Ubisoft E3 conference review

So, my stream wasn't working for the first five-ten minutes or so of this conference and that kind of set the tone for the whole show. This was easily the most disappointing conference so far (which puts it in third place for those playing the home game) as it didn't really reveal anything new or exciting until the very end. So, I do apologise but this is going to be perhaps a bit shorter than my previous blogs about E3 simply because there wasn't all that much to take away from this presentation.

Before I get started, I would like to say that Aisha Tyler tried to pad out this presentation. She joked around a bit, she tried to engage the audience and she succeeded a few times, because she's a talented lady, but the crowd was there for games, and title after title was just "we've seen this before, we've seen this before, we've seen this before." Very little game-play was shown, the trailers were either short or ones previously released....and games were ones that we are all looking forward to but still, the show was very much "yep, here they are, we're still working on them guys." I personally thought they missed a trick by only briefly showing the South Park game The Stick of Truth, but then I suppose it may have been bad form to rub the now defunct THQ's face in losing the IP...but at least it would have been something, the show was very bland and plodding and at times seemed to be unfocused. There were a few exceptions to this however, The Crew (which to me felt quite like Midnight Club or the Burnout series) was mildly interesting, with an on-line world of customisable cars where you can group up with friends and complete missions. The Mighty Quest of Epic Loot looked like a humorous take on the tower defence game, in that you build up defences to your tower then your friends (or strangers, I would assume) can try and break into when you're not on-line and then steal your "loot" that you have stole from other towers whilst not building your own. It was a little disappointing to see such little game-play of Assassin's Creed 4 and not a single drop of Watch Dogs at all (game-play I mean, we were treated to a video trailer) and similarly to see Trials Fusion (yay!) linked to a mobile platform called Trials Frontier (boo!), and the less said about Just Dance 2014...the better.

The Division...up until this point, the whole show would've been completely unremarkable. I was debating over whether to even write up a review of it because it was just regurgitated nonsense and nothing was really exciting, innovative or newsworthy. The Division is what changed that though. It's a third person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic near future, and if I've interpreted it correctly, it is a persistent world survival RPG shooter...which sounds freaking amazing. The game-play that was shown of it was of course, very serious, very much in the style of role play, but you could see the benefits of working in a team, watching each others back as you scavenge the area (it looks to take place in and around New York) looking for food, weapons, first aid and whatever else, whilst avoiding the zombie-like monsters and perhaps the less prominent, but just as deadly rival groups of other players who will be out to steal your gear. It could go very wrong, but I really hope it works out for Ubisoft on this title because so far, despite having the worst show, they've unveiled one  of the best games so far. 

Sorry for it being so short, but really, there's little else to talk about....except for freaking Rabbids on television or whatever the hell that thing was, it was cringe-worthy. Hopefully the Sony show will give me a lot more to write about.