The last day of E3 is already here. It’s been quite a ride as we’ve played a large selection of the biggest games coming out within the next year. Today we have booth tours with Bethesda, Sony, and 2K Games. We’ll also be trying to check out Activision’s booth a perhaps get hands-on impressions of Black Ops II. Come back to us this evening for another image gallery and more impressions on the games that we’ve played.
SOE was nice enough to get us into a presentation about PlanetSide 2 as well as give us some quality time with the game running on a nice PC gaming rig. It’s been nearly a decade since the world’s first MMOFPS PlanetSide was released in 2003 and what its sequel intends to do is update the concept of the three warring factions with modern FPS sensibilities and graphics.
In our admittedly fairly brief hands-on time with PlanetSide 2, I have to say that it played both played and looked better than I was expecting it to. The game’s graphics have naturally seen a huge boost since 2003 and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the other standard FPS games to have come out in the last couple of years. There were some animation hiccups and foliage pop-in in the alpha footage we were shown before actually playing the game and I’m happy to say that none of the issues I observed in the trailer reel are currently present in the working build of the game. Each time you respawn you are given the option of playing as one of six different classes of the standard FPS archetypes like snipers, medics, and heavy soldiers. These classes all feel quite different from one another and seem to be balanced pretty well. Vehicle operation required more finesse than we were prepared for and our stints in aircraft and tanks were almost always short-lived. There were people zooming around, though, that seemed to have reasonable control of their vehicles, so I guess we’re just particularly bad drivers.
As a free-to-play MMOFPS, there’s really not a lot bad to say about PlanetSide 2. It looks and plays as well as any full-priced FPS title on the market as is set to offer CoD Elite-levels of online stat/clan tracking and sharing (including iOS apps and an API for sharing stats in other ways). SOE is planning to make money from this game through the sales of item “side-grades” and a plethora of visual customization options (including much touted zebra-/leopard-print camos, and tank spoilers).
We received more beta invite cards than we are planning to use from the SOE booth, so we’ll host a give-away contest in the coming week to give you a chance to join us in the beta for this very playable and promising MMOFPS.
We were able to have a decently long playtime with Epic Mickey 2 on the PS3 at E3 yesterday, and what we saw was fairly promising. Using the Move controller, I ventured to tackle a boss battle in which I had to paint or thinner-ize various parts of a large robotic dragon while trying to avoid its fire-breathing and circular-saw covered tail. As is to be expected, the jump from Wii controls to Move controls was indeed a smooth one as the game handled in much the same way as its predecessor. It was certainly not the easiest boss battle I’ve ever tackled and I’ll even admit to having died once or twice.
As with any game running on the PS3, Epic Mickey 2 wasn’t without some aliasing, but I’m sure most people will take “some” aliasing on their HDTV instead of the giant aliased mess that is the Wii on modern TVs any day. Aliasing aside, Epic Mickey 2 has graphically benefited from the jump to the HD consoles with higher resolution textures, Havok physics, and cleaner character models. The gameplay, from what I saw, still involves 3D “hub” worlds connected by 2D platforming levels based on animated shorts and the like from Disney’s rich history. The improved graphics help these platforming sections look even more like the segments on which they are based, but they may not be able to entirely help out the otherwise fairly average puzzle platforming mechanics. I was not able to experience the co-op play offered in the game, which may be its saving grace, so you might want to hold out on passing judgement on the game completely until some co-op impressions come out too.
While the time that I had with Epic Mickey 2 was indeed fun, I have still yet to see anything that would bump this game up into the upper echelons of the various games coming out this fall. Epic Mickey 2, unless some interesting aspects of the game are still kept secret, seems right now to be set to repeat the moderate success of its predecessor and become another slightly above average puzzle platformer appealing mostly to tweens and die-hard Disney fans.
YouTube uploading from our hotel is slow to the point that it would take longer than we have to sleep at night to upload even a small, 3 minute gameplay video. We will have a ton of great gameplay videos up for many of the games that we played at E3 this week, but it will have to wait until we get home safe and sound to our 50 Mbit/s connection.
This is a mixed blessing, though, as now it frees me up to start posting impressions articles about the games we’ve played/viewed over the last two days. To ease in posting and allow me to post more of them, I’m not going to bother with giving them nice header images until next week as well.
Sorry for the disappointing lack of non-picture coverage of E3 this week, I assure you everything in our power is being done to try and remedy this situation as early as possible.
Thanks for bearing with us,
-Miyamoto
We had a busy day once again this time going through the Nintendo booth, briefly visiting the Microsoft booth, and checking out a lot of games from Telltale, Konami, Capcom, and WB Games. We have the 44 best pictures that we took from today in a gallery for you below including hi-resolution pictures we managed to take of the Xbox 360-like Wii U Controller Pro. Enjoy!
It’s day 2 of E3 and we’re hitting up some of the bigger game companies for booth tours including: Nintendo, Microsoft, Telltale, Konami, and Capcom. We’ll have a bunch of new pictures for you tonight as well as working on getting some of the gameplay videos up that we’ve been shooting. Stay tuned for more Usagi at E3 goodness.
We were the first media team into the South Hall of the E3 Expo today and were able to get tons of pictures of most of the coolest things being shown off at E3 that were not at the Big 3 gaming companies’ booths. Our Nintendo and Microsoft booth tours are tomorrow, so we’ll have a lot of coverage of them then, but for now enjoy the best 81 pictures we took all over E3 today as we visited the Disney, SOE, and Square Enix booths in particular.