I went to Eurogamer yesterday and thought I'd share my thoughts with you guys. Overall, the event was.... thoroughly underwhelming, to be honest. Yes, it's for the public and yes, it's probably more geared to console gamers than PC gamers. And they're likely to enjoy queueing to see the latest games on the latest consoles. If you're a PC gamer, though, the wow of the graphics was nothing new. I guess it's good that PC and consoles can produce equally good games, but it does detract from the feeling that this is meant to be something better. Most of the PS4 games were not running on PS4 - there were dummy consoles and the controller wires ran out to the back, presumably to a PC. War Thunder (running on such a PC) had horrible physics and my friend said it doesn't run anything like his Steam version. The only game we played on the PS4 itself (with the exception perhaps of a pointless Snake-like drawing demo) was DriveClub, a special 2 lap challenge version. For a game that's weeks away from release, it played horribly. It kept lagging (whenever an event happened like an on-screen message, it froze for a second). I got a fraction of a wheel off the track and span several times, as did my friend who is much more into his driving games. And somehow, I managed to get my car on two wheels, climbing up a wall, by merely going towards the wall! I was not impressed. That said, the controller felt like a vast improvement. The Xbox One looked nice, quite bulky but nice. The controller was nice, quite comfortable. The sticks feel a bit looser than the 360 sticks. However, Forza was not an impressive title to demonstrate with. It looked like a 360 game - like the last Forza. I think the day one pack-in titles are terrible choices - FIFA I guess I can understand to tempt the sports fans, but it doesn't interest me in the slightest. Forza would have been my choice, but after seeing that, I'd rather save my money. Maybe I'll get one when the price has dropped but it's vastly overpriced at the moment. I'd rather put that money towards a nice PC. Incidentally, Gran Turismo 6 looked a lot like Forza. I wasn't overwhelmed, but it's probably a title I'd pick up when it comes down in price, as I like the series (well, I did the earlier titles, anyway). A lot of the games were rehashes. It's depressing that the video games industry is leaning towards just churning out sequel after sequel. To be honest, I loved my GoldenEye, Counter:Strike, Unreal Tournament, Call of Duty etc. but I'm getting bored of the whole genre now. There's only so much shooting people that I can take before it gets boring. Oh look, new COD - it has somewhat different areas and some new guns! Yawn. That said, some of the titles that impressed me the most were nothing new per se, but they were done well. The likes of Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8 and the Zelda titles looked good. My friend was trying to get me to pre-order the last Xbox One in his shop on the train up there. Another friend was trying to tempt me towards the PS4. After what I saw yesterday, I think I'll be leaning towards.... Wii U. I saw Fable Anniversary, the Holiday 2013 build. It was very buggy, but it does show promise. Well hey, Fable was great anyway... remastering it can't be bad! It's somewhat surprising that they're releasing it on 360, though... although from one point of view, nice that all the games are on one platform. Maybe that'll lead to a re-remastering in future! Ryse is supposed to be good, but I didn't get to see it as the queue was HUGE. Which brings me to another point - overall organization. For anyone who has been to a trade-only show in the past, this was poorly executed. There could have been more stuff there. There certainly could have been more freebies. When it's actually a public show with people paying, you'd hope for freebies. And Gamestars Live was an EXCELLENT public show. This just seemed smaller and not as well organized. You had to queue for EVERYTHING. I'm pretty sure they geared it towards you having to buy a full weekend pass for more money. Microsoft had a competition to win prizes, such as an Xbox One. You got a card given to you at whatever game you chose to preview, stamped. It has ten games on it, you can get a stamp for each game. The more stamps you get, the more chance you have of winning. Sounds good, right? Well, actually - no! Firstly, you have to queue a good hour to see each game, plus the time playing it. Yesterday was 10 hours long, although our tickets only got us in for the last five hours. Which makes it impossible to get many stamps in a day. Furthermore, the draws are made on the hour, every hour. And you have to have handed your card in to enter. So you have to decide whether to just enter, or try to build those points up. Plus you have to actually be there to hear the prize draw and redeem it. So basically, you have to spend two days on the Microsoft stands queueing to be able to enter the draw on the third day! Some of the Microsoft stands were open, so you could see the screens, but others (e.g. Ryse, Fable) were in a room. Sony had a slightly better system, in that they made you queue to enter their area. There was a giant screen showing demos and behind the scenes stuff (including a video showing developers working on Little Big Planet) to keep you entertained in the queue, but it was a lot of standing around with nowhere to sit. I think possibly Microsoft had a line for those with disabilities, as some people in wheelchairs and crutches went ahead of us from a small adjacent line. I don't think Sony had that facility, but I could be wrong. The queue was in the usual snaking barriers. A nice feature was three PS Vita stations at each end, allowing you to try out some games. However, they were a bad choice of games for a moving queue as they had long load times... I didn't get to actually play anything! They then had a PS4 in a cabinet on the last corner to ooh and aah over. On the final straight, you got handed a lanyard and two tickets - each being redeemable for one game from a list. Sounded disappointing that we were being limited, but I think that may have been for the challenge games. There were still pods that you could play other titles on, so it was quite good. You had to re-queue for the 18+ area, though. They really need to do something to cut down the queues - perhaps have more going on so there would be shorter queues, at least for some games. And, considering we don't really have trade events over here any more, they should have made one day dedicated to press and trade only. In fact, yesterday WAS originally press only, but I think they opened it up when tickets sold out. And, as I said, there really should have been more freebies. I came out with a Turtle Beach bracelet. I saw some people with posters. And a few had Fable t-shirts - God knows how they got those. I overheard a Microsoft representative on the Fable stand say "we've given out our quota for today" so maybe he was talking about t-shirts and they gave them out early. Overall, I wasn't that impressed with the event, or the titles coming out. I was more impressed with the stuff coming out for the older consoles (Fable and the Nintendo stuff) than anything. Bit sad, really. Oh, and the Oculus Rift was very interesting... particularly in conjunction with the Virtuality-esque OMNI treadmill! I didn't get to see the VRX iMotion up close, but it looked good from the top floor! Pics to follow soon.
To touch on what Yakumo said in another thread that I've already said here.... Thing is, you CAN'T say it's Nintendo who do this. Name a publisher who DON'T. This expo had the likes of Battlefield 4 [EA], Dead Rising 3 [Microsoft], Call of Duty: Ghosts (technically COD 10) [Activision], Elder Scrolls Online (technically Elder Scrolls 8) [Bethesda], Just Dance 2014 (technically Just Dance 5) [Ubisoft], Gran Turismo 6 [Sony], Forza 5 [Microsoft again] and The Sims 4 [EA again].
Good wrap-up retro. It's comforting to know I'm not the only one getting disillusioned with today's gaming scene.
Good read. Glad to see the Wii U getting some love. If not for Crimson Dragon all of my most anticipated titles would be Wii U releases this year in fact (Sonic Lost Worlds, SM3DW).
None of the new consoles have anything that'd get me to buy them on release, even though I do love Forza. The upcoming Wii U games don't interest me either, except maybe for SM3DW: Sonic Lost Worlds has a big chance of sucking, and Mario Kart will be the same item lottery shit as every game in the series since Double Dash. Hell, they should just simplify things by removing that pesky "gameplay" and give each player some items at random - the one who gets the best items wins.
Maybe that's why we both have retro in our user names! It's a real shame. If I think back, there haven't been that many console releases that have excited me for a long time. I pre-ordered a Dreamcast and a Wii. The Wii was the first console that excited me with its concept in a long while - it really offered something new. Sadly, it hasn't delivered quite as well as it should have... and the same goes for the Wii U. I haven't bought one yet and didn't have the same enthusiasm as it's nothing really new, although I like the controller concept. That said, the games at the show did look good. It's funny that the Nintendo games got me excited, when they're just the umpteenth release in a long line of those titles. I think it's because there's a nostalgia there - I played Mario and Zelda as a child, I grew up with them. Mario Kart was an amazing release - both on SNES and Nintendo 64. And seeing Mario, Mario Kart and Zelda in 3D on the Nintendo 64 were amazing experiences. It showed me that the future of video games was on a whole new level to what we had experienced before. Conversely, the new consoles themselves don't have any amazing new features. A lot of the launch titles are number x in a series. Whilst I do enjoy some of those series, II can't say I get excited about these new games. Maybe they're churning them out too quickly nowadays. And some of them didn't look THAT different to their predecessors. I'd love to see games based more on expansions. Perfect the base game, then release new levels, maps, quests, cars, songs... whatever it is that people expect from the next game. I'd have been happy to buy packs for Guitar Hero 3 for a good while, but they had to release new titles and change them in ways that I didn't always feel were for the better. And I don't understand the whole football thing (soccer to you Americans) - OK, I'm not a fan of football so that plays a bit part. It seems that FIFA is the preferred game one year, then Pro Evo the next. Surely they could stick to whatever worked, then release a pack for the new season - updating the players and uniforms, etc. Is there really THAT much more that you can add to a game where 22 players run around a field kicking a ball?
