassins Creed and The Division, I just hope they don't neglect the single player element of these games as a sad-sack no-mates like me would be very disappointed!



A couple of other titles that caught my eye were Battlefield: Hardline and No Man's Sky. The former is another iteration of the Battlefield game which, despite feeling a little burned by Battlefield 4 last year, I am very tempted by simply for it's rather splendid take on cops and robbers! It's a great idea, replacing the two warring military factions with two warring law enforcement and criminal factions. Hopefully they'll have learned from the buggy mess that was BF4 and we'll get a much smoother launch with a game that actually works. No Man's Sky is a shot right out of left field. A weird kind of exploration/survival game set in an infinite, procedurally generated universe. How this is going to work in practice is anyone's guess but it looks stunning and I find the concept fascinating. Fascinating enough to possibly tempt me into getting a PS4 to play it on. Oh no, wait, it's coming out on PC too. That'll save me a few quid then.



The game that really stole the show for me though was Tom Clancy's The Division. It looks fantastic, the setting is brilliant, (love me a bit of post societal collapse survivalist stuff), it has loads of cool gadgets, (look how the map works! That's brilliant!), but there's also something else. It plays like a third person shooter, much like Watch Dogs in fact, but listen to the chatter of the players in these (obviously scripted) clips; "adds", "elites", "group heal", "group buff"... it's a bloody MMO!

Who Watches the Watch Dogs?

Not much blogging going on here last week, but it wasn't for a lack of games being played. Quite the opposite in fact. My usual time for writing a blog post is when I get home from work after a night shift, usually accompanied by a little mining operation in EVE Online. The hands-off nature of mining means that, although I'm still at the computer to keep an eye on things and switch to a new asteroid when the old one is depleted, I'm free to do other things on my second monitor without too much impediment, namely drafting blog posts. The thing is though, despite the release of the Kronos update for EVE during the week, I've spent very little time in there thanks to the fact I'm having an absolute BLAST in Watch_Dogs.

My fear that the missions in Watch_Dogs might dilute the pleasure of tearing up Chicago was unfounded. The missions I've run so far have been just as fun as messing about in the open world playground has been. They are nicely varied, offer a decent level of challenge, and can often be tackled in a number of ways. Need to infiltrate an enemy stronghold to steal an access code? No problem! Go in all guns blazing, or maybe ram a truck through the front gate. How about sneaking in over the fence and silently taking out the enemies one at a time with a silenced pistol, or possibly even just using the enemy's own security system against them by hacking your way into their CCTV cameras and jumping from camera to camera until you find your target and then hacking his phone for the security code without ever setting foot inside the compound? While the missions can sometimes be a little frustrating in that if you die right at the end you need to start all over again, it's usually in a way which you feel is fair, you tend to feel you failed because you failed, not because the game is unfair or badly designed which is always a good thing.

There's also plenty to do in the city. I've been mainly focusing on the main storyline missions and 23 hours in I'm coming up to being about two thirds of the way through. Obviously that's not what has taken up all 23 hours because sometimes it's just too tempting to tear around the city in a fast car for a bit. There are also dynamic events happening all the time that draw your attention away from the main story. As you drive around you will often get an alert warning you of a potential crime in progress and a prompt to set a waypoint. When you get to the area you need to use the ctOS's facial recognition technology to find the potential victim or criminal and then watch until something happens, when it does you need to intervene before the victim comes to any harm. A non lethal intervention, while more difficult, will result in a bigger reward. These are very simple little distractions that only take a few minutes to complete and can be easily ignored if you want, but I find them very satisfying little mini-games between the bigger set pieces of the main arc. There are also countless side missions, jobs, games and challenges to partake in as you roam the city, more than enough to keep you going well after the main story is finished with. And that's before I even mention the multi-player!