The 2007 holiday season has repeatedly been cited as the first ‘real’ battle in the next generation war. It will be the first holiday season where all three consoles should be available in abundance, leaving consumers to make purchasing decisions based solely on price, game library, and complementary feature sets instead of forcing them to settle for whatever they can find on store shelves. Poised for that battle, Microsoft focused their entire press conference towards pushing the strength of their 2007 lineup. The result was a solid if unexciting affair filled with impressive games most of us were expecting or had already seen, and little in the way of new information to build hype toward the future.
Peter Moore teased that one of the more exciting rumors circulating the web – that Microsoft had snagged the anticipated music game as a timed exclusive – might be true when he introduced Harmonix and joined them in a live demonstration of Rock Band. However, no official announcement was made to that effect. Exclusive or not, Rock Band is exactly the type of mainstream-friendly fair that Microsoft needs more of in order to expand the 360’s user-base beyond the hardcore set. The newly announced Viva Pinata Party Animals, on the other hand, came off as a poor attempt to flesh out the Xbox 360 library. It’s an obvious answer to Mario Party on the Wii, and quite frankly that game didn’t deserve an answer in the first place. Titles like Rock Band offer alternative gameplay experiences that are appealing and accessible to all types of gamers and non-gamers, without resorting to shallow mini-games.
Microsoft followed up the announcement of Viva Pinata Party Animals with a new trailer for Mass Effect and confirmation that the highly anticipated RPG would be released before the end of this year. The trailer showcased visuals that were noticeably more polished than the last time we saw the game, but still had some noticeable framerate issues. The gameplay sequences shown did a great job of getting across the epic nature of the storyline and the intensity of the real-time battles. We’re as excited to play Bioware’s space opera as anyone else, but one has to question the wisdom of adding yet another major title to an already-packed holiday season. Never mind sure-fire million-sellers like Halo 3 and GTA4, Microsoft has not one, not two, but three massive RPGs slated for release later this year. Most gamers operate on some semblance of a budget and probably won’t be able to buy all three games – they’ll have to choose the RPG they want most. In our estimation Microsoft would be better served to spread out the release of their major RPGs to ensure fans of the genre have both the money and time to enjoy them all. They already have Halo 3 set for release this holiday season anyway – they should give their first party killer-apps some breathing room. We all remember what happened to MechAssault 2 after releasing a mere month behind the behemoth Halo 2.
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Xbox Live was the next topic of discussion, but unfortunately Microsoft never touched the one issue on most gamers’ minds – the pricing structure. Microsoft is still light years ahead of the competition in terms of online functionality, but the service isn’t without its problems. First and foremost among them is the lack of dedicated servers, a shortcoming that has caused a great many Gears of War players a great deal of frustration thanks to dreaded ‘host advantage’. Furthermore, with Sony and ostensibly Nintendo both offering free online services – the former of which is also offering dedicated servers – it seems now would be the time to push Xbox Live to the next level to keep the gap between the competing online platforms from closing. The unveiling of new Xbox Live Arcade titles and additional offerings on the video marketplace are welcome, but let’s not forget the Xbox 360 is supposedly a games console first and foremost, and most gamers probably consider an enjoyable online game experience a first priority.
Bizarre Creations gave a live demonstration of PGR4 and the game looks simply stunning. The texture work is insanely detailed and the weather effects border on photorealistic. The demonstration focused on the inclusion of motorcycles and the variety of maneuvers that crotch-rocket junkies can pull off in order to accumulate kudos points. The last game that tried to pit bikes and cars against each other, Test Drive Unlimited, didn’t do a particularly great job with the physics for the motorcycles, but hopefully Bizarre Creations will be able to make the bikes feel significantly different from the cars and make them fun to drive. Nothing would beat the rush of slicing through a pack of cars on a crotch-rocket. Microsoft continued the first-party parade with a new trailer of Lost Odyssey that featured far more visual variety than the drab grey-hued demo shown last year at TGS. That story seems standard fare for a Sakaguchi RPG – it centers around an amnesiac main character that must rediscover his past to save the world. Yawn. Unfortunately, the battles still looked brutally slow, especially when the gameplay footage was bookended by CG action sequences. Hopefully we’ll learn more about the battle system over the course of the week and see if there’s more to it.
Third party efforts were definitely the high point of the show. Ubisoft’s Naruto action/adventure looks quite good, but the gameplay came off as rather simplistic. Microsoft touted the average age of the show’s fans between 8 and 14, so that’s probably the audience Ubisoft is aiming for, and really Microsoft needs more quality games aimed at a younger audience. It looks as though it will please fans of the show, but hopefully it will be deep and challenging enough for older fans of the action/adventure genre. If not, well, there’s always Assassin’s Creed, which looked stunning despite a slightly choppy framerate. Jerusalem is HUGE and completely explorable, as players can make their way up and down any building however they see fit. The combat looked interesting, focusing on counterattacks and parries, which seems like a good way of preventing the action from devolving into unsatisfying button-mashing frenzies. Too bad the enemy AI on display was dumber than a sack of hammers, as enemies would patiently wait their turn to attack the player, even when they had him surrounded. The most impressive element of the game is the crowd dynamics – violently shoving beggars that get in the way, shoving citizens to the side in the midst of a chase through the streets, blending in with the crowd to avoid suspicion, it all appears to work brilliantly.
Infinity Ward damn near stole the show with their live demonstration of Call of Duty 4. The visuals in the game are nothing short of spectacular, with huge environments filled with vegetation, detailed textures on everything from the walls to the knitting of the player’s gloves, and some of the most realistic and atmosphere lighting we’ve seen this side of Crysis. The surround sound setup of the event certainly didn’t go unnoticed either, even if we felt like we were going deaf by the second explosion. Every person in the audience was itching to get their hands on the game by the time the demo ended, and were understandably elated to hear that Xbox 360 owners would have the chance to participate in a multiplayer beta. For the first time in a very long time, we’re excited about a Call of Duty title. As amazing as Call of Duty 4 was, it was the surprise revelation of a Resident Evil 5 trailer that everyone would be talking about when the show ended. The trailer was rendered in real-time but showed no actual gameplay. If there were any doubts that the North African local Capcom had chosen for the game could make for a suitably creepy atmosphere, this trailer annihilated them. Its hard to say based on what little was shown, but the game seems to veering away from the monsters of old and towards a more human, psychological source of terror. Seeing a child bound to a wall start to bleed from his eyes and scream was chilling.
Being an Xbox 360 channel we’re not going to explore the details of the Games of Windows announcements that Microsoft made, but we would be remiss if we didn’t mention two new pieces of information. First of all, the Unreal Engine 3 will now have Windows Live integration built into the code. Peter Moore didn’t spend too much time talking about this, but he did react to crowd applause by saying it was ‘a big deal’. He’s right. The Unreal Engine 3 is arguably the most impressive graphics engine out there right now (only Crytek’s latest engine tops it), and various companies from all over the world are licensing it to save on time and money. If every game that uses the engine now has Windows Live and (hopefully) cross-platform support built into it, it would almost certainly increase the number of users making use of the service. Nice move Microsoft, now if you could just get over the idea of charging PC gamers to play games online…
Then came the least surprising announcement of the show – Gears of War is coming to the PC. Arguments could be made that taking the Xbox 360’s best-selling IP and putting it on another platform can only hurt the 360’s appeal and identity to consumers, but in all honesty it stands to reason that anyone that would have bought a 360 to play the game has already done so by now. While not many 360 owners are likely to resent the game heading to the PC, we think more than a few are going to be downright pissed off that the PC version will come with not one, but FIVE new single-player chapters for PC players to enjoy. Cliffy B provided a live demonstration of a piece of new content, a boss battle against a Brumak – you know, the boss battle that just about every 360 owner who played the game said they would have loved to play. The battle not only looked intense, but arguably looked more fun than any of the boss battles in the 360 campaign. That demonstration, combined with real-time footage of some gorgeous new areas had many Gears of War fans in the audience simultaneously cursing Epic and begging them to offer the content up for download on 360. We’ll try and get some confirmation one way or the other about DLC over the course of the show. We don’t think it’s too much to ask that the 360 owners who put down $60 to help make Gears of War a million seller several times over should get a chance to enjoy the new single-player content.
Finally, and we do mean finally – sitting on concrete steps starts to hurt after awhile – Microsoft ended the show with the game everyone expected them to (except Phil, who was honestly getting worried that Microsoft might not show Halo 3). The graphics in the single-player trailer looked markedly better than those in the multiplayer beta, but the game still doesn’t quite scratch that top tier of visuals on the 360. The HDR lighting was definitely the most impressive aspect of the presentation. More important than the visuals though, the gameplay looked exciting. Battle scenes were filled with activity, tons of infantry troops shooting on the ground, human and alien vehicles strafing through the chaos, gunships circling above, and a gigantic alien construction wreaking havoc before finally submitting in a huge, real-time explosion. This was the kind of chaos and epic scale of battle that gamers were sold on by the Halo 2 advertising campaign but never received from the actual product. Halo 3 seems on track to right those wrongs.
The audience’s reaction to the Halo 3 trailer was dead silence followed by a rapid exit, and perhaps that’s more telling than any summary of the feeling coming out of the conference. Last year Microsoft excited and inspired gaming fans by providing an intelligent long-term vision for the Xbox 360 and the Live brand, and bolstered that vision with announcements of new games for the near and distant future. With the exception of Resident Evil 5, everything at this conference could be seen coming a mile away. Even if everything show was impressive – which, for the most part, was the case – the gaming public has been impressed and excited about those games for months now. Did we really need a conference to sum up what we already knew? We wanted to be blown away by the ambition of Alan Wake made reality, to see Too Human redeem itself, to see if Peter Molyneux could fulfill his promises with Fable 2, and to see if Rare was still trying to earn that 350 million dollar price tag. Instead, we learned that Halo 3 has a single-player campaign, that Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty 4 look great, and that Resident Evil 5 exists. Old news does not make for a particularly enthralling conference. Hopefully Nintendo and Sony can do better.
