E3 2012 recap

I remember how I used to feel when E3 rolled around. Stocking up on snacks and coffee, I stayed glued to my monitor all night watching various game conferences eagerly soaking up any details regarding my favourite franchises or new IPs. You’d think now that the industry has grown so much over the years, these conferences would only get better, but sadly, they haven’t. If anything, they’ve become flashy, yet empty events catering mainly to the casual, motion controlled gaming crowd. Megatons have been replaces by pop icons gyrating on stage, while sequels being churned out year after year are killing any form of excitement that was left. 

This is why I was most excited for Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs. In an industry that’s being run to the ground by sequels, Ubisoft’s new IP is like a breath of sweet, fresh air. The game’s shrouded in a cloud of mystery, but the trailer seemed to suggest Watch Dogs would be a sci-fi heavy, open world third person action game in which players are free to hack nearly any electronic device from phones to traffic signals. The game also seemed to balance out the Assassin’s Creed variant of stealth (blending in with the crowd) with some balls-to-the-wall action. Plus the whole sci-fi, Matrix-ish angle on the whole thing just seemed cool. The rest of Ubisoft’s conference was relegated to gameplay videos that you can see here.



EA babbled on about casual games for a while, before they switched to the games people actually cared about. Medal of Honor Warfighter, something I wasn’t too confident about actually looks quite nice. It’s the same mission structure we’ve seen in countless military shooters by now, but thanks to DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine, the game looked and sounded real good. We’re also hoping the game’s multiplayer does not disappoint as there are virtually no good competitive shooters on the horizon.

When EA officially announced Dead Space 3, I was genuinely excited because that’s one franchise that has consistently delivered so far. However, what I saw on stage was far scarier than any Xenomorph out there. Visceral Games have taken a very tense survival action game and turned it onto a complete frat boy co-operative shooter. Gone are the days when you feebly explored hulking, desolate ships afraid of what monstrosities lay in the darkness. Now it’s all about boring, clichéd run and gun action against big giant Lost Planet inspired monsters that come with giant glowing weak spots on their body.



Most Wanted is finally getting a reboot by Criterion games, so that’s nice. To be honest I would have rather had a new Burnout game and I’m not talking about some crappy top-down knockoff. I’m talking about the blistering speeds and chaotic destruction of games, like Takedown and Revenge and not the confusing navigation of Paradise.



The biggest surprise from EAs’s conference ironically came not from a game, but from a tie-up between EA and UFC. For those who don’t know, the UFC license was officially tied to THQ for a certain amount of games, but it looked like they jumped ship as soon as their contract got over. While no games were announced, you can bet your bottom dollar/rupee that EA will begin churning out yearly iterations of UFC games, real soon.