E3 2013: Day 0 Discussion Thread

[Leftos]

Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft are all having their pre-E3 press conferences today. Microsoft has to try and turn people around by showcasing the so far unannounced console exclusives they have, Sony just has to not mention they'll be enabling every publisher to use their NFC patent filed in January, EA will be showcasing its next-gen games and the Ignite Engine, and Ubisoft has Watch Dogs, South Park RPG, Order of the Stick, Rayman Legends, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, according to Ars Technica.

Speaking of Ars Technica, if for whatever reason you can't watch the video streams presented by SpikeTV, I suggest the former's live-blogs which I've always loved.

So, feel free to give your predictions on what happens today, and discuss all the events as they happen. We'll be keeping notes of your comments and mentioning them in our series of daily hourly podcasts starting with the first one recorded after E3's Day 1 eve.

Microsoft: 9:30 PDT - 16:30 GMT /// Live-blog by Leftos
Summary: Xbox One coming in November 2013, $499/499 euros/429 pounds. For details about exclusive and non-exclusive games showcased, read the live-blog linked above.
Pre-Order: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CMQTVK0/

EA: 13:00 PDT - 20:00 GMT

Ubisoft: 15:00 PDT - 22:00 GMT

Sony: 18:00 PDT - 1:00 GMT

[Leftos]

Microsoft Press Conference

Live-blog by Ars Technica's Kyle Orland and Andrew Cunningham:
http://live.arstechnica.com/microsofts- ... onference/

My Live-blog (all times GMT+3):
7:22pm: It has been announced that the Xbox One will be coming in November. Guess the ad that accidentally showed up saying that Call of Duty: Ghosts was coming to Xbox One November 5 was true after all.
7:39pm: Metal Gear Solid goes open-world.
7:40pm: In the next-gen, female snipers still just wear a bra. Why the hell wear more? The song mentioned her name and made a comment about her just as she was appearing on-screen. Reminds me of video parodies of things like this.
7:45pm: 5 months before the release of the Xbox One, a new 360 is available, starting today. Xbox Live Gold will offer two free games a month starting today. Free games will be pre-determined.
7:47pm: World of Tanks 360 Edition.
7:49pm: WoT360 coming this Summer, Free-To-Play.
7:51pm: Max: The Curse of Brotherhood also coming to the 360 (Pixar-like platformer), Dark Souls.
7:52pm: Time to see some Xbox One things. "Microsoft is investing in studios around the world to build next-gen games."
7:55pm: RYSE: Son of Rome (TPS), showcases a D-Day level gameplay.
7:57pm: Scratch that. So many quick-time events it's not even funny.
7:59pm: Someone's actually playing the game. As in, pressing buttons as the prompts come up. This game is all QTE.
8:01pm: CryTek made this. Xbox One Exclusive at Launch.
8:02pm: Killer Instinct coming only to the One.
8:03pm: Insomniac's Sunset Overdrive is a "living world game" that can be updated "every day".
8:04pm: Insomniac is a first-party dev. Sunset Overdrive has Pixar-like graphics, is a shooter.
8:06pm: Forza Motorsport 5 showcase, talks up McLaren a lot, real McLaren car shows up on stage.
8:08pm: Xbox One's cloud connectivity means "the end of AI". Forza 5 learns how you drive by gathering a lot of data, can drive like you on its own, can match you better against other players, and the AI will actually be based on user-profiles in the cloud, instead of what the developers would program themselves.
8:12pm: Imagine that applied to other games, where instead of having the developer-programmed AI, you can download other AI personalities. We could collectively build great AI. Or a terrible one.
8:14pm: Minecraft comes to Xbox One. Console users might finally get maps that approach the PC ones.
8:14pm: Quantum Break will be a TV show that will be controlled by your choices, giving you your own version of it. So like any other interactive adventure, but with a lot of real footage as well.
8:16pm: Time is frozen, hero pulls a scientist out of a frozen explosion.
8:17pm: D4 is a cell-shaded episodic murder mystery. The trailer was 10 seconds long, showed literally nothing.
8:18pm: Studio wants to give the game creation fun to everyone: Project Spark. Users will create games (creation seems to be lead via Kinect), will be able to share with the world. SmartGlass can be used to edit the detail after editing the base with Kinect. You can add behaviors (basic or as detailed as you want (line by line)) to any object.
8:21pm: They use a community-built stage that took 3 days to build, even while you play you can transform the environment and characters around you. "Rockman" became a huge "Rock-mech" to fight a horde of goblins attacking the village. Looks VERY cool.
8:28pm: LIVE streaming to Twitch.tv. Ability to record and upload game footage after the fact.
8:29pm: No more Microsoft Points, local currency only.
8:30pm: Xbox Live Gold Membership applies to the whole family. No cap on number of friends.
8:31pm: Dead Rising 3, open-world zombie game.
8:33pm: Anything and everything can be used as a weapon, just like previous DR games. "Rich open-world, no loading times."
8:36pm: Hammer-chainsaw. HAMMER-CHAINSAW. Goes over a ton of zombies in a car, too many of them with too low speed nearly stop them, a zombie tries to grab him from the window.
8:37pm: Uses SmartGlass to call for artillery support. Why not do this with the controller? Maybe a map that shows on SmartGlass allowing you to have it running at the same time as the game, so you can just touch on the spot you want to drop bombs without pausing?
8:38pm: Guy presenting Witcher 3 is awkward as hell. "YOU GUYS ROCK!" pointed to the audience, almost no reaction whatsoever. "Witcher 3 is coming to the Xbox One", no reaction whatsoever.
8:39pm: Witcher 3 will utilize Kinect for quick switching and spell-casting, SmartGlass for inventory management.
8:42pm: EA and DICE have the floor. Battlefield 4, constant 60fps on the One.
8:43pm: Awkward silence for half a minute as the Battlefield 4 trailer freezes the first time. Soderlund must have died, went to hell and back in those moments. Battlefield 4 is coming FIRST to the Xbox One. Timed exclusive then?
8:45pm: Battlefield 4 is showcasing single-player campaign gameplay. Does this mean it will finally have a proper campaign?
@pastapadre: I'll rehash my joke from earlier. The Battlefield 4 trailer won't play because the Xbox One hasn't connected online recently enough!!!
@DrPizza: NB: Battlefield 4 not Xbone exclusive, will look better on PC, so play it on PC.
8:49pm: Apparently small developers have an advantage when developing EXCLUSIVELY for the Xbox One (makes sense, small developers can't spend that many resources in developing for multiple platforms, but that's just marketing talk; they'd rather have the game on both platforms unless you're throwing enough money at them not to). Game in point? A rogue-like. What?
8:51pm: Investment in 5 brand-new franchises exclusive to Xbox One. Black Tusk in Vancouver is working on a new AAA game.
8:53pm: Trailer showed nothing. Another studio now. Wind over a desert, person wearing rags walking through. Big explosion in desert, huge robot-thing shows up in the middle of it all, person's holding dog-tags, robot sneezes, sneeze pulls off hood-rag, it's a Halo soldier (Master Chief?). Halo: 2014.
8:54pm: Halo: Something Assault will be a Windows 8, WIndows Phone, Surface exclusive. Top-down game supposed to be touch friendly with dual-sticks. So not user-friendly.
8:56pm: Holy shitsnacks. $499?! It's launching in 21 countries at the same time.
8:57pm: 499 euros. Still makes it 90 euros more expensive in Europe after California Tax (8.75%).
9:00pm: Clould-compute still feels like "we couldn't put good enough hardware on there". Whenever cloud's down, where do those features go, since framerate's not supposed to drop?
9:01pm: TitanFall's being showcased. Can't say I'm impressed by its engine. Doesn't look more impressive graphics-wise than anything we've had this current-gen, but maybe I'm PC-spoiled.
9:05pm: TitanFall is a mixture of soldier FPS and mech FPS, as in you can get in and out of mechs at will while fighting.
9:05pm: It's coming out Spring 2014, exclusively on the One.
9:07pm: 10 minutes later, the price hasn't dropped. $499, 499 euros, 429 pounds. Shaft, meet every market that's not the US one.
9:08pm: And this marks the end of my Microsoft Press Conference live-blog. Hope you enjoyed! See you in the thread.

[shadowgrin]

lol World of Tanks being F2P. Breaking! Thanks MS!


Nice job on the comments
You could just skip the time stamps from your typing so your train of thought will go much faster, smoother, and more natural.
That's what she said.

Forza 5 learns how you drive by gathering a lot of data, can drive like you on its own, can match you better against other players, and the AI will actually be based on user-profiles in the cloud, instead of what the developers would program themselves.

A 'lite' version of that is similar to the one found in Real Racing 3. Time-Shifted Multiplayer (TSM) as they call it. RR3 under EA.
EA should get their shite together and combine each of their studios online multiplayer AI knowledge, something like combining the processes of Real AI (NBA Jam), TSM, and from their other sports games like FIFA.


Titan Fall's engine is based on a modified Source. So yeah, don't expect 'next-gen' graphics since Source is pretty much old.

[JaoSming]

Just, nothankyou to the Xbone. I only liked Forza, which seemed like a new game experience and not just pretty graphics, and that price point, ugh. Add games, plus XBL Gold, plus controllers, plus whatever the fuck else....ugh....Kinect aint worth it for me

[chicagoRAW]

I liked Ryse and Titanfall looked cool.

Here's the new 360 ( ) .

[Leftos]

Forgot to close the GameTrailers stream after the Microsoft Press Conference ended, ended up watching a CryTek producer awkwardly try to justify a game that's all QTE as having an "innovative control scheme". Yeeeeeah, nope.

[Jackal]

Just, nothankyou to the Xbone.

This.

[Leftos]

Day 0 will include first looks at both NBA 2K14 and NBA Live 14 after all. Live 14 will be part of EA's Press Conference, and 2K14 next-gen will be given a first look during Sony's Press Conference.

[Sauru]

the microsoft conference had a couple games that i would play but nothing that made me say "hell yeah i will pay 500 bucks to play that". in fact nothing was good enough for me to pay the new game price for it. i am now curious about the sony conference as i really want to know where they are at with the price

[JaoSming]

NFS Rivals at least looked like a NG game, BF4 multiplayer looked insane in its scale, and mo fuckin Battlefront bitcheszzzz, and Mirror's Edge 2, cmon

As for Madden/Live/FIFA/UFC.....nothing selling me on Next Gen, that is for sure. Madden looked NG, FIFA looked like PC, and UFC/Live went CG on us again.

I'm done until Sony.

[Leftos]

But... but... Ubisoft has Rayman Legents! It has South Park RPG! AREN'T YOU INTERESTED?!

[Sauru]

EA had too much sports going on. the entire thing was a bit of a let down for me. the good news is you can dribble in nba live 14 so we got that to look forward to at least

[benji]

Where's the liveblogs of EA and Ubisoft?

[benji]

Ubisoft liveblog:
#girlwood

[Leftos]

I was about to ask you the same thing. Where's the EA live-blog, benji?

[benji]

The Crew = open world United States from Driver team...all over mai face, better come to PC

[chicagoRAW]

Compared to this Ubisoft crap, EA was decent.

[benji]

Trials Fusion for 360/PC/PS4/XBone and Trials Frontier for moble, both 2014

[Leftos]

The Crew sounds awesome, hope it comes to PC. As for Trials, I'm really happy to see them announce PC from the start. Guess Trials Evolution: Gold Edition did well.

[benji]

this unnamed game looks pretty hott

EDIT: TOM CLANCY'S THE DIVISION
ONLINE OPEN WORLD RPG

[Jackal]

The Division and the Crew looked AMAZING.

[Leftos]

phpBB [video]

[Andrew]

If the Xbox One is going to be $499 US/499 euros/£429, I'm guessing it'll be approaching $1000 AUS. The PlayStation 4 is likely to be in the same ballpark, but so far they've offered a little more incentive to spend that much on a new console. Microsoft? Not so much.

[benji]

rumor is PS4 will come in three different models ranging from $399-$599

phpBB [video]

[chicagoRAW]

rumor is PS4 will come in three different models ranging from $399-$599

Yup.

http://www.gamespot.com/e3/sony-to-rele ... t-6409624/

If the Xbox One is going to be $499 US/499 euros/£429, I'm guessing it'll be approaching $1000 AUS. The PlayStation 4 is likely to be in the same ballpark, but so far they've offered a little more incentive to spend that much on a new console. Microsoft? Not so much.

I Haven't seen anything from XboxOne to want to spend $500 on it.