E3 2011: We braved Ubisoft's sonic assault of a stand to look at Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Ghost Recon Online, TrackMania 2 and Furious 4.
Ubisoft is a wonderful company made up of great people, who all give to charity, are wonderfully attractive, and rescue puppies from trees. Ubi also flew us over to E3, by the way, and I just want to say now that its generosity is in no way going to affect our appreciation of their wonderful, wonderful games, or the company’s awesomeness.
Ahem...
Regardless of our now established unbiased man-love for the company, we can also safely say that Ubisoft had possibly the loudest stand on the show floor. Between the very interesting Rocksmith and various dance and fitness titles for Kinect, constant loud music practically thumped everyone on the stand into submission. Note for future shows: open demo booths and LOUD ROCK MUSIC make for very difficult interviews!
Moving right along, though, our time on Ubi’s stand was packed with surprises – some good, some, not so good...
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier Future Soldier’s looking more and more like a really solid game, but we were surprised and more than a little disappointed to discover that the game is no longer coming to PC. It seems that Ubi’s made a stealthy decision to keep the game console-focused – hell, even Wikipedia still lists the game as coming to PC!
It’s a real shame. We got to play the game and have a chat to one of the Ubisoft Paris devs, and we’re truly lamenting the loss of this game on PC.
Regardless, we’re still keen to play more. The game’s focus on tight, highly tactical action is complimented by a range of wonderful near-future tech that the devs have modelled on emerging military technologies. Stealth suits, drones, and excellent comms all play a part in making you feel like an absolute hard-arse spec ops soldier, but none more so than the ability to synchronise your fire with AI and co-op team-mates to take down multiple enemies simultaneously. It requires a lot of control to do properly, but when it works it’s fantastic.
The game’s cover-based shooting never feels pushed, either – while some games (*cough*XCOM*cough*) feel like cover has been arbitrarily placed in the environment, Future Soldiers level design feels natural. Even better, not every firefight even calls for the use of cover, so the game’s pacing and variation is richer for it.
Finally, there’s the Gunsmith, arguably the coolest use of Kinect motion control we’ve ever seen. It’s something we’d actually get a Kinect for, in all honesty. We splooged about it in our Ubisoft conference blog, which is convenient, because the SUPERLOUD Ubi stand made the demos of it there pretty tough.
Ghost Recon Online Perhaps this is the reason that Future Soldier isn’t coming to PC – and if that’s the case, we’re almost good with that, because Ghost Recon Online is looking like a prime FPS. In fact, given that it’s going to be entirely free to play, we’re not sure where the catch is... it looks great, has an amazing engine with full AA, anisotropic filtering and even a great lighting engine (apparently the lighting guy hid in his office for a week and added volumetric lighting without telling anyone – I like his moxie), features interesting, class-based action... seriously, where’s the catch?!
We played some and it’s a hoot. It makes EA’s free to play Battlefield release look like a turd.
Various manias Developer Nadeo and Ubisoft are doing some really interesting things around TrackMania2.
For those uninitiated, TrackMania is part over the top racing game, and part world builder. The whole idea is that you can create your own tracks, from simple racing circuits to over the top, stunt-intense mind-benders, then share them online. TrackMania2, which we got to play a bit of (and it’s a hoot!), is only the start, however.
Nadeo’s also working on ShootMania and QuestMania. Both games share the same ideal of player-made content, but focus on FPS and RPG games respectively. With the same robust level building system as TM2, and the ability to not only create levels, but also new building blocks of levels, we’re very interested in seeing how these games go – especially as there’s the possibility to combine the games, which is an intriguing idea. We asked the tame Nadeo guy on the stand (whose name, as far as we could tell, was LOUDGUITARSQUEAL) about mixing and matching Manias, and he said it’s doable, but necessarily good – really? What could be bad about mixing an FPS with a racing RPG?!
Brothers in Arms: Furious 4 Okay, this one we’re just not sure about. Furious 4 is Gearbox’s homage to Inglorious Basterds – it’s brutal first person action, rather than the more sober and realistic combat that Brothers in Arms is known for. It’s a depiction of a Nazi warmachine that’s more Wolfenstein than anything else, complete with jetpack soldiers, weird science and a team of four player characters that’s an extreme case of game stereotyping.
The co-op gameplay pitches four very different character types – the heavy, the shooter, the melee guy etc – and there’s a real focus destroying as much of each level as you can. There’s a distinctly arcade feel to the game’s theatrics.
It looks like it could be fun, but it’s more of a sugary confection than a real meaty experience. Randy Pitchford, at the Ubi press conference, said that Ubi dared Gearbox to push themselves and deliver a new kind of World War II experience – sometimes taking up challenges like that aren’t necessarily a good idea...
Issue: 137 | June, 2012