E3 2017: Ubisoft

The Ubisoft press conferences have felt a lack of confidence in their products. The company has had a similar problem to E3's other publishing giant, EA, in that they've had a checklist of casual games and annual franchises that they need to market and inform investors of that don't make for compelling viewing. In hopes of making the medicine go down a little smoother, Ubisoft has distracted us with ever-evolving theatrics. As a trade-off for sitting quietly through the trailers for slight permutations on existing franchises and demos of games we'd already seen at the Microsoft conference, we got a wacky presenter or a cheery dance performance. Of course, this was never going to be able to disguise that what Ubisoft had to show was often just a little too limp and lifeless.

Their desperate grasps for anything that would cut through the grey then became a source of hilarity for all the wrong reasons. Ubisoft's Mr. Caffeine was the publisher at their peak in trying and failing so, so hard to lend some hilarity to their milquetoast business presentation. The show would occasionally hit some real winners in terms of games, but even then, Ubisoft was unable to cash the cheques they were writing in these presentations. Fabrication is a common practice at E3, but this company had made themselves the kings of it. Everyone who watches these pressers should see CrowbCat's comparison of Ubisoft's E3 demos against the final products. The company found an unusually captivating presenter in the form of Aisha Tyler after floundering with it for some time, but she could only work with what she was given, and the calibre of conference Ubisoft was producing was primed to reduce drastically. They had lost Tyler as host, and mechanical diversity is in ever-shorter supply among Ubisoft's line-up. Their various franchises will soon all merge into one ultimate monogame where you and three other frosty operators will climb a tower in ancient Athens, craft that tower into a hang glider, and then use that hang glider to kill a drug-running shark. It seemed like we were in for a rough time with our friends from Montreal.

I'd been waiting through this E3 for a sucker punch from one of the big-name publishers. E3 is great when it shows us good games, but the real draw of the expo is seeing the industry at its most ridiculous and surprising. If you'd have said that Ubisoft would be a contender for the best press conference at this E3, it would have seemed as silly as telling people that Mario has a gun now, but fuck it, it's 2017, Ubisoft is a contender for the best press conference, and Mario has a gun now. We might have known about the existence of Mario + Rabbids prior to the briefing, but we didn't know it would bowl us over like this. E3 trailers that hold back on some crucial detail about the game are now a dime-a-dozen but the Mario + Rabbids reveal worked because you thought you'd already seen the humourous twist on the formula, but it was just getting started. When it did reveal its twist, it wasn't to do with a character or a plot point like every other trailer, but the whole pervading system that the game is built on. A strategy game makes sense as the next step for Mario considering how many genres he's already vacationed in, but at one time it wouldn't have happened. The Mario franchise has branched into platformers, minigame collections, RPGs, block puzzle games, and every kind of sports game imaginable, but strategic thinking is not what Mario games have wanted to inspire in players. They've wanted to remain accessible in their mechanics and immediate in their reward, but we're heading into an era of a new Nintendo. Mario is an iPhone game now, Zelda is more experimental and uses Souls-like dynamics, and following suit, Mario is allowed to have a strategy game with firearms in it.

Ubisoft didn't just go big on the surprises like Mario + Rabbids or Beyond Good & Evil 2; they also showed a lot of self-discipline with the more obvious culprits for killing press conference momentum. The new Just Dance, Assassin's Creed, and South Park were given comparative slivers of time, allowing more unlikely stars to shine through. The only significant relapse to Ubisoft's ways of old was in Skull & Bones which, to be fair to them, was a new IP, it was just a transparent replication of the naval battles in Assassin's Creed IV. Still, you don't get many chances to see a new IP with a demo immediately ready to go. If the demo was representative of the final product then Skull & Bones is a game that is going to live and die on the depth of the choices players can make beyond the core mechanics because those mechanics are already familiar and perhaps a bit wrung out by this point.

It's odd that Skull & Bones was not the only game Ubisoft had in their pocket where you take to the water on a trusty vessel, and even odder that the other game is The Crew 2. There's only so much coast and river throughout the U.S. so how useful they can make the boats as a mode of transport is up for debate. That being said, there's something about the idea of you and a couple of friends cruising through a city, all in different types of vehicles, which could crack the possibilities of an open-world driving game like this wide open. Criterion has a similar project by the name of "Beyond Cars" which doesn't seem like it's going to see the light of day, so maybe this is Ubisoft finishing their job for them. While they're at it, Ubisoft could also bring the controls for The Crew a little further in line with standards for racing games today. I believe The Crew is a game they deserve another crack at because there was a potential in their approach to the map and loot which was never given its wings.

Starlink: Battle For Atlas is not necessarily a game I want to play but one that is fascinating from a business perspective. Toys-to-life games are potentially risky because you're manufacturing a lot of hardware and hoping that customers will buy whole armfuls of physical add-ons for their games. The field is littered with the bodies of the fallen: There is no more U.B. Funkeys, no more Disney Infinity, and there's no new Skylanders this year. These series may be canaries in the coal mine but what if they just represent gaps in the market for the taking? Amiibos still light up the faces of thousands of Nintendo fans and Lego Dimensions thinks player-assembled toys are the way to go. Ubisoft agrees, and Starlink looks to thrive on a physical, tactile version of equipping items in a video game. You can't deny something is exciting about the idea of seeing a gruesome enemy craft, putting a bigger cannon on your toy spaceship, and going to town.

There's Spectrevision's Transference which came across remarkably like another sci-fi horror. Intentionally or not, the impression that Spectrevision is giving is that Transference will rely on the horror that you've never actually left the VR program after you take the headset off. It wouldn't be possible with computer-generated graphics but remember that they said there are making a kind of VR film in here, and if it is what it looks like, they may have gone too far in the name of realism. Horror is appealing to us not just because it scares us but because we can entertain fear while knowing that we're safe. It's why most people think that The Exorcist is good horror entertainment but stepping into traffic is not. If Spectrevision wants to break down the barrier between the real and the virtual then all they're doing is gaslighting players, and that's not just uncomfortable, that's unethical. But maybe I'm making too many guesses about what they have up their sleeve.

Lastly, let's talk about Far Cry 5. The recent Far Cry games are a strong example of AAA games giving the audience no clear direction on what their emotional reaction should be. They are on some level trying to evoke a grave shock in players over the exotic hell they've found themselves in but also want to be buck wild escapist gun fantasies. Far Cry 5 has an interesting premise in that it takes the assumptions we've formed from the series' previous settings and thoroughly questions them. Far Cry's banquets of violence and chaos would only be possible in poorer, more remote countries, right? But if anything, Far Cry 5 looks to show a wholly more gory disaster happening right in the player's back yard. It is the implication that the same kind of endangerment that we may feel by being hunted by a tiger on the Rook Islands, a black person could feel right in the good old U.S. of A. It's empowerment is not from some far-flung tale of killing an impossibly enigmatic bad guy but in the kind of people that actually live in the U.S. taking their home back from a far-right disease within it. It even manages to avoid the common trap of painting every citizen in the American South as a torchbearer for racism, and along with BG&E 2, looks to be a step forwards for the representation of black women in games.

It's no mystery why this may particularly resonate in 2017, but the marketing for this Far Cry has brought about even more tonal confusion than that of previous entries. Early trailers told us, dubiously, that this was a game of hearts bursting open over racist authoritarianism but the E3 trailer went the opposite direction and showed us the glee in classic video game gun violence. It's hard to read the measures on this one, but without proper reinforcement, people are going to assume this is just another big action shooter. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that. Far Cry has long seemed uncomfortable in its own skin, and I want to shake them by the shoulders and tell them "You just be you" because us happily killing white supremacists in this game still means something, even more than us killing Nazis in Wolfenstein means something.

Part of the sunny response to Ubisoft's press conference may well have been because of low expectations, but it provides hope. If Ubisoft can make the kind of 180 from product slog to crowd pleaser that they did then any company can and E3 remains capable of great surprises. Thanks for reading.