News - Ubisoft @ E3

- Ubisoft @ E3 -

A summary of sorts

Farcry 4

Nnnnnheelllloo

Start strong and open with a bang is a good philosophy ey. So here we are watching an intro cutscene of some unseen manface on a bus in the Himalayas and ooooo there's a monkey there trying to steal your passport. First things first the game looks rather nice from what they're showing now, so the trailer goes like this - You're on a  bus and then there's a checkpoint and people get shot and then the bad guy shows up and is once again quite mad (but let's be honest he's not Vaas) and then he stabs some guard because....something. The old ones are the best for Ubisoft I guess since this is running a lot like Farcry 3, annnnnnyway they didn't show us anything other than this cutscene and it ends with the villain telling us we're going to have so much fun together whatever that means..just keep waiting for the Sony conference since that's where all the juice is for this game.

Aisha Tyler strides onto the stage to greet the masses

Quake beneath my mighty tread!

EUGHHHHHH but at least she seems somewhat genuine unlike some of the other presenters they shove on stage. Also it seems that swearing is totally fucking professional for Ubisoft so fuckin ey right.

    

Just Dance 2015

Twat central

Do you know why I despise these trailers? It's because they're hyper unrealistic, firstly nobody has friends like that, nobody plays games like that and who the hell has that much living room space to fit 12 people in their mid 20's pretending to have fun and cheer each other on with hip young phrases!? Not only is all of this just horrendous BUT we were forced to bare witness to an awful collection of people on stage dancing with their damn phones because that's right you don't even need a console to play this now just a smart phone with a gyroscope in it and friends who don't mind dancing like twats. Oh there's also this great new feature where you can download other peoples dance videos and judge them like the awful person you are. Awful awful person

The Division

What year is this!?

No gameplay to see here instead it's a whole new trailer of a guy getting shit kicked then saved by the resistance and then future nazi soldiers or something appear to try and kill you because this whole shebang is the result of a virus of some description and you need to be purged I guess. The trailer was pretty good though, not because of any of that but because it starts with an apartment interior and pans around constantly changing from pre-incident to post-incident which was interesting to see how quickly it changed in the months between from apartment to fortified living space and from city to warzone.

The Crew

My oh my, what a big wing you have...

Well well well it's good to see this game again. For those not in the know The Crew is a form of MMO-driving game where you can drive from coast to coast (in the U.S) with absolutely no loading screens and set up races and other unknown activities with your Crew/group of friends. Sadly not much more to see this year but the cars are indeed shiny and the beta registration is open now and oh yea it comes out November 11th for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

Assassin's Creed Unity

Duck, dodge, dip, dive and dodge

This time we get to see some more gameplay in the form of a co-op trailer. At a first glance the free running has been improved and looks much more fluid when traversing a city and your hidden blade has been all fancified just like your gun which has two barrels because Assassin's. Speaking of which there are no ladysassin's in this game which I'm sure Tumblr will just have a field day with.

We get to see Mr. Arnold stalking through a building looking for the target and it's here that we see what I'm pretty sure is a new snap to cover system and actual crouching, I could be wrong about these being new but either way they work and again the stalking looks smooth enough right now. It's also interesting to that there was no mini-map on the screen, instead it looked like you could flash up icons directly in game, I can only assume that you'll be able to set waypoints to them that way...or they were just hiding the minimap.

Shape Up mother fucker!

WORK YOU SLACKERS

No prizes for guessing that this is a fitness game given the name and all...The pitch for this was making fitness fun which having spent a lot of time in gym with people trying to motivate me to move my lazy arse is something I know cannot be done through conventional means. The difference is that in the game you can punch asteroids or do some kind of dance dance revolution style thing or do sit-ups till you shit yourself. All this can be done either against your past performances or against a friend both of which sound equally hellish and yes this is the first game to use the Kinect or even mention it whichhhhh is quite the shocker. It raises many interesting questions though, can fitness be gamified? Does gamification change our perception of the subject? Could you really do a press-up with a whale on your back? Hmmmmm

Valiant Hearts

I am a man with manly tears!

Definitely takes the prize for most depressing trailer of the show god damn, go watch it. Made in the UbiArt engine, the same one used for Child of Light and Rayman Legends, this visually stunning game set during World War 1 tells the tale of war from a dogs perspective (I think). It was a bit confusing to see so just go watch it and be saddened by it. It looks fantastic and you'll be able to play it June 25th.

Yves Guillemot is small

I don't know who made this but I love you

We love you alllll blah blah blah well done to us we're Ubisoft OH and here's one more game...

Rainbow Six Siege

So many dicks will be shot into the walls..I can see it now

Well bugger me I didn't see this one coming at all, maybe a new Splinter Cell or..something but wow here we are with a new Rainbow Six game on the tables. The 'gameplay' we got to see was allegedly alpha or pre-alpha or conceptual alpha or something but I'd bet my bollocks to a barn dance that they're full of shit, alpha doesn't look anywhere close to that good and once again it's a tactical shooter with some awful voice chat going on. 

A simple hostage rescue is the premise of the gameplay here, to make life easier we'll call the teams the Terrorists and the Counter-Terrorists. The game begins with the CT's scoping out the house with mini remote controlled cameras and planning the assault with maps of the house looking for entry points, while this is going on the T's are fortifying weak walls and barricading doors and if at all possible destroying the mini cameras sent in by the CT's. Assumedly after a certain amount of time has elapsed it's all systems go as the CT's get into position to bust in through a window or blow a hole in the side of the house.

Tactical team shooter y'all that's what we're dealing with here, if you get shot you're probably going down on the ground and if somebody doesn't pick you up in 5 seconds you're out for the round and your team will hate you so don't fuck it up. The interesting or potentially awesome thing about this game is that they were showing a lot of destructibility within the house, more than just shooting holes in walls, you can use your breach explosives to bust giant holes in walls or better yet you can blow a hole in the ceiling and descend like an angel of death into the room amidst the confusion.

It looks like it will be a lot of fun assuming you've got a group of friends to play with who all use voice comms and will essentially role play..yea have fun with that. No date on this one but I would guess late 2015 and hopefully it looks great and plays as fun as they've made it look with this.

END!

Summary

Bravo Ubisoft you actually had a good conference with minimal cringing brought on by bad scripting...Sony next up! 

News - Assassin's Creed Unity

SO I just found out via Eurogamer that Ubisoft has come forward and said not only is there no female playable character in Unity BUTTTTTTT there's also no COMPETITIVE multiplayer apparently. This actually sounds great, gives them the chance to focus entirely on the single player experience and make it tolerable again. Go Ubisoft!

Review - Watch_Dogs - PC

 

What is it?

THE FUTURE OF GAMING!!! Pfft not even close. Watch_Dogs is the highly anticipated new IP from Ubisoft, an open world, third person action game which lies in a similar vein to GTA though with less emphasis on fucking shit up and instead on hacking things like some passive aggressive nerd on the Internet.


Story

So in this rendition of Chicago you are Aiden Pearce, notorious hacker and terrible person. The game opens with you scouting out a hotel or store or something that isn't made incredibly clear but as you're doing it something goes wrong and another hacker is on to you and orders a hit on you. Cut to you driving through a tunnel when some guy on a motorbike comes along side you and blows your tyre out causing your car to flip and killing your poor little niece in the process, after that it's all just a revenge story at the core. A few twists here and there but nothing that will completely shock you. There are some likeable characters, or one at least (Jordi) though there are plenty of unlikeable expressionless sacks of meat...

Gameplay

Watch_Dogs is another sandbox simulator from Ubisoft. The big selling point for this game was the ability to "hack anything" which in this case actually means: cars, phones, ATM's, traffic lights, bollards, helicopters, radios and bridges. There are more things to hack of course but the anything part of the earlier statement is way off the mark. Your time in sunny/rainy Chicago will be spent doing one of 3 things: Driving, hacking and getting involved in the games terrible combat mechanics. Driving isn't the best of times, the cars feel very loose and the way they take damage is just bizarre, you can plough a sports car at full speed into a pick-up truck and drive away from it, we're a long way from the damage modelling we saw in GTA:V that's for damn sure. The hacking is...shit. If you remember the plumbing/hacking mechanic from the original Bioshock it's basically that but with current and nodes, needless to say it's a little uninspired and every time I was presented with one a little piece of myself died. As for the gun-play...Terrible. No customisation options for things like silencers which make life a lot easier since you can pop a guy in the head with the silenced pistol you get at the start and nobody even bats an eyelid, be prepared to die a lot in gunfights as you aren't exactly wearing Kevlar so you're going to be hitting those checkpoints a lot.

Like most "next gen" or rather current gen games Watch_Dogs comes complete with it's own iPad (or Smart Glass if you prefer) app and through this you can engage in some of the multiplayer systems of the game. Playing with your particular brand of tablet device will allow you to take on the roll of the police as you try to prevent people in game from getting to a certain waypoint, to do this you follow them with your helicopter whilst sending in various levels of police power and altering traffic lights etc., it's a nice new experience that actually feels like something "next-gen". The other interesting part of the multiplayer is the invasion style mode where somebody enters your world (disguised of course not just running round as Aiden like you are) and the longer it takes you to find them the more the hacking bar fills up and when it's full they win, you lose, the usual. Don't worry yourself too much thinking you'll have to drive round the whole city to find the scum who's stealing your shit, all these events take place in a finite radius which gradually gets smaller making it easier to find them with your magical Macguffin phone and well if you don't want to be part of any of this new age multiplayer nonsense then you can just turn it all off and be alone in your city with no-one to play with just like in real life.

It's not all doom and gloom and people stealing your hard stolen cash though, you can take a Digital Trip and become a giant spider tank and basically destroy Chicago and all it's inhabitants for points, it's one of the few "fun" side-quests or mini-games to take the edge off the gritty revenge story you're dealing with in the story which is always nice.

Graphics

Now...I am reviewing the PC version here which at the time of writing is...shit. Besides the poor optimisation the game just isn't as pretty and shiny as it should be, it's definitely not even close to what was show at E3 and in various trailers etc. It all reeks of something that had to be toned down to run on consoles which is just a little sad at this point as it happens far too often, Ubisoft have said a patch is coming but unless they add in another 30gb of textures it's still not going to look as good as we thought.


(Waters nice though)

Ignoring all of that however the game does have it's moments, the water textures are incredibly nice and you will occasionally find yourself staring at a beautiful sunset with just one too many lens flares. Don't get me wrong it's not an AWFUL looking game but for a game that was delayed for as long as it was it should look better than this.

Audio 

Why don't open world games like this have metal in their soundtracks anymore? That was the best thing about Saints Row 2 and 3, driving round like a mad bastard listening to heavy ass guitars and bands screaming about whales or something. Suffice to say Watch underscore Dogs doesn't have any metal which to me is a bad thing, though I could forgive them if the rest of the soundtrack made up for it but it just doesn't. To clarify I'm talking about all the in-game radio music here since that's what you'll listen to 90% of the time. It's a mishmash of songs of varying genres that must have been pulled from Guy Blands iTunes account in the office because there's just no logical reason for half the music to be there, especially something as unpopular and insignificant as an Alkaline Trio song, I wasn't aware that being from the area the game is set in grants you a spot on the soundtrack...I'll remember that next time a game comes out of Warrington (my hometown).

It's not just a bad choice of songs though, the sound design is a real let down for the game. The guns sound fairly poor and the voice acting is Ubisofts usual brand of terrible, I'm not sure but I'm fairly confident some of the main characters were random people plucked off the streets. When I was playing an announcement came on over the radio in the car and was a good 400% louder than what was previously on, now I understand that the dialogue contained in that broadcast was at least somewhat relevant to the games lore but I really didn't need it to be so deafeningly loud. By contrast another news announcement was barely audible (and no I didn't lower the volume). Audio is one of the most important things in a game to me and they really missed out with this one I'm sorry to say.

Yay or Nay

I think I've talked enough shit about this game already so I'll just sum up my main problems here:

• It's on Uplay and that is a terrible terrible thing
• Needs a lot of work (future patch may improve things)
• Story is a bit bland
• Something of a let down after all the hype
• Poor audio assets in places
• Can't jump over a small gap

 
 (Damn small gaps ruining my sweet parkour)

HOWEVER I do think the game has some good things going for it, the hacking is new and interesting and could definitely have potential depending on what they choose to do with the game down the line and the multiplayer has definite potential and definitely removes some of the monotony of going from mission to mission to mission. We were all so excited when this game was announced and the hype got well out of hand which is a shame because I really wanted to enjoy this game but I just couldn't overlook some of the issues that were staring me in the face.

The game is not bad by any stretch but it definitely lets itself down in a good number of ways, if you're after a sandbox to dick around in because lets face it that's what they all become when you finish the story, then buy GTAV. At least in that you won't lose reputation for covering all the cars in stick bombs and blowing them up..if anything you'll be loved. Probably. OH one more thing, there's too much damn DLC, okay I'm done.


http://store.steampowered.com/app/243470/
http://uplay.ubi.com/en-GB/game/watch-dogs