As the two third-party developers of the conference lineup EA and Ubisoft frequently end up retreading much of the same territory from first-party conferences by showing the same games both there and in their own briefings. To their credit, this year they managed to ensure their big titles had a presence in their own conferences and the console manufacturer conferences without too much needless recycling, and they avoided drowning audiences in Kinect demos and wheeling out upsettingly unenthused celebrities as has been a problem in recent years. The similarities end at a point however. Neither EA nor Ubisoft were blowing any minds, and they both had their slumps, but the Ubisoft conference had much more vibrancy and energy to it, while it felt like EA had far more hollow promises and not a lot to show for all the hype they were attempting to build.

Everyone’s press conferences are constructed to some degree around careful PR strategy and manipulation of the audience, but EA’s event was a constant assault of exaggerations. We were told that NHL 15 changes “almost everything”, that PGA Tour 15 is “golf without limits”, that Criterion’s new racing game lets players “Go anywhere” and “Make any experience they want”, while the presser as a whole used the word “emotion” a silly number of times without ever managing or in many cases even trying to tie it to anything tangible. The more you hear people talk like this without being able to back up their claims, the less credible they seem, and the more it feels like these companies think they can dazzle you by throwing out a bunch of buzzwords with nothing behind them. In many cases the presentations were primarily videos of developers talking about how good the games they are making are going to be. I mean they weren’t going to show you any games, they’re not ready yet, but they must be good because these devs went to a mountain and these guys love car crashes and are riding in a helicopter. Sadly, even the Mirror’s Edge 2 segment veered heavily into this territory. They were able to show some skillfully crafted animation, but the bits of the video that weren’t developer conjecture were melee combat and the fighting is not the bit of Mirror’s Edge we want to see more of.

Aside from that, The Sims 4 looks decent although not much of a step up from The Sims 3, it’s kind of terrifying see EA simulate a dead martial arts hero and use him as a marketing prop for the new UFC game, and I liked when golf was happening over a battleship. The conference had a solid closer in the form of Battlefield: Hardline, even if it wasn’t anything that was going to make you jump out of your seat. The game looked a lot like Battlefield as it is now, but from what was shown recontextualising the gameplay in a cops & robbers scenario and providing more opportunities for crazy city-based destruction stands to present some exciting multiplayer experiences. It was actually a pleasant surprise to hear them launch the beta right at the end of the show, it would have been even better if doing so hadn’t completely wrecked their servers.

After the events of EA the Ubisoft conference was a step upwards for day zero, but it had its stumbling blocks. Aisha Tyler was one of the best speakers we saw on a stage today, she’s genuinely passionate about games, and it’s amazing to see a huge game company put a black woman front and centre to represent them, that’s a rare occurrence. Sometimes that enthusiasm was hard to take as genuine and not some part of a script though, and while there were no gags as howlingly bad as “#Girlwood” this year, things were brought down a little by some pretty lame jokes about weed, erections, and shitting yourself, along with a number of awkward asides that didn’t quite hit their mark.

Looking to the games themselves, the antagonist for Far Cry 4 looks intriguing, hopefully we’ll get more of him in 4 than we got of Vaas in 3, although thinking about that maybe there just wasn’t that much to Vaas as a character. Considering how dumb and plastic it was the Just Dance 2015 segment was surprisingly inoffensive, perhaps because I couldn’t keep myself from tapping along with both Pharrell’s Happy and Lady Gaga’s Applause. Shape Up also looks to be adding a decent dash of light-hearted fun to the fitness game genre, and I even warmed a little to Assassin’s Creed: Unity despite it being clearer than ever that they’re really not doing that much to set the game apart from previous entries in the series. The most interesting part of the conference for me however was The Crew. Remembering how open and willing they were to show off its features last year I’m a little surprised we didn’t see something more representative of the gameplay as a whole, but the idea of getting together some friends and gliding through that picturesque scenery is deeply appealing to me, and it’s a game coming out in 2014. After the impressions from the show floor during the previous E3 I also kept expecting someone to come on and say that they’ve fixed the poor handling since last year because word is they actually have.

There was a trailer for The Division which was fairly engrossing in itself, but that most likely does not depict the true tone of the game. On the flip side there was Valiant Hearts: The Great War which we were shown no gameplay of, but given the angle of the trailer that sorrowful, sombre reflection on World War I might well be what we see in the final product. The briefing concluded with some gameplay from Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege which didn’t look significantly different from any other Tom Clancy squad-based shooter out there to me but maybe I’m just not well-versed enough in the franchise. And that was Ubisoft. They didn’t have a great number of games, but I have to give them kudos for giving each game a sizeable chunk of stage time, and maybe it’s the lowered expectations from the EA conference, but I thought it went okay overall.

P.S. Mr. Caffeine, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I am thinking of you.