E3 Show Floor Impressions

[Margalis]

I stopped doing these for a while since it seemed like bad form given that I worked for a major publisher, but now I don't, so taste my wrath whoever!

This is the straight scoop. No developer-guided bullshit, no models and finger sandwhiches, no Tim Schaffer explaining how the boring driving in Brutal Legend is already fixed in their most recent build - just pure gameplay from the show floor of E3, followed by some wrap up thoughts. If other people who went to E3 want to contribute you have my blessing. This is in order of booths I visited mostly. Also I don't stand in long lines to watch canned presentations, so if a game is missing that's probably why.

Also thank fuck I got the kind of badge that let me skip crowds.

Capcom

I played Duck Tales, but without sound, so I feel like I didn't give it a fair shake. That's the only thing I played at Capcom. Dead Rising 3 was in a booth with a line.


XSeed

I played some Killer is Dead. You probably already know if you are going to like this game or not. For what it's worth I thought the combat was significantly better than in Lollipop Chainsaw, a game I wanted to like but mechanically was just not that good unfortunately. Here the moves feel better, you have more control (a huge problem I had with LC, you can't choose your exact moves), the dodge/parry thing feels better and if you do it at the right time you get a No More Heroes style dark step. (Or Witch Time from Bayonetta) I will definitely be playing this. Again, you know if this is your cup of tea.

Konami

Castlevania: Something Something 2 looked pretty good. The first game, or at least the E3 build of it, looked QTE heavy and while it looked good graphically it didn't run well. This looked better, ran better, and looked more gameplay centric. Sadly it still doesn't look like a Castlevania game to me.

EA, Ubisoft, Activision - I glanced at a couple things. Yes, I do realize these are the top 3 3rd party publishers. No, I didn't care. I kind of wanted to see Destiny. What they had playable without massive lines was snooze-worthy.

Square Enix
Surprise of the show #1: S-E had a good booth. Like, really pretty good. FFXIV looked awesome on the computers they were running it on, and the PS3 version looked ok during a big raid battle. The UI looks a billion times better than in vanilla XIV. How it plays I really don't know - like a cross between FFXI and WoW I suppose.

Lightning Returns looked...good? I was solidly in the "why does this game exist?" camp, along with the "and why does it look so bad?" camp. But visually it looks fucking crazy during battles, and there appears to be a fair amount of strategy. It's like a cross between FFXIII 1 & 2 and a game like Monster Hunter, where you wail on an enemy (using the right elements and such), knock them over into a prone state, then go to town on them. You only control one character so I don't know how much depth there will end up being, but that one character can switch into a bunch of different roles and has like 4 different meters - it's like an entire FFXIII party rolled into one character.  It may end up being trivial but there seemed to be the potential for a lot of strategy and mechanical complexity.

Saint's Row 4 I guess is being distributed in the US by S-E. Looked like Saint's Row? Not my cup of tea.

Deus: Ex - Director's Cut for Wii U looked pretty good, but I don't have a console frame of reference to compare to.

Ghost Guy - Soul Detective AKA I forgot the name. I actually watched the hands-off booth demo for this, something I never do. This could potentially be really good, it could also easily be super frustrating. Putting together clues to solve crimes seemed like it could devolve into trial and error and in the guided tour I spotted problems with word choice and phrasings that made incorrect answers appear possibly correct. This will come down to the details of execution and the combat/stealth elements. At least it looks like a novel experience though, I like what they are going for even if the execution ends up off.

[Margalis]

Sega

Sonic: Lost World I basically Mario Galaxy with Sonic. It looked pretty good and ran well. I'm not sure if they solved the problem with 3D Sonic where your run past most of the content making the bulk of the game irrelevant, but as a 3D Sonic game this looked loads better than Sonic the Wereboar or Sonic as a knight with or sword or whatever the fuck Sonic has been up to.

Tecmo Koei

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z Looked like the kind of game I would like but I didn't really like it. The aesthetic was a little too cartoony to me, it seemed to be aiming for Lollipop Chainsaw but overshot and ended up at Plants vs Zombies. It also looked very sparse and "last gen." The visual style was really cool in some ways like shading and overall presentation, but the overall feel of the game just seemed off. It was ridiculous but not in a good way.

Atlus

Shin Megami Tensei IV for 3DS looked great.

Dragon's Crown I am very torn on. The game looked flat out boring. I'm hoping this is an issue with the difficulty and the level they were showing off. The game mechanics look they have a lot of potential and are right up my alley - you have a bunch of crazy moves and spells and you can do stuff like launch an enemy into the air, jump after them, hit them a bunch, throw some spell at them, etc. It's very fighting-game inspired. That said the actual level they were showing off seemed centered mostly around opening treasure chests. Like you walk into a scene, kill one enemy instantly, then spend 30 seconds fucking around with treasure chests, then repeat. Even the boss at the end went down almost instantly using no finesse of any kind.

I'm a little worried that at least with 4 people you can brainlessly zerg the content. Maybe it was just purposely very easy with weak sparse enemies. The mechanics seem solid but I'm not sure you need to use them. (For reference I started Muramasa directly on hard mode and that was a good choice) I wanted to like this but I'm worried.

Nintendo

Surprise of the show #2: this was good. I was pretty down on Nintendo after waking up at 7 in the morning to watch a barely functional stream. But the quality of games here was high, and Bayonetta 2 was my game of the show.

Pikmin and Wonderful 101 are both fairly known commodities at this point I think. They were showing off a crazy 4 player mode in 101, to be honest I had no idea what the fuck was going on. The single player looks awesome though.

Mario Kart 8 looked shockingly good. This might actually be the biggest shock of the show for me. Wii Mario Kart was a negligible step up from the GC version (and I prefer the GC mechanics) and I've never played Mario Kart 7. It looks like a lot of effort went into this game - it runs great (60 fps), the environments looks great, the character models look great, the Goombas in the middle of the road look like the greatest Goombas ever. The tracks have all sort of crazy riding on walls and through corkscrews and lots of complex banking and such - it looks like a true generational leap and definitely not mailed in the way MK Wii sort of was.

I'm pretty sure everyone expected to another standard-issue MK and this was well above expectations, at least to me.

Wind Waker looked amazing. The boss battle against the big bird enemy really did look like a cartoon. There are lot of subtle visual improvements especially with the UI, the game runs at 1080. This definitely looks like the best HD remake I've seen. It looked super super good.

Donkey Kong I didn't see that much of but it looked good. I've never played the Wii game or any DK side-scroller except for a bit of DKC1. Anyway it looked good, I didn't see that much of it.

Super Mario 3D World was hard to evaluate because it was being played in chaotic multiplayer mayhem style. 3D Land for 3DS is great but I'm not sure how the level design will translate to accommodate 4 players. I'm a little worried it will force the play fields to be too spread out and open, force the game to be easier, etc. I'd like to play this single player on a non-starter level to form any real opinion.

Bayonetta 2 was amazing. I didn't even expect this to be playable, and because the Nintendo Direct stream was a 240p stuttering piece of shit I was scared this might be a low-res framey mess. Nope. It was the exact opposite of that. Everything about this was great. The Bayonetta design was great, the enemies now have more rich blues and golds and a more saturated palette vs the mostly white and gold of previous games, the game ran great, the image quality was great, the entire demo was like one long playable cutscene but with actual gameplay. This looked more "next gen" than most PS4 / XB1 games, and looked like a big leap up from the 360 version of Bayo 1.  The combination of resolution, frame rate and image quality was off the charts. Everything looks and runs perfectly as you are riding around on top of a jet that is flying all around a city, then you are fighting some giant demon that is clinging onto the side of a building...

Seeing this was like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. Any fears I had about technical issues were dispelled entirely. It's still possible the game will be too set-piece centric or have weird design elements that bring it down a notch, but the game just looked fantastic.

[Cyrrex]

Wind Waker looked amazing. The boss battle against the big bird enemy really did look like a cartoon. There are lot of subtle visual improvements especially with the UI, the game runs at 1080. This definitely looks like the best HD remake I've seen. It looked super super good.

Curse the Gods!

[Margalis]

Sony

This was where things got weird. 80% of the Sony booth was PS3 and Vita. The 20% of space devoted to PS4 was largely taken up by Blacklight: Retribution, which looked worse than many PS3 games. Transistor and some light/shadow themed game also looked like middle-of the-road PS3 games. Drive Club fpr PS4 looked marginally better than GT6 for PS3. The emphasis here was very squarely on PS3 and Vita.

Knack looked flat out bad. The game did not run well, it looked boring, the environments were bland. Every once in a while you see why this is a next-gen title - a lot of independent animations on the main character, a complex environmental effect, etc, but for the most part it looked like nothing special at all. (And also once again just boring) While I could identify parts that signified "next-gen" the overall impression was very much of a current-gen game. If you compare this to Disney: Infinity on Wii U (and also PS3/360?) it looked the same or worse from a big-picture standpoint.

I wasn't really interested in PS3 and Vita stuff, and the Sony booth was a mess with a bunch of midgets in giant costumes clogging everything up ( I swear this is not a joke) , so I left pretty quickly.

Microsoft

Unlike Sony this was mostly devoted to next-gen. However...there was very little actual XB1 content. Like...there was a golf game, a bunch of stations where Kinect would display your skeleton, a bunch of video monitors with the caption "See what people are saying about XB1."

Killer Instinct looked like the combination of animation quality, resolution and frame rate would be tough on 360, but it didn't really sell being next gen. Every once in a while a fireball would explode into about a million sparks as if to prove that it couldn't be done on current hardware, but beyond that it was pretty underwhelming.

Crimson Dragon looked like a 360 game. The UI was a little sexier than a 360 game maybe. This started life as a 360 game and it shows. It looked pretty cool as a game, but nothing about it said "buy new hardware to play me."

Ryse was another case of the combination of resolution, IQ, animation, etc, not really being possible on current gen, but also not really selling next-gen either. At one point a cloth flag rolled down with a cool cloth physics simulation and I thought to myself "that definitely would not look like that on 360" but beyond that...are you sensing a theme? The next-gen part of this game was a rolling piece of cloth!

The MS area was super underwhelming. Also they showed that Make Yer Own Game game, but I didn't really check it out because reasons.

[Margalis]

Wrap Up

I have two major takeaways.

#1 is that Bayonetta 2 was awesome. Anyone who played some shitty Wii U ports and thought "ruh roh, is this thing even more powerful than a 360 at all?" can at least know that in the hands of Platinum it sure as hell is.

#2 is that the next-gen presence on the show floor was really underwhelming. There were PS4 games that looked worse than comparable PS3 games. There were "next gen" games that had no reason to be next-gen, and next-gen games that technically sure they had to be next-gen if you want to be strictly rational about it, but really didn't appear to be next-gen in any significant way.

On average the next-gen games had a better combination of res / frame rate / IQ, higher animation quality and more cool effects and such, and by comparison some current-gen games looked a little sparse, but for fuck's sake, if you want me to buy an XB1 don't show me a cartoony golf game. If you want me to buy a PS4 don't show me what looks like a Flash game.

When Gears of War 1 came out for 360 its use of normal maps and other newish techniques really made it look like something wholly different that what you'd get on PS2/XBox. I remember just looking at a slab of metal and admiring the grooves in it. Nothing I saw today gave me that feeling. Some of it looked better, sure. I'm not a dummy. I know that if Killer Instinct was on 360 when a fireball exploded it would explode into 50 sparks instead of 500. But in the end the next-gen games were mildly power-up existing-gen stuff. (Remember I'm talking playable games here, not dog and pony show stuff)

The emphasis on Sony was on PS3 and Vita. I presume the plan is to inevitably sell out PS4 at launch regardless, and still sell PS3 hardware and software as PS4 builds momentum. But the MS booth was mostly XB1 and they had very little to show and none of it was particularly impressive.

Both companies made a very poor case for their new hardware, especially if you have a decent gaming PC. If you were in the hall that didn't have the Sony/MS booths in them there was very little indication that new consoles were a thing at all. Hell, even if you were in the Sony booth there was very little indication that new consoles were a thing. I had to look around for about 30 seconds to spot any PS4 content.

Edit: I didn't see Dark Souls 2. If it was on the show floor I missed it. But I didn't particularly seek it out, I didn't feel the need to play it.

[Ragnoros]

Wind Waker looked amazing. The boss battle against the big bird enemy really did look like a cartoon. There are lot of subtle visual improvements especially with the UI, the game runs at 1080. This definitely looks like the best HD remake I've seen. It looked super super good.

Curse the Gods!

Got a speedy CPU? Play it now. Download Dolphin, rip/acquire the old GameCube dvd rom, turn on Anti-aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering and 2x, 3x or 4x rendering. Game looks amazing and runs flawlessly. (Ok, crashed on me once. I am running a q6600 @ 2.4 ghz and encountered little slowdown.)

[Yegolev]

Got a speedy CPU? Play it now. Download Dolphin, rip/acquire the old GameCube dvd rom, turn on Anti-aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering and 2x, 3x or 4x rendering. Game looks amazing and runs flawlessly. (Ok, crashed on me once. I am running a q6600 @ 2.4 ghz and encountered little slowdown.)

While I did know about this, I had completely forgotten about it.  Since my video card upgrade caused PCSX2 to become a better way than a real PS2 to play games, I'll give Dolphin another whirl and see how it goes.  So, thanks!

[Nonentity]

Crossposting mine from the other thread.

Went and played a few things today (left early):

Dive Kick - Two button fighting game - not even a movement stick, just two buttons. One jumps, one kicks. You can kick on the ground to move backwards. One hit kills, 5 rounds. Every character has different kick arcs, it's actually super super fun. It's the mind games of fighting games without all the complexity. You can land headshot kills and then they're dazed at the beginning of the next round.

Transistor - New game from Supergiant (Bastion guys) - feels really solid, the time pausing and planning mechanic works great, makes it a bit of a mashup of an action game and a tactical one. Art and voicework are top notch again.

Secret Ponchos - This game is legitimately awesome, it's a wild west dueling game. It sort of uses twin-stick shooter controls for moving and aiming, with a different cast of characters. I played a dude that had a rifle you could root yourself in place to get longer range with, or I could also charge people and impale them on my bayonet, and then shoot them off. They had a 2v2 respawning match going, but I saw support for up to 4v4 and a variety of maps. Should be awesome.

Mercenary Kings - I kickstarted this game, and it is rad. It's like a mission-based free-roaming Metal Slug with crafting.

LocoCycle - this is an xbox one game where you are a sentient motorcycle dragging a dude behind you? you can jump into the air and do combos (your wheel spins out and hits people and you get a combo counter, and you can weave throwing your passenger around as a combo). I dunno, could be dumb fun.

I also got to get hands on with the PS4 and Xbox One controllers.

The PS4 controller is WAY better. The handles are longer, so it doesn't feel as cramped for my large man hands (6'5") to reach the analog sticks. The texture on the back of the controller feels kind of grippy, it's nice. Sticks seem like they have a better tuned tension than the PS3 ones, and the divots in the thumbsticks make them much better. Buttons don't stick out of the controller as much but they still have a really solid hit to them. Triggers on the back are great. That little touchpad clicks like a touchpad on a Macbook. The "options" and "share" buttons are a little higher (since they extend to the top of the controller), but they weren't any harder to hit

The Xbox One controller just feels like an evolution of the 360 one, which isn't the worst thing. Buttons felt great, the triggers have a wierd curve on the end of them but once I adjusted they actually worked a bit better. It's basically the same as the 360 controller, but I don't think it needed as much improvement as the dual shock did. I didn't like the smoother texture as much as I did the one on the PS4.

Could not fucking find Dark Souls 2, might not be on the floor. Namco doesn't have a booth.

[Samprimary]

Door

Really disappointed in this one. Looks like the platform involves a sort of a 'system pass' requirement, or it's some puzzle that is completely non-intuitive. Every time I tried to get in, my path was forcefully blocked by two (admittedly well-rendered) large men. There were no tooltips or anything. Four hours later and I'm about to give up out of frustration. Could not find a vendor or anyone helpful to talk to about the game.

[Paelos]

LOL the sad face makes it. 

[Margalis]

The best part of E3 for me was getting there before it officially opened, seeing a huge crowd of like 500 people waiting to get in and a giant line feeding into it, then just walking past everyone and being waved through. Suck it plebs!

[Samwise]

Does E3 still have lots of scantily clad booth babes, or did they ban those?  That's all I'm really curious about.

[Velorath]

The best part of E3 for me was getting there before it officially opened, seeing a huge crowd of like 500 people waiting to get in and a giant line feeding into it, then just walking past everyone and being waved through. Suck it plebs!

And then you all pretty much saw the same stuff most of us watched online in the comfort of our homes.

[Margalis]

Does E3 still have lots of scantily clad booth babes, or did they ban those?  That's all I'm really curious about.

The Bethesda booth had some hotties in short shorts and red sports jerseys - that was about as racy as it got outside a couple of costumed models.

And then you all pretty much saw the same stuff most of us watched online in the comfort of our homes.

There is a huge difference between seeing (not to mention playing) stuff in person vs seeing video, even direct feed video. That said I go partly to meet up with some old buddies and coworkers and such. I probably wouldn't go if it was solely for the show floor.

I also find it really interesting to see how many setups each game has and what the general reaction on the show floor is. E3 reporting tends to be incredibly skewed by behind-closed-doors stuff, which is how you end up with situations where Brutal Legend is getting nominated for all sorts of "Best of E3" awards when nobody at the show even wants to play it.

[Yegolev]

Got a speedy CPU? Play it now. Download Dolphin, rip/acquire the old GameCube dvd rom, turn on Anti-aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering and 2x, 3x or 4x rendering. Game looks amazing and runs flawlessly. (Ok, crashed on me once. I am running a q6600 @ 2.4 ghz and encountered little slowdown.)

While I did know about this, I had completely forgotten about it.  Since my video card upgrade caused PCSX2 to become a better way than a real PS2 to play games, I'll give Dolphin another whirl and see how it goes.  So, thanks!

Update that I have entered the jungle of ripping Wii ISOs, so... thanks?

[Ragnoros]

This one is pleased to have served you.

[schild]

Wait. I can play Wii Games on the computer now?!

Just kidding, still no games I want to play.

[Rasix]

Well, I liked Eternal Darkness.  Wait.. that was Game Cube.

[Yegolev]

Did some research.  At the moment it's still easier to play those games on the console(s), esp Wii games, and my Wavebird is still working fine.  Not terribly interested in getting bluetooth configured, etc.  Would be nice if the WiiU would play Wii games in 1080, though.

After all this shit, I'm trying to figure out what my setup is going to be like in a couple years.  So far it looks like I'll be running a WiiU, 360, and PS4.  And of course I'm getting back into PC gaming; viva la indie revolucion!