Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well, we’ve had more than a week of E3 coverage, and I’m sure you’re sick of it by now. So I’m finishing up! I checked my huge pile of notes, recordings and press materials and found I have only one thing left to write about – Stalker: Clear Sky.

This sequel/prequel/remake of the acclaimed, if divisive, FPS is an interesting one because it’s the only game anyone at RPS specifically asked me to check out at E3. Jim Rossignol all but demanded I find out if there was going to be “terrible new English voice acting and music” in the upcoming title, and so I obliged by chatting with GSC Game World’s Valentine Yeltyshev.
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Yep, EA again, because this time I’m not talking about their press conference but the excellent time I had in their far-too-crowded demo room checking out their titles – Dead Space, MySims, Mirror’s Edge and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, first hand.
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Now here’s something I managed to forget about completely until I was sitting in Phoenix Airport, lamenting my missed connecting flight. Capcom actually really quite like the PC. I spent a fair bit of time in the Capcom booth having my arse handed to me in Street Fighter IV by a team of people who apparently came to E3 already unstoppably good at the game, and I have to say – it’s absolutely superb, far far better than I thought it was going to be.
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[Thanks to extreme tiredness, I didn’t manage to write up all of my impressions from E3. Over the next couple of days I’ll clean house and post up my leftover thoughts.]

So if the Sony Online Entertainment game that you are looking forward to is DC Universe Online, well, E3 wasn’t for you. Because cleverly, SOE are going to reveal all of the details of the game at the San Diego Comic Con (which, in retrospect, I should have stayed for) in front of the slavering hordes of nerds that they want to impress the most, instead of wasting the details on the slavering (but smaller) hordes of nerds at E3. What did I learn from my brief chat with the developers? Well, that it’s going to be a heavily physics based MMO where characters be able to “use the environment as a weapon” – and they made a pretty big deal about how hard it is to put proper physics into an MMO.
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I headline “Bethesda Softworks” to keep the format I’ve been using, but really I should just have put “Fallout 3” because that’s all they were showing and that’s all anyone cares about. I had a little bit of problem with this scheduled appointment – The time I was set to see it got confused by either PR or myself (we couldn’t decide) – so I didn’t perhaps get quite as much hands-on time as I would have liked (is there ever enough hands-on time at these kind of shows for hundred-hour RPGs?) But I got to stand and chat to executive producer Todd Howard while I waited, so it worked out for the best, really.
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From our comfortable slouch in front of our dusty LCD screens, E3 2008’s seemed surprisingly fertile after last year’s dampest of squibs. Perhaps there weren’t many omigosh new announcements, but it gave a glad chance to see long-awaited shinies such as Dragon Age, Fallout 3 (DON’T SAY A BLOODY WORD), Spore, Mirror’s Edge, Dawn of War II, Borderlands, Alpha Protocol and more in extensive action. Me = chuffed.

For those actually at the show… eh, not so good.
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At last – no silly cinematic, no unhelpful announcement of name-change – just honest-to-god in-game action from Bioware’s next RPG.

It’s not Mass Effect with orcs. It’s not Oblivion with, er, different orcs. In fact, it’s quite possibly exactly what you cRPG-starved masses been praying for (well, I say that, but really I’m braced for the inevitable storm of complaint). And for the non-cRPG-starved masses, it also features a very cool bossfight. Go, get beneath the cut! Quickly!
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This is a really poor quality video, but the developer voiceover does reveal quite a lot more than the constant reiteration of there being “500,000″ weapons in the game. It talks about the persistent nature of Borderlands characters, the level-based system, the nature of online co-op, and the wide-open, exploration-rich terrain.
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I’ve just passed the mid-point of E3, and by this point, no matter how hard I try, it’s all starting to blend together. It’s at this point that you might start to hallucinate that everything you’ve seen was actually all just the same game – a music title set in a decaying city that featured instrument peripherals with hundreds of buttons.

Thankfully I’ve kept it together a little more than that. Though perhaps not enough! Because when I was showed Alpha Protocol, Obsidian Entertainment new action RPG set in the world of espionage, I was positive I was just being shown Mass Effect. Positive!
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Does anyone under 50 even read Tom Clancy books anyway?

So, “your voice is the ultimate weapon.” I’ll be honest – while I’ve no doubt all that Ubi money can make something that (unlike the horrible Will of Steel) works, I’m finding it hard to believe that Tom Clancy’s voice controls will be anywhere near as slick and forgiving as the below Tom Clancy’s trailer for this Ubi-RTS suggests. However, Tom Clancy’s walkthrough beneath the cut has me genuinely anticipating Tom Clancy’s Endwar.

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