E3 2014 Notes and Commentary

June 19th, 2014

This video was too funny to pass up.

For the first time in a long time I was completely satisfied by the E3 showing this year. Loads of great games and plenty of innovation. After hours of reading, watching, and reflection, here are my main take aways from the show:

Presenting Gameplay

Video playthroughs focused on select portions of a game accompanied by developer commentary and gameplay trailers with few cuts are the best way to show off your gameplay to a new audience. Montages, CG trailers, early prototype video, and conceptual demos of the developers talking high concept just doesn’t cut it. Let the gameplay do the talking.

Between Nintendo’s Digital Event and the Treehouse Sessions, they covered these bases pretty well. However, the Treehouse videos were often drawn out due to the Japanese to English translation. Yes, I’m interested in Codename STEAM. No, I don’t have 45 minutes to sit through a slowly narrated playthrough with translation delays. Sony’s developer interviews were much more digestible at 10 minutes a piece, but they were too unfocused. Take this video of Hohokum for the PS4. After watching a 9-minute interview, I still have no idea what you do in this game. Start the interview with a short, elevator-pitch summary guys….geeze. The interviews are also inter-spliced with short snippets of trailer footage. It’s a good idea, but there’s not enough gameplay or context in the interviews to be constructive. Sony’s punchy length and Nintendo’s dictated playthroughs together would make a winning formula. Next year, guys.

The Conferences

If you stripped out all the CG trailers and meandering demos from the E3 conferences and replaced them with focused gameplay explanations, they’d be much more effective. I’m an E3 nut, but 1hr and a half of sizzle grows tiresome real quick.

It boggle the mind that Sony and Microsoft continue this pissing match of minor exclusivity. “Console debut”, “DLC first”, “it’s better on…”, “exclusive alpha version”, every time you hear these words—or in the case of self-apparent multiplatform titles, not hear—you know that it’s still a free kick to the other team.

Microsoft’s conference was basically a rehash of what they’ve been doing for the past 7 years: shooting, stabbing, and driving. I have no problem with these kinds of games, but there wasn’t anything genuinely new—unlike Titanfall

The start of Nintendo’s Digital Event was so refreshing especially after two marathon hours of self-important sizzle. It was funny too; I almost fell out of my seat. I also love the idea of Nintendo pushing back against the vocal minority of idiots in the Nintendo fan base. However, it was unfair of them to use Mother 3—a game which they can easily bring over to the virtual console.

Sony gave even more time than last year to indie games and it certainly injected a shot of dynamism into their showing. I’m not sure that Microsoft’s “we have 100s of these games” tactic is as effective as Sony’s curation approach. Giving these games a platform outside of a video montage and winning over some exclusivity on key titles is the best way to demonstrate commitment. That’s to say I think that players are more interested in playing the next great wave of indie games than having a large quantity of indie games to play. After all, we’ve all got PCs. In saying all this, though, maybe it’s just a consequence of the way Sony presented their indie game line up, but it was hard to see how these games were unique outside of their visual flair.

New Zelda

I was surprised that no one said that the new Zelda looks like Killer is Dead meets Skyward Sword. It totally does, right?

Nintendo say that the latest Zelda will be “open world”, but I wonder what that means exactly. Open world design works against the squeeze of gameplay, so I wonder how they’re going to pull it off while still maintaining the high level of gameplay quality that the Zelda series is known for. I guess A Link Between Worlds, which I have sitting on my 3DS SD card unplayed, will answer some of those questions for me. Whatever the case, I think it’ll take all the design ingenuity that Nintendo can muster to deliver on what Aonuma articulated during the digital event.

Splatoon

Splatoon was my game of the show. The genius behind this game makes my head spin. Territory control represented visually and organically as ink. Ink as a central dynamic that syncs into movement speed, traversal options, abilities, game flow and progression, and spatial dynamics. Ink as a solution to the issues inherent to gunplay (easy-to-see bullets that you can respond to, a weight dynamic to aiming, gyro to tune aiming, non-violent gunplay). Motion controls, touch screen controls, and traditional controller inputs. A reinvention of a well-worn genre. In terms of design, this is the most modern and sophisticated game I’ve seen in a long time.

I’m also surprised that no one said that Splatoon looks like a Sonic team game.

Odds and Ends

Prior to the show I was hoping that Nintendo would announce a new IP. In the end they announced six and they all look fantastic.
Project Spark was one of the only kid-friendly games shown at Microsoft’s conference and so what did they do? They added Conker to it. Well done.
There seems to be a lot of different coloured gems in Yarn Yoshi. I hope they’re not just excessive collectables. I’m still not convinced of this game.
It’s cool that Criterion are working on something awesome and completely new, but showing it off so early is poor form for EA.
Shape Up treats work out moves as interactions and then builds a game around them. It’s a neat idea.
Having recently read Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper epic From Hell, I’m curious about The Order. However, not much has been said about what makes the gameplay unique and what we saw at E3 doesn’t aspire much confidence that it’ll be anything more than Uncharted 2 inter-spliced with Heavy Rain.
The Grim Fandango remake announcement was the biggest megaton of the show (although the game hardly needs a remake, but I’m open to being proven wrong).
The additions to LittleBigPlanet 3 look smart and substantial. It’s funny that the same team who worked on Forza Horizon 2 are working on this game.
I can’t believe that Konami put out another MGS5 trailer. I wish they would explain more about the gameplay. I guess they kind of did that with Ground Zeros… :/

Yep. Very satisfied indeed. What did you most enjoy about the show? Let me know in the comments.

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Tags: e3

E3 2013 Game Design Notes and Commentary

June 28th, 2013

I got back from my trip around China last Saturday and it feels like it’s taken ages to catch up on E3 news and videos. Here’s what caught my attention at this year’s show:

New IPs

For a long time I’ve been hung up on the idea that new IPs represent progress in the games industry. This year, though, a few things changed my mind. The first was the E3 Nintendo Direct presentation. Although Nintendo didn’t announce a single new IP, and the coveted Retro Studios game turned out to be another Donkey Kong title, I loved everything they showed. Of the big three companies, Nintendo has the most exclusive and original titles, and they’ll probably have more to show at the next Nintendo Direct in a month’s time. The second thing is something that Shigeru Miyamoto said in an interview with GameIndustry.biz, a conclusion that I was forming myself after watching the three main conferences:

“So this is actually a discussion that I think is tricky to balance, and certainly internally at Nintendo we have people on the teams who say, “Wouldn’t this be better if we created a new IP around it?” But to me, the question of new IP really isn’t whether or not [you have a new character]… I look at it from [the perspective of] what is the gameplay experience in the game you’re playing? For a lot of people, they would say if you take an old game and wrap a new character around it, that’s a new IP, but that game is still old, and the experience is still old. So what we’re doing is we’re always looking at what type of new gameplay experience can we create, and that’s the same for whether we’re playing with one of our existing IPs or we’re doing something new.

Pikmin 3 is a good example; the Pikmin characters were something that were born out of a new gameplay idea when we first came up with that game. We created the gameplay idea first and we decided that the best characters suited for that gameplay idea were Pikmin characters. That’s where the Pikmin IP came from. Similarly, if you look at our booth here, we’re showing it as a showcase of all of Nintendo’s great characters, but in each and every one of those games the gameplay experience is what’s new. So from my perspective, it’s not a question of just how can we create a new character and wrap it around an old game and put that out and call it a new IP. It’s always about starting with a new gameplay idea and a new experience that’s unique from an interactive standpoint and then finding a character that’s best suited with that. In some cases, it may be an existing character, and in some cases it may lead us to a new IP at some point in the future.”

Miyamoto hits the nail on the head. New IPs are often perceived as original and innovative because the difference from established IP is immediately clear: there’s new characters and a new world. The gameplay, however, may be quite familiar. So the only way to really determine innovation is to look at the gameplay of each individual title.

The third thing is the lack of originality elsewhere in the conference. Sony said that they had a whole slew of new IPs coming in the next year or so, but only showed Drive Club and a CG trailer for The Order. TitanFall looks great, but everything else Microsoft showed was more of the same driving and shooting.

The Role of Nintendo Direct

I’m a big fan of the Nintendo Direct presentations, and also the Developer Direct presentations, because they slow down and take the time to explain to the viewer how the games work. As someone that enjoys thinking about game design, I really appreciate this format. Nintendo have copped a bit of slack for not doing a live presentation, but I think they’re better for it. My friend, Richard Terrell, said something that esonated with me recently which is that at E3, the games press is looking for sizzle, but Nintendo are taking the slow and truthful route by focusing on gameplay. I think this summarises the situation perfectly.

Third Party Support at Conferences

As has become increasingly apparent over the past few years, third party exclusives are now something of a rarity. Between the big three, there were something like eight exclusive third party games between them (Dead Rising 3, Ryse, Bayonetta 2, Wonderful 101, Crimson Dragon, Below, D4, and Sunset Overdrive). What’s interesting about all these exclusives is that they’re published by the console manufacturer themselves.

Something I’ve never understood is the air time that Sony and Microsoft give to multiplatform third party games. Sure, if they lock in an hour of exclusive content or get timed exclusivity on DLC, it’s kind of worthwhile, even though such bonuses are often quite trivial to begin with (Batman skins, yes!). However, if the game is identical to games on other consoles, I don’t think that it deserves much more of a mention outside of a name drop or presence in a video montage. Take for example, the trailers for Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III at the Sony press conference or the Metal Gear Solid 5 trailer at the Microsoft conference. These games are coming to all platforms not because of good publisher relations, although it probably plays a part, but because of the direction of the market. So including them in the pressers, even as a gesture, is ineffective.

Sony Exclusives

According to Shuhei Yoshida, Sony have thirty titles in development at their worldwide studios, twenty of which will be released in the first year and twelve of which are new IPs. So far we’ve seen six of the twenty first party games to be released in the first year (Knack, Killzone Shadow Fall, Drive Club, Infamous: Second Son, The Order, and the Super Stardust HD successor) and three of the twelve new IPs (Drive Club, Knack, and The Order). I guess we have a lot to look forward to over the next year or so.

Gameplay, Please

FMVs, cutscenes, non-interactive sequences, and gameplay with a high degree of automation were more frequent than ever at this year’s show and it’s quite worrying. I mean, does anyone have any idea how to play Quantum Break?

Sony’s Presser

Sony got a lot of positive press for doing nothing, ie. not enforcing DRM policies. The way that Sony were championed by gamers and the games press because of this just goes to show how beholden we are to these companies.
Making online multiplayer only available to Playstation Plus members suggests that Sony, like Microsoft, are interested in moving to a service-based model.
In the Microsoft conference, Phil Harrison talked up MS’s commitment to indies and then showed a trailer to Minecraft for Xbox One before shuffling along. In the Sony conference, they got eight independent developers on stage to show off their games. Both in numbers and the nature of the titles, this says a lot.

TitanFall

One of the more interesting games of the show, despite being a first-person shooter.
Jump boost/double jump, climbing up ledges, wall running, pushing off walls, and ejecting from mech mechanics, as well as the height difference between mechs and soldiers, add a vertical element to the game, increasing the spatial dynamic. It also appears as though the levels are designed in tiers and with a variety of ways to creatively use the movement mechanics. The mechs appear quite agile too. Just watching the characters move around looks like magic. I love it.
The mechs can grab bullets and throw them back at their enemies. This is a nice way to add interplay to gunplay.
The eject seat in the mechs, if manually controlled by the player, could act as a last ditch way to turn the tides of a fight by literally getting the jump on an opponent’s mech. Using the mechanic would therefore be a choice between the advantages of the mech and the opportunity to insta-kill an opponent’s mech. The speed of the evac’s vertical ascent should be optimised so that it’s both difficult for the opponents to target the soldier and for the soldier to orientate themselves towards the rival mech. This would make the evac mechanic high risk, high reward.

Killer Instinct

I found this comment by Eion on Eurogamer to be quite amusing:

“Meanwhile, Tekken Revolution launches tomorrow. It is free to play, with 8 characters free initially. It’s based on a solid, modern fighting game engine from a veteran fighting game developer – not an attempt to recreate an engine that was old in 1996, from a developer who has never touched a fighting game before.

Shocking how badly KI holds up to that kind of comparison.”

Metal Gear Solid 5

MGS5 looks to continue the children of war theme from Metal Gear 2.
They didn’t show enough straight gameplay for me to make further comment. I will take this chance to once again bemoan open-word gameplay, though. Whenever a game developer says that their game is open-world, what they’re really saying is that they’ve given up on making the kinds of concentrated challenges that are needed to facilitate the player’s learning and mastery of the game system. Open-ended challenges should follow restricted practice, such is the nature of how we learn. I hope MGS5 begins with restricted practice and then leads into freer practice. Maybe Ground Zeros is that restricted practice.
I wonder how they’ve changed the CQC system.

Super Mario 3D World

The camera adjusts to simplify the perspective, as with the Mario Galaxy games. The “main” semi-overhead camera gives the player a good view of the area around them. It’s rather zoomed out so that they can also see what’s behind them. It’s ideal for multiplayer. The camera work in the recent Mario games is a huge improvement over Super Mario 64.
There seems to be a scurry mechanic where the characters kick up puffs of direct. The dirt puff kicking (?!) when walking is also more exaggerated to help the player judge depth.
I’m curious about how the gameplay is structured to support multiple roles.

Ryse

This game is built on a foundation of contextual combat, QTEs, and voice commands, so the action is probably going to be quite static.

Dead Rising 3

Aiming looks automatic and unreliable.
You can pick up all these weapons, but how interesting are they to use? Each weapon should have its own unique quirks that can be mastered. Also, the distribution of weapons, assuming you can’t upgrade them or learn new moves with them, is really important to help the player develop and keep them engaged until the end of the game. That is to say, weapon distribution equals game progression.

Watch Dogs

Tablet and console play is cool. Tablet play could also be done with a Wii U gamepad.
The camera jumping and third-party environment manipulation is awesome. This could be done with the Wii U gamepad as well, where on the TV, the avatar is shown looking at his phone while on the gamepad, the player is controlling the cameras and environment.
It would be good if hacking required more than a button press. De-optimising the hack mechanic or replacing it with a short mini-game would add tension, character, and skill to the process. For example, completing a series of button prompts, pressing buttons to a timer, or engaging in a simple puzzle. Why not have different devices or classes of devices (traffic control, lights, cameras, etc) have their own way of being hack? You could make some things harder to hack than others so that as you get through the game, and have to hack at a higher level, it’s more difficult to hack or you have more layers to hack through.
Imagine if Ubisoft removed all the shooting and fighting and instead focused on designing everything around the hacking function. They could swap out the violence for pursuits or monitoring missions where you need to stay in range of an NPC long enough to track their data.

Final Fantasy XV

I love the dazzling look of this game, but the gameplay trailer makes me think that the camera is too zoomed in and there’s too much auto-lock on, two things which squash the use of space.

Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2

Form fits function would have done away with the obvious highlights when climbing.
Combat looks like God of War, they even copied the golden fleece mechanic from God of War II.

Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare

The existence of this game makes no sense to me.
They just re-skinned regular team shooter classes as Plants Vs Zombies characters. The cactus is a sniper, the sunflower is a medic, the chomper is a melee unit, and the pea shooter can plant turrets.

Mario Kart 8

The first thing that struck me is that the graphics look awesome, especially compared to Mario Kart Wii, relatively speaking.
Instead of taking an additive approach to Mario Kart, I’d rather they try to rework this game from the start. I love Mario Kart, but have no interest in this game.

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Tags: e3

E3 2012 Game Design Insights and Commentary

June 13th, 2012

Walking down a hallway, solving an obvious puzzle and mashing a button for a quick time event: sounds like one of the most anticipated games of 2012 to me! Or at least, this was the response by many “critics” in print, the enthusiast press and on blogs to the Tomb Raider reboot showed off at last year’s Microsoft E3 event. The game’s second live demo at this year’s show, a bunch of disconnected; barely-interactive gameplay sequences, only provided further proof of the lack of concrete game design. Yet while the game’s gratuitous brutality has been rightfully questioned, the equally dubious gameplay has avoided heavy scrutiny. The uncritical eye of the majority of game “critics” continues to be distracted by flashy graphics and throat stabbing. (For many of the reasons why, read here. I’ll be exploring some more reasons later). This year’s E3 brought its fair share of Tomb Raiders including Resident Evil 6, Last of Us, boating in Assassins Creed, Star Wars 1313 and Sleeping Dogs—most of which will be hyped beyond reasonable doubt; some of which will probably win something at the game critics awards. Update: Turns out I was right on the money.

While there is growing disapproval around Tomb Raider and other games of its ilk, such voices haven’t reached a critical mass to drown out the marketing buzz. This E3, I compiled notes on the conferences and key games of the show, with a focus on insightful commentary and game design. Although my ideas are limited to trailers and game demos put online, I hope it gives you an idea of the type of commentary we’d be getting if critics valued gameplay as much as they say they do.

Please let me know what you think and what you made of the show in general with the new Disqus comment system. You can sign in with your social media handlers too.

Microsoft’s Conference

They mush have said “the power of Kinect” at least 10 times.
Speaking of which, it seems that Microsoft have finally realised how difficult it is to design games for Kinect as most games/services they showed focused on voice commands. In which case, why not just use a headset? It’s great that Microsoft are exploring voice control game design, but it’s such a minor area to throwing so much money behind.

Smartglass

An ill-considered idea which seems like more of a means to promote Microsoft’s new tablet and OS.
Without standardised controls, no one will develop games for it and there’s little benefit in spreading information over several devices when they don’t seem to interact much with one another.
Why not just use a PC to find extra information on music and movies? It’s faster, easier and you can find more specific information.
The tech, however, is undeniably cool and I love the idea of unifying devices around the TV. There’s certainly a lot of potential here. I hope Microsoft can realise it.

Halo 4

Considering the gung-ho nature of Microsoft’s press conference, the demo was a bit tepid and lacking cliffhanger.
Some people noted that Halo 4 seems similar Metroid Prime. This is because some of the new enemies look like space pirates, while the others appear to be natural fauna. There was some visor switching going on too.

Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6

Both of these games look ridiculously bad. I think that game designer Matt Glanville put it best on Twitter:

“I’d get excited more if all the effort/money that went into spectacular-but-shallow set pieces was diverted to deepen the core mechanics. Look how much Mario does with a simple JUMP mechanic. That’s what I want to see from shooters: versatile core mechanics. Instead you get sequences that don’t gel with the core mechanics, so they get simplified into something that is incoherent with the game. We all know why they exist though: eye candy for trailers, to shift units.”

Dead Space 3

Was partly leaked to death several months prior. I think it got lost in the shuffle, especially considering how similar it looks like Gears of War/Lost Planet.
I guess Visceral didn’t have much choice, but to make the series more action-orientated. You can’t iterate much on well orchestrated jack-in-a-box scares.
The large worm-like creature looks like the final boss from DS1…great.

Farcry 3

What a wicked trailer, but let’s be honest, it doesn’t look like sanity is incorporated into gameplay aside from tripping out the visuals.
The 4 player co-op at the Sony presser looked pretty last gen.

Metal Gear Rising

The story looks like Platinum added a layer of Vanquish-esque McCheesemo to Kojima’s already bad writing. MAKE IT RIGHT.
The sword slicing segments are slowed down; allowing the player to cut cleanly, have transparent blue honeycomb highlights; for visual reinforcement, appear isolated or to run on a cool down timer; preventing the player from abusing the mechanic, and the blade leaves a shadow on the target; making it easier to judge depth. Clean game design. By comparison, in the pre-Platinum Games version it looked like Raiden could cut whenever the player wanted, following the original “cut at will” slogan. Putting the dexterity-heavy slicing with the analogue stick front and centre probably created a lot of design issues which saw the original version eventually get scrapped.
I do hope that the other slogan, “cut anything”, still applies and, based on the trailer, it appears to be the case. How much so, I guess we’ll find out later.

Sony Conference

Sony started off talking about mortality and ended with a man begging for his life before getting shotgunned in the face.

Last of Us

Hand-to-hand combat looks contextual and heavily automated. Lots of long animations taking the player out of gameplay.
The enemy AI looks heavily scripted too.
The menu reveals light inventory elements.
Few survival mechanics were shown off, which makes me think that, despite its flaws, I am Alive, may be a more progressive post-apocalyptic survival game.
The developers were supposedly inspired by The Walking Dead, which I’m currently reading, yet Walking Dead is hardly this senseless.

Beyond

What a statement by Sony to put this as their first act.
I was really excited for this game and then they just showed a cutscene, WTF?

Call of Duty Vita

“For the first time ever you’ll have a AAA first person shooter in the palm of your hands with a beautiful 5 inch screen, dual analogue sticks and seamless online connectivity” Resistance: Burning Skies only came out last week guys…

God of War: Ascension

The Wikipedia page describes several of the changes made to the combat system, all of which sound great, albeit, hardly the overhaul the series sorely needs.
I’m curious how they player will know that they’re still in control and what inputs they can make when the visual prompts are taken out of the QTEs.
I don’t like that for the existing QTEs the face button icons are all orange. Colour makes it easier for the player to read the prompts. This is why QTEs on the Wii are so horrible. Putting the prompts to the side of the screen, corresponding to their placement on the pad, makes them even harder to identify.
I like how the grapple pull mechanic has been remapped to the triggers, which is more intuitive. The animation doesn’t look as slick as in God of War III though.
Sub-weapons that Kratos can take from enemies: Sensible idea as the combat system needs constant variety to keep it interesting. Mapping it with the other face buttons, to circle, gives it precedence in the player’s consideration set.
It would be cool if Kratos could disarm enemies. For example, when not holding a sub-weapon, Kratos could stun an enemy with a hard attack and then press circle to disarm them.
It would also be good if the sub-weapon degraded over time, this way, the player would be forced to use a variety of weapons.
Kratos didn’t have the block-and-re-fire-energy mechanic in the demo. I hope they keep it in as Kratos has few defensive moves, let alone moves that require the player pay attention to the enemies’ attack patterns.
Looks like spells and/or the rage moves return.

Nintendo Conference

Most of the WiiU games they showed were already mentioned, prototyped, featured in montages or name dropped by developers last year. The lack of surprises is baffling.
After wheeling John Richettello out last year to spout praises for the system, EA only showed Mass Effect 3 this year.
Pikmin 3 appears to benefit as much from the Wiimote as it does the gamepad. Similarly, New Super Mario Bros. U seems to innovate as much with new game ideas (coloured Yoshis, squirrel suit) than gamepad and online functionality. Nintendo Land looks just magic and makes the most use of the new console and its controller. Unfortunately, fair or not, “hardcore” gamers don’t find a selection of smaller games as convincing as a “full” game. A fully-featured single player game by Nintendo’s first party studios which uses both the social and gamepad innovations of the WiiU would have gone a long way to appease these people and make a stronger case for the system.
The criticisms made against the WiiU’s 3rd party support are all about parity with the other consoles, which will naturally take some time to happen. Still, it’s disappointing that more 3rd party “ports” aren’t making their way to the console at launch. Why isn’t Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 going to be on the new console at launch? If Activision can downgrade the Xbox 360 version to the Wii, then they can surely port it to the WiiU. With this said, Nintendo had the most 3rd party exclusives at the show and almost all of them look new and innovative. Further, the extra features and gamepad elements of the ports are in many ways equivalent to exclusive DLC. By virtue of developing for the gamepad, developers offer extra exclusive content to the platform. In terms of fresh ideas, I think that the 3rd party titles haven’t been so comparable to Nintendo since the DS.
The small talk with the Ubisoft and Warner Bros. CEOs was just…awkward. At least they were warmly greeted onto the stage though and with titles too, unlike the Capcom guys at the Microsoft press conference.
If Miiverse’s note system is closed or can’t connect to existing social networks, it will fail.
Why did Nintendo need to bring in the 3DS guy just to show off 3 games that we already saw last year? They could have shown Project P-100 in that time.
Nintendo Land should have swapped places with Pikmin 3. Nintendo should have focused less on the amusement park aspect of the game which just looks abhorrent. A fire work display? I wanted to vomit.
Why not show Game and Wario at the conference?
I hated the campy pre-show video with Non-specific Action Figure, but absolutely loved it on second viewing. E3 needs more camp.
They need to put a Non-specific Action Figure trophy in the next Smash Bros.
Demos at the 3DS Software Showcase were perhaps better suited to their E3 hub as they went on a bit long, but it was nice to have the games discussed in detail. Why not announce Fire Emblem as well? It freaking stormed the Japanese monthly charts on release, outselling the other 19 titles after only a week on the shelves.

ZombiU

Dark Souls-esque passive online, where if one of your friends dies in their game, their zombie appears in yours (with their name overhead).
Unlike Resident Evil 6 and Last of Us, ZombiU actually seems to be designed around survival and horror. Here’s 3 examples:
You play a variety of characters who inevitably die throughout the game. After one character dies, the player embodies a new character and must relocate their previous self to recover their lost goods. That is, the player takes on a unique role as an overseer and uses the information gained from this outsider perspective to help the different characters progress through the story. I love the idea of this daisy-chained narrative.
Because the player’s looted inventory is their “power”, so to speak, the player, the collective unit of the individual characters, starts off weak and slowly becomes more powerful.
At various points the player will need to ransack lockers and lock-pick doors among other things, which are done on the WiiU gamepad. While the player is looking down at the controller, the TV screen frames the character in a 3rd person perspective which allows the player to see if any zombies are approaching from behind. Simulating real life, looking up from the gamepad allows the player to “peak over their shoulder”. This set up facilitates tension and all manner of scares without the need to handicap the player’s movement and attack mechanics.
No idea why they showed an ugly CG trailer in the press conference.
When zombie Reggie moved his face in the press conference, you could see the edges of the texture map.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

The way stickers are used as battle commands, items for side-missions and ways to interact with the environment looks magic. Not only does it unify these disparate parts of the game, but it removes the text commands from battle.

New Super Mario Bros 2

I’m concerned that the 1 million coins conceit will ultimately devalue the coin as a game element.
Grouping coins together creates a stronger pull for the player to scale the difficulty.
With 2 players, the camera only tracks the player in front, pushing the other player off-screen. This forces the 2 players to stay together and communicate. What was likely a consequence of the 3DS’s low resolution screen has been turned into an advantage. This is like what Miyamoto said: one solution can often solve many problems.

New Super Mario Bros U

Coloured Yoshi’s return. From the trailer one can see that: the yellow Yoshis are light sources, blue Yoshis spit out bubbles which act as platforms and trap enemies; turning them into coins, and the pink Yoshis act as inflatable balloons.
In the Iwata Asks videos, the terrain has red outlines around it. So it seems that the player with the gamepad will be able to manipulate the terrain. This is far more interesting than the spawning platforms they showed off.

Game and Wario

I wish they had videos on Nintendo’s E3 portal explaining each of the games.

Rayman Legends

The player using the gamepad takes the role of a green fly character. Touching anywhere on the screen moves the fly to that position. Because the player on the game pad has a variety of things to interact with at the one time, the fly is constantly twitching around the screen. This would normally make the avatar’s animation appear jerky and distracting, however, it perfectly fits the way flies often buzz in and out of our vision, and works with the animation and voice overs to further exaggerate the zany character.

Nintendo Land

When Nintendo first unveiled the name, the amusement park hub and Katsuya Eguchi started talking about his love for theme parks, I hated it. It just seemed too sickly sweet.
The amusement park is cluttered, ugly (Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts anyone?) and doesn’t even look like an amusement park. It’s a giant floating disc with icons. If they never said it was an amusement park, I probably would’ve never realised.
After watching some videos though, I must say that the individual games are impressive; lots of thoughtful nuggets of good game design.
I’m most excited about the Donkey Kong game, although, it might be tiresome holding the controller up at the TV all the time.
For the Animal Crossing game, I love the idea of handicapping the player with the gamepad by designating the control of the 2 guards to the 2 analogue sticks. This way, they need dexterity and knowledge to win.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Armoured Edition

On the surface, the gamepad implementation is varied and well suited to the existing mechanics, and it seems that they’ve made smart decisions in reworking the game for the WiiU. However, it all hinges on the small details, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
Graphics don’t look so crash hot. Seems like they farmed it out to the B team.

Misc

Wii Fit U – The tobogganing game requires that you lie on the balance board. Controlling a game with your ass, that’s innovation.
Castlevania 3DS – Slick visuals. Made by Mercury Steam, the developers of the console reboot.
Watchdog – Refreshing because it is relevant, something which can only be said for..well, maybe just this game at E3. It’s pretty amazing how few mainstream games are about contemporary issues. The gameplay demo looked far less impressive than the initial trailer suggested.
General – Why don’t Sony and Microsoft have isolated game demonstrations with explanations on their portal sites? It would have helped me write more about their games.

Posted in Game Discussion | Comments (11)
Tags: e3

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