T w e n t y S i d e d

Now it’s Ubiosoft’s turn. I expect I’ll be pretty negative here, assuming I have anything to say at all. For most of these companies I can at least say, “Sure, the company leadership is annoying, but I really like their products!” But that’s not the case here. I hate their particular house style of open-world collect-a-thon. I can’t stand Assassins Creed. I’ve never connected with Far Cry. The Tom Clancy stuff doesn’t do anything for me. I hated WATCH_DOGS. Okay, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is one of my all-time favorites, but that was, what? 2003? And I’ve disliked where the sequels went after that one. For Honor isn’t my thing.

And then there’s UPlay, this unsightly growth on the face of the company that they’re still insisting is a “beauty mark”. And before that was their ridiculous dedication to always-online DRM.

So yeah. Obnoxious company with terrible policies, bad taste, an abusive approach to DRM, and a library of games I don’t care about. Probably not going to be a fun show for me. I guess I can at least look forward to seeing presenter Aisha Tyler do her thing, right?

Actually, no. The rumor is that they’re not going to have Tyler hosting their press conference this year. That’s bad news, since she’s always been the best part (only good part) of their show. Ubisoft is the stiffest of the corporate stiffs, to the point where they make Microsoft look punk rock by comparisonThe Division staged demos were always an epic cringe-fest. On the other hand, the For Honor guy was probably the coolest dude at E3 last year.. So they really need a professional to make their presentation feel more like a party and less like a board meeting with an audience.

They claim Tyler isn’t appearing this year so they can have a better focus on their developers. This seems like a strange reason, since one of the duties of a good host is to bring people out on stage and make them feel comfortable, even if they’re not in show business. If we’re talking about putting designers, programmers, and artists out on stage, then the last thing in the world you’d want is to have them address that great big crowd directly. Instead you can have them come out and talk to the host.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2017 Day 3: Ubisoft”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

And so we come to the final show of Day 2. I don’t know what Bethesda will be showing off, except nobody is expecting Fallout or Elder Scrolls. I guess I’m hoping for some Wolfenstein.

You can watch the stream here. Again, I’d love to embed the stream so it’s more convenient for you, but Twitch embeds autoplay and that is really annoying.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2017 Day 2: Bethesda”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s day 2, which means it’s time for Microsoft to shuffle out on stage and play another round of “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?”

They’re expected to show off the new Xbox hardware. I’m looking forward to getting angry over the part where they once again fail to apologize for Games for Windows LIVE. I’m anticipating that they will follow that up with a bit where they pretend like there’s nothing wrong with the Windows Store.

I’d embed the Twitch stream, but for some idiotic reason the Twitch player always auto-plays. That’s obnoxious. So instead you’ll have to settle for this link right here.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2017 Day 2: Microsoft”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Like I said yesterday, I’ll be watching the E3 stream and writing about it. I’m not sure which particular stream I’ll be watching, though. A half dozen different outfits are running their own stream, and I’m not sure which one will be the least annoying. I’ll figure it out once the show starts. For now I’ll be keeping an eye on the YouTube stream in one window and and playing Starbound in the other. (The Spacefarer Update just came out.)

I don’t expect to have a lot to say about this particular presentation. EA seems to have killed off or mutated all of the games I might care about. But we’ll see if they have any surprises.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2017 Day 1: Electronic Arts”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

As in the past, I’m going to be watching the livestream of E3. But this year instead of adding my own commentary on top of the show (which made it easy for ME to miss things, or to make it so I would drown out the presenters so YOU miss them) I’m just going to live blog it.

E3 is such a strange beast. There are three groups involved, and they all want different things:

The Publishers

The publishers want to get the biggest bang out of their marketing dollars by making announcements at this point of maximum public interest. All eyes are on E3. Well, not really “all eyes”. The vast majority of “gamers”Whatever THAT means. ignore E3. But the core audience is keenly interested in it. These people are the big spenders, early adopters, and platform loyalists, and with the right touch their enthusiasm can be harnessed to generate even more hype.

So the publishers invest a lot of money trying to control the narrative. They want favorable coverage with timing they control. They want everyone to buy as much as possible, as soon as possible, with as little scrutiny as possible.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “E3 2017: Intro”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.