N00basaurus Inspects E3 Part 3: A Dynamic Change in Microsoft

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Watching through Microsoft’s Xbox One presentation, I was actually caught off guard.  Unlike previous years of E3 madness, this year, Microsoft and its console, Xbox, focused on its games.  It was a different change, it was a welcomed change.  A breath of fresh new life into the Xbox universe.

Microsoft’s XBox in the Heavyweight Division:

The presentation starts with Halo 5: Guardians I’m… kind of conflicted with the information that we were given.  On one hand, it’s doing something that I love about the Halo series as a whole, back when Bungie Studios was still making them.  That is, the focus on the first person story.  Halo 4 felt lacking and and rife with bad and cheap writing.  On top of that, the story felt like it was just kind of tacked on at the last minuet to a multiplayer only experience.

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One of the things that I am hesitant about in Halo 5 is the Hollywood star studded cast that they are pushing.  I mean, seeing Nathan Fillion as a super soldier and the return of Keith David as the Arbiter will be amazing… but I worry that they might accidentally fall into the the Call of Duty: Ghost issue, where, in Call of Duty: Ghost, the developer studio spent all their money getting Kevin Spacey and then the rest of the project suffered due to lack of development.

I will say that from what they mentioned in the presentation, that you get to play two different squadrons of spartan soldiers, is kind of interesting. Though, I am severely disappointed that you don’t get to choose to play as the Arbiter or some other alien like you did in previous Halos (Halo 2 specifically).  It just seems as a lost opportunity to give another layer of depth to the story and gameplay.  Another thing that still bugs me is that they are going with that awful “History Channel Presents: Ancient Aliens” reveal in Halo 4.

[su_spoiler title=”Halo 4 Plot Spoiler” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron”]The evil aliens that died out billions of years ago. The big ancient beings that created the space ring system that control the outbreaks of space zombies by killing the zombie’s food source, I.E. all life in the galaxy, are JUST HUMANS! The lack of creativity in that decision… it still bugs me.[/su_spoiler]

I also don’t like the design decision that they ripped from the Avatar films, that is, the when an alien roars at you, the creature’s face pulls back and shows the skull underneath.  [su_spoiler title=”Halo 4 Plot Spoiler” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron”]Their human skulls… I just can’t let that go… it’s terrible.

Could you imagine an Aliens movie where instead of the monsters being strange alien beings from outer space, they are just an ancient race of humans? Can you imagine how much of a letdown of the plot that would be!? [/su_spoiler]

One of the other issues that I had with Halo 4, was that the levels were bland and devoid of color, as were the enemies.  If you have brown dust and dirt desert plus brown dust and dirt colored enemies, it becomes a little too much like the terrible John Carter movie by Disney. This new Halo looked quite pretty in the game play trailer.  Bright vivid colors abound, even in their dust and dirt maps, there were brightly colored buildings dotting the landscape here and there.  Everything had lights and flashing visual aesthetics.  It just looks pretty.  Well done, Microsoft, well done indeed.

They showed some sort of flashes of the multiplayer, and along with the the usual “red vs blue” that Halo multiplayer is iconic for, it also looks like various AI enemies populate the map.  This does two very unique and interesting things.  For one, it gives the maps a feeling of organic flow.  That is to say, previous Halo maps, being devoid and empty, were just that.  Giant blank and empty spaces with not much going on.  But adding AI non player characters to the mix, adds a special feel of population to the map.  It wasn’t some strange ghost town, but an actual “place” with purpose.

The other thing that adding AI into massive multiplayer battles, is that it now forces players to be more actively aware of their surroundings than ever before.  In doing so, it adds to the level of immersion and tension as you battle against your human counterparts.  It is an interesting and welcome change, and I’m excited to see how that plays out.  Also, they sort of teased that you can be more than just the Spartans.  I know that they did that in Halo: Reach by allowing you to choose between being an elite (one of the larger alien species) or a Spartan (the human super soldiers), but it never really got any more diverse than that.  In the trailer for Halo 5, you see some red teamed colored hunters, the big shield bearing plasma projector wielding lumbering juggernauts gearing up in brief sizzle reel cutaways.  If those are playable, Halo 5 will be the deep immersive halo experience that Halo has longed for for quite a long while now.

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The next Xbox gold standard game is a game that, well, I have mixed feeling about as well.  Gears of War 4.  Gears of War has always been a sort of dirt and dust covered humans in brown armor fighting dirt and dust covered aliens in a dark brown ruined landscape dotted with hip high walls.  Its biggest innovation, or rather, its most iconic innovation, was the chainsaw bayonet that is very akin to another company’s “Space Marine” style of weapons.  The first game had some interesting takes on how hopeless life would be if evil aliens invaded and won against humanity.  They also added good mechanics for a co-op player experience.  One of my favorite co-op scenes was one where I had to man a spotlight in the dead of night and use it to guide my friend through buildings across the street.  Else, if he step into the shadow, he’d be eaten alive by light averse bats.

Gears of War 2 and 3 were kind of terrible, in my opinion.  The writing was not very good in the story modes, which included one where you teleport from place to place without any sort of indication of why you are there or let alone where you are.  One moment you’re in the belly of a worm where the spice must flow and the next level you are in a mad scientist lab.  The only transition you have is a blank loading screen… it was pretty bad.

From the video, Gears of War 4 looks awesome.  From the colors in the game, which is one of the things I always disliked about the franchise’s usual drab shades of brown, were bright, vivid, and contrasting even in shadow and darkness, to the interaction between characters.  I’m really hoping that having the two characters means that they are going to do another game where you can co-op with a friend (hopefully both local and online).  That would be glorious.  Plus I think this is the first Gears of War where a female is a soldier on the front ranks.  Instead of being someone’s wife who’s been turned into a zombie… or just being the annoying voice that held your hand as if the entire game was a tutorial on how to play it.  This is a welcome change, and I’m very interested in seeing how it plays out!

Next up:

Fable Legends.  Talking to a bunch of my fellow students, apparently I’m in the odd minority of Fable fans.  I dislike Fable 2 but I absolutely love Fable 3.  I just felt that the story was better written for the most part (though the endings of both games left much to be desired).  Fable Legends… I’m not sure what to think about.  It seems to focus entirely on multiplayer.  They have role playing elements, first person shooter elements, and even top down RTS elements happening at the same time.  I don’t know if there’s going to even be a story within in… it’s just simply too far away from launch to really tell.  But it looks pretty, so that’s something.

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I do like, however, that you can play it on both Xbox One as well as the new operating system due out this year, Windows 10.  They are also cross platform, so those on the PC, running Windows 10, can play with Xbox One players.  It will be interesting to see if they can pull off a project with such high ambitions.  Lionhead studios has come a long way since Black and White.

Rise of the Tomb Raider.  Yet another Tomb Raider.  Tomb Raider is one of those games that got its start around a sort of super sexist masochistic response to the question “what would a woman be like an an archaeologist?” and which the answer to that question was simply “Buxom”.  I’ve never liked the Tomb Raider games because of it.  It always seemed like some perverse snuff film where you watch a large chested woman be killed in the most horrific of ways.   That has been my opinion for pretty much all of the Tomb Raider series, up until recently.  You still have the horrific death scenes, but the character has slowly and over a short amount time become more and more of a natural character rather than some overtly chesty sex symbol.  Especially in this version.  I still think she is a little too… unscathed for the role for which she is playing, but at least she’s not half naked.  A step in the right direction for the gaming industry as a whole.

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And Then There’s Rare:

So Microsoft now owns Rare.  Rare is apparently not dead like everyone has been musing.

First, to celebrate 30 years of Rare development, Microsoft is releasing a compilation disk that hosts 30 games from Rare’s past that date all the way back to the studio’s inception with the title, Rare Replay.  Who doesn’t like them some Battle Toads?  It includes favorites like Banjo and Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and Perfect Dark, classics both 2D and 3D.  Glorious.

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On top of their past successes (offshoot former Rare employee studio’s Kickstarter notwithstanding) Rare is making some sort of a pirate themed MMORPG called Sea of Thieves.  Although we don’t really know much about it at this point, it looks pretty great!  There have been several pirate MMOs in the past, and most of them have been squalor pits of micro-transaction nightmares, poorly made, dreadfully animated, and just all around bad.  In Rare’s short E3 video, (other than the micro-transaction part) they kind of put all of those other issues that plague pirate MMO’s to rest.  Like everything Rare touches, the world is beautiful and very aesthetically wonderful.  Time will tell if it caries any weight other than visuals, however.

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Oh, my, the cannon fights!  Though… like always, I hope that they will introduce non-human model characters along with the overly common standard human ones that they show in the trailer.  Sea of Thieves is something to watch for indeed.

 

Some brief mentions:

Xbox One is getting two new Tom Clancy games.  Tactical based military shooters with large fan bases.  The Division had some interesting story plot with the whole “everyone’s dead because weaponized viruses suck” plot line, but I’m still just not a fan of these kinds of games.  Every year there’s a large smattering of Tom Clancy military shooter games.  It’s very difficult to tell them apart these days.

Same is with Forza Motorsport 6.  Another Forza is coming out, just like last year and the year before that, as well as the year before that one.

Dark Souls III.  We got a teaser trailer for it, but no real substantive information.  So here’s the teaser trailer, enjoy.

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Indie! Indie! Indie!

The Xbox presentation was chock full of indie games.  And not just a tiny little sideshow of “hey, look at our indie games” like E3 console presentations have done in year’s past, but they actually gave these small studio developers floor space on their grand stage to give short presentations about the games they have made, just as if it was a large AAA studio.  I was floored by the number of indie developers and the number of games that Microsoft had brought to their presentation.  Last year and the year before, indie studios were one of the largest things missing from the Xbox One showcase, and now they have learned their lesson and came back in a big way.

I’m not going to go through all of them, since there are so many.  You can watch the full presentation above to get a grasp of what you can look forward to on the Xbox One, however, many of these titles are to come out for the PC as well.

The Microsoft indie games that I am looking forward to are:

Cuphead

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As an animator myself, albeit a terrible one, I’m always entranced by the original old style of 1930’s cartoons.  How the characters moved about on the screen and interacted in their worlds was just absolutely fascinating.  And now there’s a game that mimics just that.  Fantastic!

Gigantic

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This game looks interesting.  I’m really hoping it’s a co-op “go find and kill big monsters” game.  I love how the characters look, though the art style uses far too much of the color red.   This game could go either way, but it probably had the best character design of the entire presentation.  They are all unique and striking as well as very different from one another (save for the color red.  What is it with the color red in this game?)

However, following through the PC Gaming Show, I’m saddened to hear that the game is yet another MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena).  The gaming sphere is becoming completely swarmed and bloated with MOBAS.  It started with Star Craft and War Craft way back when, but now consists of DOTA 2, League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, Smite, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, Star Craft II, Bullet Storm, Overwatch, and now Gigantic.  With a field so over-flooded with MOBAs, it’s going to be incredibly hard to stand out among them.

Tacoma

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It looks like some suspenseful zero G mystery thriller in space.  Cue A Space Odyssey 2001 Hal 9000.  Cool enough, but when the trailer hits the part where the main character enters the password via sign language, I nearly lost it.  That’s WAY cool.

Beyond Eyes

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Using the fluid feel of watercolor paint to demonstrate the world as it changes like a liquid around this blind child according to her sightless perception… I was blown away at the creativity in this game.  Although it doesn’t seem to be as action packed and suspenseful of games that I am generally used to.  It is very easy to see the artistic value in a game such as this.

Things That Made Me Say “Oh!”:

One of the things that Microsoft has struggled with in the past was promoting features of the Xbox One that appeal to gamers.  When the Xbox One was announced, the features were focused pretty much entirely upon having the system take over other systems in your living room.  Your cable box, your video player, your boombox, your gramophone, and that sort of deal.  They focused on things like Netflix and Hulu and other entertainment apps.  But what they forgot to focus on were features that gamers look for in consoles.

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One of these gamer focused features was announced in the very earliest portions of the presentation, and that was backwards compatibility.  This time around, Microsoft has announced that the Xbone will become backwards compatible with the Xbox 360.  Now mind you, it’s not “true” backwards compatibility, it’s select compatibility.  It mostly depends on what games are available on their Xbox Live marketplace.  What happens is, if the system recognizes that you own the game from the Xbox 360 console (by either having it already purchased from the Live marketplace or have the disk of a game that is already up on the Xbox Live marketplace, then it will unlock a copy compatible to the Xbone.  But if the game is not featured on the Xbox Live Marketplace, it is not compatible with Xbone).  So really, it’s a step in the right direction towards bringing in players to the Xbone experience, but time will only tell how well that this move will translate to gamers in the long run.

A feature that I am wholly against, is bringing early access games to the console landscape as Microsoft has proposed that they are doing in the indie showcase.  For those of you who don’t know what early access is, it is a way for a game company to cash in before releasing a game.  The player can purchase a game before it’s fully developed, and in return, the studio gives “early access” to the player, so the player can start playing immediately.  In theory, that’s all fine and dandy.

But here is what happens in reality:  1) The game is so early in development where many of the critical features that are required for the game to function are not implemented in the game that becomes available to the player.  In other words, the game is made available far to early in development to really give the player any sort of positive experience.  In several instances, the game is literally blank.  2) Very few “early access” games have actually left “early access” to become launched titles. What this means is that the game is in a perpetual “Alpha” test (the iteration of a game where it is missing core features and mechanics, but it is still “playable”).  They never really get further development. And worse case scenario 3) Early Access titles open the doors for scammers and “asset flippers” to grab money for little to zero development effort.  4) The game and the developer studio vanish.  Good bye and thanks for all the fish.  You pay for a broken game, and they take your money and disappear, taking the game with them. Expanding this feature to a console… Early Access is used as a cash grab, and I’m not for it.

However, if Microsoft Xbox has a system where they vet games that can be on early access and bar those that try to scam the system in some form or fashion, then maybe I could be persuaded into liking the feature.  At least they are letting you play the game a little bit before deciding whether or not you want to give money to those developers… but still, Early Access is something that is abused too widely for me to pay much attention to it.

Keeping Control:

Keeping in line with the gamer centric presentation, Microsoft announced a new wireless controller for PC.  This is kind of interesting because it is an obvious reply to Vavle’s Haptic Response controller.  The Windows game pad from the Xbox 360 has been the end all when it comes to controllers for the PC.  As an attempt to keep Microsoft’s game controllers at the top, they needed to redesign their Xbox One controller to have features, including increasing the precision but also, for the first time ever, a completely customizable controller, both with programmable button schematics to actual swapable hardware.  It’s interesting to think that the control sticks can have different textured thumb heads and the ever so important D-pad to have different feels and shapes.  Triggers have some sort of lockable “safety switch” that changes how they react when pulled.  And the most strange aspect are the paddles underneath.  I have no idea what controls those paddles will be for.

You Can See and Touch:

Even though I  am not much of a fan of the game Minecraft, it is always interesting to see what Microsoft does with the IP since buying it several years ago.  What they showed at E3, specifically the the semi-VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) glasses, dubbed Hololens, was actually pretty great.

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Augmented reality is something that I’ve always had a great interest in, and I’m glad to see that a large company, such as Microsoft, is on the forefront of consumer innovation.  The most exciting thing about the Hololens is not that it works with Minecraft, or anything they really showed with the Minecraft system.  The most exciting thing is the possibilities for game devs to integrate a sleek AR console, like the Hololens, into their game design.  I can see it now.  Nerds from all over are going to swarm city parks to shoot invisible aliens and other monsters.  Many psychologists will be quite concerned.  The Hololens is probably the best presented VR/AR system shown to the world so far.  Once again, good on you, Microsoft.

My final thoughts: Microsoft had a very impressive E3 presence this year.  Especially after following previously lackluster E3s in the past.  Focusing on the games, focusing on indy, that’s the way you do it.  Even now, I’m thinking about the Xbone and some of the features that would be nice to see on one.  Very well done Microsoft, very well done indeed.

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