E3 2015: Ubisoft

So here’s the thing: I can’t decide how much I like Aisha Tyler as a presenter any more. On the plus side it’s Lana Kane on stage telling you about video games she’s seems genuinely excited for, and not that I would ever besmirch the good name of Mr. Caffeine but Tyler felt like a breath of fresh air after some of the disasters of Ubisoft in previous years. On the down side that genuine enthusiasm only means so much when she’s so swept up in all things Ubisoft and when these press conferences are hellbent including plenty of memes. I appreciate that everyone is going to have a different taste in jokes, but this nerd culture thing where humour is just clicking together over-the-top crazy things like kittens and explosions and unicorns isn’t my bag.

Demo too unrealistic, showed online players co-operating.

Our first on-stage demo was For Honor, a game that’s going to live and die heavily on its controls. It can be tough to make melee combat work in a multiplayer, but the pseudo Dark Souls approach to conflicts that we saw in For Honor could genuinely present us with a whole new kind of game. The Crew is getting an update apparently, and they sound serious about it, but the problems with the title seem too deeply embedded in the gameplay for a fresh coat of paint to fix them. I found myself a bit underwhelmed by The Division. It feels like they’ve been dragging the reveal of this one out for years and I think we’ve all been waiting to see what the hook is meant to be without ever finding one. Maybe there’s a decent TPS RPG in here, but we’re told this is a game where anything can happen and seeing no return on that promise. One basic contradiction in a demo like The Division's is that they're trying to give you an idea of the organic interactions that will arise in the game, but doing it in an entirely scripted setting.

I’ve never played an Anno game, but the trailer for Anno 2205 has me intrigued. I really like the architecture of those sci-fi cities. I almost thought we were going to get out of this one without a song and dance number but there was Jason Derulo with some hot moves and questionable use of the mic. I’m still trying to puzzle performances like that one out in my head. What is the overlap between the people who watch E3 and fans of Jason Derulo? Why of all things was this what the marketers landed on?

At least we'll get to synchronise from the top of Big Ben.

Eventually we made our way through to a new Assassin’s Creed. After the fiasco that was Unity it was clear what had to happen, Ubisoft needed to apologise to fans and assure them that the next time around it would be different. That they wouldn’t get screwed over again and that the developers were capable of avoiding that kind of disaster happening a second time round. But it was like Unity didn’t happen, the cycle just marched onwards, and honestly I think it’s likely they can’t guarantee that same thing won’t happen again. They’re still on that yearly development schedule and the sad thing is that even if this next game is 99.9% glitch-free it sounds like it’s still returning to the same blueprint we know all too well by now. We’ve seen eight main games in the Assassin’s Creed series in eight years and they can’t keep marching to the same beat. Ubisoft's final game was a new Ghost Recon which a lot of people understandably speculated might be a new Call of Juarez at first. I don’t find myself that wowed by guns and cocaine alone, but there might be a mechanically fine game in there. All in all not a great conference, but props to Ubisoft for having women and people of colour on stage.