Now that everyone’s home and feeling has returned to their feet — just as the con flu starts kicking in — we’ve had a chance to assess the real takeaways from 2013′s Electronic Entertainment Expo.

That’s right — I mean the loot.

Most companies hand out a little something to people who go behind closed doors. Shirts, bags, funny wigs … it gets a little strange out on the show floor sometimes. We can’t claim that we saw and grabbed everything we could, here’s what found its way into our hearts. And our luggage.

Launch the gallery below for swag!

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Producer Stéphane Roy really, really wants to make a great game. This doesn’t come across as arrogance, or pride, or even business. Roy knows he’s responsible for rebooting a legend. He’s carrying that weight.

So it’s not such a huge shock that when we sat down at a special pre-E3 event, he got out the first three questions before I even turned on my recorder. Roy wanted feedback. I’d seen an early build of Thief (releasing in 2014 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) just a few months previously at the Game Developers Conference, and I spent 20 minutes with it before our interview. He asked what I thought about it. If I liked it. If I found it to be too difficult.

GamesBeat: I did notice that the A.I. was a lot more attentive this time. They spotted me every single time.

Stéphane Roy: Really? Every time? Well, this is the middle of the game. When you come in cold and pick up the controller, it’s not easy.

GamesBeat: The first couple of times, I was trying to see what kind of trouble I could get into with it. Which is a lot, it turns out.

How are you finding the A.I. now? You asked me if it’s too difficult. What do you think of it?

Roy: For this game, the A.I. is a complex beast. We want to make sure that you’ll be able to play with it. It’s that cat-and-mouse gameplay. We have tons of parameters we can play with for detection, so that’s where we are now. It’s a question of balance.

We want to make sure that the hardcore gamer who doesn’t want to kill anybody will be able to turn off everything and play that way. But we also want to make sure that you don’t want to fight with the features. If you just want to play cat-and-mouse with the guards, we want to support that, too. The difficult job now is just balancing everything and making sure that it’s not too sensitive. It’s important that you feel like it’s fair.

GamesBeat: In the outer courtyard, I took out the two guards, but I made noise doing it. When I snuck into the inner courtyard, I would see those guys running around on alert, doing stuff outside their normal patterns. That was when I knew I had a bit of a job on my hands to get around them.

Roy: This is where the game and real life are a little different. In real life, that something happens and the guards all know something is happening. In a game, it’s not fun. This is the kind of thing we want to work very hard to balance.

GamesBeat: Some of the characters were mentioning something called a Graven. What’s a Graven?

Roy: On the one hand, you have the ordinary watch, the Baron’s guards. On the other hand, you have the Graven. If there’s a riot, for example — the population says enough is enough and rises up against this iron-fisted rule — the Graven are who will come in to oppose them.

GamesBeat: We’ve seen two missions in Thief, and both seemed like very isolated incidents. I’m wondering what the connecting thread is going to be through all of this.

Roy: I understand why you could feel that way. That’s kind of intentional on our part. Among the reasons why we showed you this section and that section, it’s because we feel like that doesn’t reveal a lot of the story. But I guarantee that during the game, you’ll have to find out a lot about what’s going on. There’s something weird happening, of course. It’s story-driven. Everything is linked together.

GamesBeat: Are there going to be any daytime missions?

Roy: No. This is a game that takes place by night. We might have something that you could maybe call the opposite later, but no, it’s really about the night.

GamesBeat: It’s been nine years since the last one, so this will be the first Thief game for a lot of people. What do you want newbies and/or veterans to see or hear or feel that will make this Thief the definitive Thief experience going forward? What do you want to add to this franchise?

Roy: We want to make sure that people who know the franchise will feel that we have the right to put the Thief name on the box. We want them to feel like we’re working up to today’s standards. This isn’t just something from 15 years ago. I don’t just want to tell you, “It’s this feature and that feature,” because it’s not just a question of features. It’s a question of how we build the game – the items, the level design, the way we make the maps today. I promise I’ll give you a better answer soon.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Sitting behind a row of game journalists hammering through Dragon’s Crown’s four-player co-op at a special pre-E3 event, I kept hearing phrases like “What’s going on?” and “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Jumping on the sticks myself a few minutes later, I experienced a curiously extended sense of What the hell? that lasted my entire playthrough.

And because this is Dragon’s Crown, that feeling didn’t just apply to the gameplay.

The character designs by Vanillaware cofounder George Kamitani (Muramasa: The Demon Blade) drew fire for their hyper-exaggerated style from the second they went public. More specifically, the Amazon and Sorceress characters caused great offense with their (to put it mildly) overtly sexualized designs. At minimum, it shows a fairly big disconnect from the industry’s recent attempts to recognize gender equality issues — a shift some people feel veers too far into overreactive political correctness.

Maybe Dragon’s Crown (due Aug. 6 on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita) simply got caught in that crossfire. I’d love to side-step those issues and evaluate this game based purely on how it plays, but that’s just not possible. It’s not one thing. It’s everything. It’s everywhere. At all times.

Let’s get some basics out of the way. Dragon’s Crown is a 2D, side-scrolling, slash-’em-up where up to four players choose from six character classes — three male, three female (three of which are semiclothed, male and female) — and go adventuring in a lush, high-fantasy world that’s borrowed almost chapter and verse from Dungeons & Dragons. Its secret weapon? A fairly detailed skill upgrade system that lets you trick out your characters to taste, whether that’s a knight who soaks up damage or a ranger who fires three arrows at once.

You also get a few branching paths to go with the role-playing options. A nonplayable Tinkerbell-type fairy and a thief tag along to provide access to bonus areas. Branching pathways give you an option to face the level boss head-on or take a softer approach for less treasure. Hey, we were there to kill us a wyvern, so we charged right in.

Turns out when that boss wyvern isn’t busy raining fireballs down on everybody, it calls in some of its wyvern buddies. We had three dive-bombing us at once. Yeah, I hate wyverns now.

Just don’t ask me how we handled it, because I couldn’t tell you with any accuracy.

Most four-player co-op games feature smallish avatars so everybody can fit comfortably. By comparison, the characters in Dragon’s Crown are huge. A party of four fills up a major chunk of the screen. Then Dragon’s Crown throws a bunch of bugbears and lizard men at them, plus a few giant sabertooth panther mounts players can jump aboard and a ton of blinding “hit” flashes as the fighting commences. And because it’s 2D, they all overlap on top of each other, foreground characters blocking out everyone and everything in the background.

When these guys all scrum together center-screen, bashing away surrounded by Kamitani’s genuinely beautiful art direction, it’s the very definition of a hot mess. Consistently choppy animations didn’t help.

I honestly didn’t know what was going on half the time and had to resort to straight-up button mashing. That bothered me. But not nearly as much as the amped-up, in-your-face sex drive that threatens to make the rest of the game, good or bad, entirely moot.

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LOS ANGELES — Jonathan Morin likes to compare games with painting. “You can craft something finite and precise,” he says. “You need to know exactly what you want to say to create something that the player will feel is elegant and makes sense, but it’s important to not say it directly. If you say exactly why you’re doing it, the player doesn’t get their own shot at it.”

Now, as creative director of the open-world actioner Watch Dogs, Morin’s canvass is privacy and exploitation in the cyberage. Anti-heroic lead Aiden Pearce can access and manipulate any electronic device in modern-day Chicago … all the better to destroy his enemies. Or maybe help some strangers.

It’s a big picture to put together. When I sat down with Morin at a special pre-E3 event, the first thing he told me was how it all began with small talk.

GamesBeat: What was the idea behind Watch Dogs?

Jonathan Morin: It started as, “OK, what are we interested in? What are all of us passionate about?” We realized that we were constantly talking about our phones and what impact that was going to have on our daily lives. We also knew we wanted to do a city, something bigger to explore. Those two ideas connected in a very natural way. If we do a modern-day city environment, it would be a crime to not talk about hyperconnectivity. It has to showcase the impact.

In a lot of ways you could compare WikiLeaks and its consequences to moment where we decided to create public libraries. It’s the same kind of insecurity. Suddenly, a lot more people have access to knowledge. It scares a lot of people.

GamesBeat: The Catholic Church illustrated stories from the Bible in stained glass windows because they were dealing with an illiterate population. The population was supposed to be illiterate.

Morin: Exactly. Instead of forcing a judgment call, I think our game is all about bringing players to interact with it. On one side, be careful about how you use these things. On the other side, you might glorify this whole thing. It makes us evolve in a lot of ways. If people play Watch Dogs, it’s a lot more powerful if it makes them ask questions.

GamesBeat: What kind of questions do you want people to ask after playing Watch Dogs?

Morin: I want people to think about the relationships that they have, and that humans in general have, with technology. Take social media. It’s a spectacular idea. It embraces communication. On the other side, we start to see psychologists talking about social media addicts. People are becoming addicted to what other people think about what they do.

GamesBeat: I’ve heard it described that [lead character] Aiden Pearce has an addiction to information. As soon as he starts hacking into people’s lives, he can’t really stop. He has to get more and more involved.

Morin: To be a little bit more precise, Aiden Pierce has an obsession with overprotection. There’s an interesting disconnect between what Aiden does and what the player perceives. Aiden is motivated to protect his family. It starts with monitoring his own home — which they don’t know about. It’s a bit creepy. There’s an interesting motive for why he’s doing that, though.

Progressively, he goes from the house to monitoring the neighborhood and then the district. Things get out of hand. He uses the only thing he knows, his grasp on power, to solve his problems. Once he gets to the point of monitoring the entire city, you can start to confuse Aiden Pearce’s drama and everybody else’s drama. You start to explore what I call the vigilante tragedy. It’s your own needs versus the needs of others.

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LOS ANGELES — Let’s face it: When space invaders attack the White House with kill-o-zap rays, you really want a chief executive who flips the “Oval Office secret arsenal” switch and goes a’gunning for alien ass shouting, “You f**ked with the wrong POTUS!”

That’s just what you get in Saints Row IV. It only gets more insane from there. I sat down with senior producer Jim Boone to talk about how his game would carve up sacred cows into prime rib, starting with how his team had to build on a game famous for its giant purple dildo melee attacks.

GamesBeat: Everybody thought maybe you topped out with Saints Row the Third, that you couldn’t make it any crazier, that you couldn’t take the gag any further. So … you went a little further this time.

Boone: We did. Yes, we did. It’s funny — the design director on the last game tells the story about how when they were a couple of months away from finishing Saints Row the Third, he said, “We’ve probably taken this about as far as you can possibly go. There can’t be anything crazier or more over the top than what we’ve just done.” Then you finish the game, and you take a step back to collect yourself. You start thinking. Suddenly, things like superpowers start coming up.

But if you have superpowers, who the hell do you fight? If I’m picking up someone and throwing them with telekinesis, what’s a gangster going to do against that? So what if we have aliens? Then the aliens can have different abilities. Yeah, that makes total sense! Then what about the player? What’s going to be? He already took over the Saints. He became a pop icon. What do you do with him? How about he becomes the President of the United States? That seems like the right trajectory for him. We pretty quickly realized that now we could go really over the top.

GamesBeat: So … Saints Row V?

Boone: I feel like we’re in the same boat. We’re saying that there’s nothing left. How do you go further than this?

GamesBeat: You could get into some Flash Gordon stuff. You gotta go conquer Mongo.

Boone: Hey, exactly. That would be the next step.

GamesBeat: You don’t start off as the president, do you?

Boone: Correct. We have our origin mission that sets up how you become president.

GamesBeat: And then it’s five years later.

Boone: Exactly.

GamesBeat: You got re-elected!

Boone: Yes, you did! Everyone loves you after all! [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Is there a way you could go too far in Saints Row? Is that even possible?

Boone: We’ve talked about certain things like blatant racism. We don’t want to have anything like that in the game. Sexism — I know this might sound strange given some of the things we do in our game, but we try to be very fair. You can play a man. You can play a woman. We try not to put things in situations where you might feel too uncomfortable. Those are kind of the only areas where we look and say, “No, don’t want to go there.”

The threshold is pretty high as far as something that wouldn’t make it in. We gave the team a week. We called it Awesome Week. We told everyone, “Do whatever you want to do this week. Preferably something that’s not even in the game right now. Come up with crazy ideas.” We had people come up saying, “What if we do a dragon you can hop on and fly around and it breathes fire.” In a week, they were able to prototype it. It was very crude, but functional. You won’t see it in Saints Row IV — it was strictly just an issue of time. But we were convinced. “We’ll find a way to make that dragon make sense in this game.”

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LOS ANGELES — If you’re still taking Saints Row IV seriously after watching the purple-suited President of the United States cruise through his White House, ignore Secret Service agents toking up fatties and drinking 40s in the background, and offhandedly toss an apple to his personal tiger, I’ve got some advice. Eject the disc, throw it off the nearest bridge, and go play The Last of Us.

Because that’s about as normal as normal gets in this game. And it only gets crazier from there.

I played an early section of Saints Row IV (releasing Aug. 20 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) at a special pre-E3 event, and it kinda won me over right around the time I punched a filibuster-threatening senator in the dick. That’s what you do when you’re the president, homes. The opening level details how you reach the Oval Office, but developer Volition and publisher Deep Silver dropped me into the second level, where you’re comfortably into your second term and signing executive orders to end cancer. That’s when the alien armada invades.

The Zin bust up your (White) house, kidnap your cabinet (staffed by fellow former-3rd Street Saints gang-bangers), and generally disrespect you. Luckily, flipping a switch in the Oval Office pops out racks of gun — this is a chief executive who knows something about defending his turf, after all. It’s run-and-gun for America from there.

This early sequence runs on very strict rails, and the shooting feels a little stiff, though that could’ve just been a settings issue. Either way, it ends up with Mr. President sitting in a twin-cannon turret, kicking Zin ships off the White House lawn.

One crash-lands, and that’s my chance to put a bullet in Zinyak, leader of the Zin. Too bad he’s 10 feet tall and a technologically superior douchebag. It doesn’t go well.

After that, Saints Row IV opens up the sandbox. The Zin tend to conquer through a mix of force and indoctrination. Kidnapees, which now included the president, get thrown into The Matrix until they’re more Zin-positive. And because you’re The One, you break the simulation’s laws and have superpowers. Some come standard, like superjumps, power slams, and supersprinting, or “superstreaking,” if you use the returning character creator to go au natural. For male characters, that even includes an option to lengthen or shorten your crotch’s “censored” bar.

Other powers must be earned, and all can be improved by collecting orbs, Crackdown-style. I quickly fell in love with my new telekinesis abilities, which I used to grab cars and people and hurl them into other cars and people. It never, ever gets old.

Minigames and side missions abound, including superspeed races and the hyper-violent return of psycho Japanese host Professor Genki and his new telekinetic-flinging game show, Mind Over Murder. Personally, I just roamed the Tron-like streets and made as much trouble as I could. And since Saints Row IV amped me up with an assortment of ludicrous sci-fi guns, it turned out I could make a whole goddamn Götterdämmerung-lot of trouble.

It’s easy to say I enjoyed the delights of the Black Hole gun, which temporarily rips open a yawning chasm in space-time and drags in anyone and anything not nailed down. But nothing tickled my sadistic streak quite like the Dubstep Gun, which annihilates people, cars, and flying Zin gunships with the deadly power of Skrillex.

Of course, even a ridiculous open-world game needs some kind of balance. Once I got too out of hand, the Zin sent one of these charmers down to cool me off;

It’s called a Warden — as in “prison warden” — and it took my puny ass to school. It’s Saints Row IV’s equivalent of SWAT and helicopter snipers showing up, mixed with a dial-a-boss service for when you really want to call in a challenge for yourself.

Least you think Saints Row IV’s copping out with an “it’s all a dream” plot, I’ve seen and heard enough to trust Volition to dodge that narrative bullet. Eventually, you’ll escape into your crew’s simulations to bust them out — performing their loyalty missions will grant them superpowers in your virtual world, too. For on those occasions where you head back to reality, expect something cool to fill in for your missing powers … a giant robot, say.

And “something cool” neatly sums up my hands-on time with Saints Row IV. Yes, it’s great to have meaningful games with powerful stories, but this one had me cracking up every time it carved a sacred cow into prime rib. It’s only interested in entertaining, and entertaining it is.

I can’t wait to cut loose in the wider world and see just how wrong it can be. That’s what executive privilege is all about, baby.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Perched up in the darkness on a stone pillar, watching a pair of guards patrolling the small outer courtyard below, I did what any reasonable thief would. I pulled out my bow and shot one in the chest just to see what he’d do.

I did have my reasons. When Eidos Montreal unveiled its reboot of Thief (due 2014 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC) back in February, the demo team essentially turned the enemy A.I. off. That sent a lot of bad signals. As a franchise, Thief built its stealth-based legacy on sneaking around undetected … not much point of that when the opposition is deaf, blind, and stupid. Titular thief Garret spent that entire demo cheerfully slipping past people in brightly lit rooms in full view of multiple witnesses without anyone raising an eyebrow.

When I injured that guard, all hell broke loose. Not just in that outer courtyard, either. The ruckus carried over into the main courtyard on the other side of a tall brick wall, where another eight or so guards broke off their rails to hunt me down.

So Thief has definitely improved. But it’s not there yet.

This newer, hands-on demo — presented at a special pre-E3 event — takes place about five hours into the campaign and tasks Garret with slipping inside a fortress-like manor house to rip off the Heart of the Lion. Garret admits he has no idea what the hell that is outside of “priceless.” Really, that’s enough. A full-scale riot in progress just outside the walls has the guards on edge and distracted. Opportunities don’t get any more golden.

Taking advantage of them is another matter. Once I started to play Thief “for real” — that is, stealthily — I ran into several roadblocks, not the least of which was that A.I. It stomped on me with alarming regularity. That’s as it should be if you screw around in a stealth-focused game, but their attentiveness went all over the map. Distractions might work once, but never twice. That left me trapped behind shrubbery, back against a wall, while two guards refused to budge or turn an inch no matter what I did. Fortunately, sneaking up to sap a chump or pouncing them from above for one-hit knockouts feels as satisfying as ever.

The tools in Garret’s arsenal also need some tuning. Harmless blunt arrows — joining rope, water, fire, and steel-tipped arrows — should’ve drawn guards away to investigate. I tried one on a nearby wall. Nothing. On the ground a few feet away. Nada. On a guard’s foot. Nary a twich. Square in the face. “Is someone there?” I was running out of blunt arrows.

I eventually just slipped past him using Garret’s silent dash move. That worked, though I honestly felt it shouldn’t have.

The level itself benefited from a lot of nice design work and smoky atmosphere, balancing threats and solutions nicely while offering multiple paths to every goal. In an earlier presentation, the demo driver bounced off a suspended crate to enter the manor house through the attic. I went in through the basement … the heavily booby-trapped basement. Luckly, Garret’s not a novice, and his Focus abilities — heightened perceptions honed through years of professional crime — lit up the dangers and led me to their control box. Snip-snip.

Then I opened a door right with a pair of guards right on the other side and got a taste of Focus’ offensive uses. Time slows and blips appear on your opponents; you have a second or two to target them with your sluggish cursor. It’s surprisingly tough to score a headshot, but the guaranteed kill makes it vital to pull off in a bad situation. When your Focus meter empties, just two guards can finish Garrett off without breaking a sweat. This isn’t a “play it your way” kind of game at present. You hide, or you die.

I shot a rope arrow into the ceiling, climbed up, and skulled through the rafters instead until I located the Heart’s secret room, and then used Focus to find its even-more-secret latch, hidden behind a picture frame. Even more reason to avoid combat and save your Focus for the task at hand. Focus also helped with the puzzle built into the chest containing the Heart. Lesson: Conserve that Focus, people.

As yet, I haven’t seen Thief’s three-act mission structure — infiltration, theft, and escape — uninterrupted. Blocks were chopped out from each demo to remove story spoilers, so it’s tough to tell how well the missions flow. I can say the demo ended on its worst note: a run through an inferno set by the rioters.

For all the pulse-pounding scale — people on fire throwing themselves into the river, split-second grapples, and rooftops collapsing under your feet — the game’s mechanics drained every ounce of urgency out of it. You run at Thief speed — deliberately, which is to say, slowly. For the most part, you cross a hazard, look around until the interaction prompt appears, and repeat. Garret even says, “I have to move fast!” But he doesn’t. Even the final jump to safety comes out of nowhere, a finale without a crescendo.

As-is, that sums Thief up. It looks like a good game, but it’s not actually a fun game. Yet.

Games like this work — or don’t — because all the different systems find that find a balance. A lot of Thief’s systems still need a lot of balancing, but the team at Ubisoft Montreal still has another year of development time to get everything working in unison. This Thief is built on good bones. Now it all just needs to come together.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — I made mine Marvel for decades growing up, so I’m all about the crazy team-ups taking up on intergalactic world-ending threats. That said, it’s entirely possible I’m not the guy TT Games made Lego: Marvel Super Heroes for. The controls feel too loose to me, the action too haphazard, the puzzles too simple yet stringent.

But my kids’ll love it.

And it has to be said, I found enough moments in both my hands-off and hands-on demos to fire up the geek center of my brain. I didn’t get to wander Lego Marvel Super Heroes’ (releasing later this year on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC, Nintendo 3DS and DS, and PlayStation Vita) open-world re-creation of Marvel’s Manhattan Island (creatively fudged to include both the X-Mansion and the Raft’s high-security superprison), but a detour out to Asgard did whet my appetite.

“We had a huge list,” says game director Arthur Parsons. “What characters we wanted, what locations we wanted. That’s where we started working closely with Marvel to write an original story that could mix all those places and characters together.”

The hands-off mission hooked up four of the 100 playable heroes — Thor, the Human Torch, Wolverine, and Captain America — for an assault on Asgard to shut the Casket of Ancient Winters … and shut down Loki. That might sound like a random fanboy-fueled gathering, but each character filled a mission-critical role. Thor provided muscle and minion-clearing lightning strikes. Cap handled defense. The Torch melted the ice blocking their way. And when Loki’s illusions created dozens of fake Lokis, Wolverine’s enhanced senses sniffed out the real one so everyone could pound on the God of Lies.

The plot involves tracking down the shattered remains of the Silver Surfer’s board, but Parsons makes it sound like the real fun happens when you cut loose and roam around the open world on your own. “We’re doing some crazy stuff, like driving around on Deadpool’s Vespa,” he says.

The SHIELD Helicarrier serves as your hub. Getting down to the street-level action is easy; find an edge, and jump off. Characters that can’t fly may parachute in, so the player can drop into any part of Manhattan they want. Once there, you’ll have your hands full with all manner of superheroics and a heaping helping of optional tasks. “A side mission could be going by the Daily Bugle and completing some quests for the editor,” says Parsons. “You have to go to the Baxter Building and do a cleanup operation because, as part of the story, it gets absolutely trashed.”

That’s not tough to imagine. The hands-on mission pitted Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the Hulk against a powered-up Sandman who’d turned a natural history museum — and much of the surrounding city — into a desert.

No lie: Hulk-smashing a street jammed with cars goes pretty well, and transforming him back to puny Bruce Banner comes with a very amusing animation. Beating my way through waves of minions felt less satisfying thanks to iffy targeting and a general sense of anticlimax. The goons don’t really do anything but run at you and punch when they get there. They’re hurdles, not enemies.

As always in a Lego game, you can zip between different characters to take their abilities for a spin, something that becomes mandatory when you start taking on the puzzles. Flying around as Iron Man, I felt locked into a 2D field instead of doing whatever I wanted, and one puzzle forced me to transform into Banner in order to climb a chain up to a platform and flip a switch. The Hulk apparently wasn’t able to jump up there for reasons that stretch the very concept of physics (as they appear in most comic books, anyway).

Indeed, the entire end-boss fight with Sandy, swirling around in giant Lego-sandstorm mode, felt like it patiently waited around for me to figure out where on the stage it wanted me to go, with which character, to flip which switch. At one point, I just let go of the controls to see what might happen. Nothing much, as it turned out.

That’s all a bit too gentle for me. At least I know it’s not going to mash my sons into the pavement when they pick up the controls.

Lego: Marvel Super Heroes shows all the same clever touches others in the Lego series do, and it throws around plenty of age-appropriate gags that grown-up Marvelites like me will dig — Thor notes Loki’s fondness for hats with big horns at one point. The team mixes so far throw out a lot of options and fan service at the same time. But this small and entirely fixed segment of the Marvel Universe isn’t enough to really render judgment. I need to untether and spin around Manhattan on a Vespa, getting into any kind of trouble I can find. I can’t help but suspect that’s when the game truly comes alive.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Microsoft’s E3 conference presented an onslaught of awesome-looking games, but we still have a lot of lingering questions about the console they’ll all appear on, the Xbox One.

From the very start, Microsoft has appeared cagey about what its upcoming console (due to launch this November for $499) does and doesn’t do in terms of digital rights management (DRM), playing used games, and a whole host of other issues. Its PR attempts to clarify those sticking points only led to more and more questions. We’ve also heard, but cannot confirm, that Microsoft has cancelled 1-on-1 interviews with at least one outlet that was outspoken on the company’s policies.

But we still see a number of things we need to know before we’ll spend money for an Xbox One.

Will your Xbox 360 Gamertag, Gamerscore, and purchases carry over?

The Xbox One’s all-new architecture makes backward compatibility of retail discs a nonstarter, but we’ve heard for a while that the noncompliance doesn’t end there.

It might seem like a no-brainer to let people carry over all their account information after a simple sign-in, but apparently, the new Xbox Live might not be compatible with the old version, either. Supposedly, that means all the downloadable games you’ve purchased won’t apply to the Xbox One, either, effectively wiping away all the money you’ve invested in Xbox software over the last eight years. Does Microsoft have a solution for that that doesn’t involve their customers having to buy their favorite games twice? It would be very nice if they did.

Can we still rent games for the Xbox One?

Microsoft says it won’t charge gamers to play a second-hand game, but it has danced around the question of whether that disc will play at all in an Xbox One. But then, the rules around simply borrowing a disc from a friend are so complicated — you can play for an hour offline, but maybe longer online, but only if you’ve been friends for more than 30 days, and only once — that they practically qualify as a deterrent in and of themselves.

Rented games, however, have slipped under the radar in terms of hard information. With that “loaned games only play once,” the signs point to bad news for rental services like Gamefly, but maybe Microsoft has a labyrinthian scheme to allow for such games, too. Or maybe it’s still figuring this one out, because so far, nobody at the company has given us a straight answer on the subject.

Will Xbox One offer a solution for customers who can’t always be online?

Hope you’ve got a good Internet connection. The Xbox One requires an online check-in every 24 hours or else your games won’t work anymore. “Offline gaming is not possible after these prescribed times until you re-establish a connection,” according to Microsoft’s PR release, “but you can still watch live TV and enjoy Blu-ray and DVD movies.”

That’s a problem for roughly 60 percent of the planet. Your $500 Xbox One basically becomes a very expensive cable box/DVD player unless it can ping home base and verify that you, the Microsoft customer, are not a criminal using stolen software. Given that a borrowed game will only play once for one hour while offline, it’s unclear why this extra layer of security is even necessary. Certainly, its benefit to consumers seems to be somewhere below zero.

But either way, unless Microsoft has some kind of escape clause, they just gave entire countries — not to mention American soldiers serving in combat theaters — a reason not to buy their products.

Kinect

How mandatory is Kinect?

Personally, I don’t feel like playing one-man charades just to access my content, but we’re getting indications that some Kinect-based motion controls are the only way to do certain things. That also seems unlikely, but the straight answers from Microsoft just aren’t forthcoming.

And the story seems to be changing, anyway. Originally, we were told that the Kinect camera would always be on … until the German government put the brakes on it by launching a privacy-issues investigation into having an always-on camera pointed at you in your living room. Microsoft later stated that Xbox One owners could change the level of Kinect involvement in the setup. But can I turn it off completely? Can I possibly not use Kinect? Is that allowed? Or will I be forced to wave spastically at the screen just to bring up a video I want to watch?

Is an Xbox Live Gold membership vital to using these features?

Gold accounts will still be a part of Xbox, and in fact, it sounds like you only need one Gold account per household now — those benefits will apply on that console whether that specific member is signed in or not. But this is an always-online console, with features keyed into always being online. When does Microsoft start charging for those?

For example, do you need a Gold account to lend a game to a friend, or to play a game that friend loaned to you? Microsoft’s language to date suggests got to download code from cloud storage in order to do that. So does Gold membership change how the Xbox One’s cloud computing access operates? Or Twitch streaming? Or anything else, really. I highly doubt it, but for all we know right now, Gold membership could be mandatory to that once-a-day check-in. We just don’t know.

But now we do know this: Sony’s PlayStation 4 doesn’t have mandatory online, won’t require a daily check-in, isn’t restricting the use of rented or borrowed games, and costs $100 less, just as Patcher guessed. So the really big question now is will Microsoft stick to its guns or flinch in the face of a simpler, more customer-friendly alternative.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Edward Kenway might not be as tight with the Assassin Order as his predecessors, but he’s not opposed to making a little money on the side at their behest.

Assassination contracts abound in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (releasing October 29 on PC and all current and next-gen consoles), and at a special pre-E3, hands-off demo, I got to see just how much the 18th century Caribbean setting — and Kenway’s day job as a feared pirate captain — seriously changes Creed’s brand of professional murder.

The demo started off in George Town, the major metropolis of the Cayman Islands … an ash-colored smash of stripped-wood buildings right on the coast. Judging by the map, the city looks absolutely huge, on the scale of Rome from Assassin’s Creed II: Brotherhood. Then the view zoomed out to show the entire West Indies. Black Flag’s world is huge, with more equally scaled cities like Havana somewhere over the horizon.

And it’s all apparently seamless. You can go anywhere in that world without load screens or cut-scene transitions. That completely alters the flow of the game.

Kenway sailed his pirate brigantine, the Jackdaw, into port and pulled his assignment from a nearby pigeon coop. It’s a twofer — a pair of names the Assassins want on gravestones. Kenway might be more privateer than assassin, but he still has Eagle Vision to light both targets up along with nearby threats — the British sailors in the crowd. Undeterred, Kenway walked right up behind the first target, grabbed his head, and pounded him into a nearby open-air bar one, two, three times.

So, not a silent hit with the hidden blade, then. The other man makes a run for it, and that’s when things get interesting.

The target makes for his docked ship, the Hercules. Kenway has a few opportunities to cut the escape short, including a free-aim that could’ve sunk a flintlock pistol’s shot into the man’s back. Instead, the demo’s driver lets him make it aboard and cast off. Now the entire boat is your target.

Kenway could make a leap and climb aboard as it pulls away, but that could get messy since he’d have to deal with the entire crew on his own. The Jackdaw‘s only a few wharves over, and once Kenway steps behind his ship’s wheel, the chase resumes. You can mark other vessels with your spyglass to track them easily, and sinking the Hercules with the Jackdaw‘s guns would fulfill your contract nicely. Ship-to-ship combat operates largely the same as it did in Assassin’s Creed III, only now your gun crews can track side-to-side and elevate the cannons for better accuracy, and smoke from the weapons can obscure your view for a few seconds.

Ah, but you’re still a pirate under that eagle-shaped hood, and a ship at sea equals plunder. Your spyglass even tells you what she’s carrying, and who doesn’t need braces of lumber and casks of rum?

Rather than finishing her off, Kenway cripples the Hercules, leaving her dead in the water. A shimmering halo surrounds her, signaling that she’s ready to board. Steer in from any angle, and your boarding parties will attack. So will Kenway. In our demo, he took over a deck gun and sprinkled grapeshot over the enemy deck, then climbed the rigging to take out snipers in the Hercules‘ crow’s nest. Only then did he hit the deck and join in the battle raging below.

You must meet certain conditions before you “capture” a ship. In this case, Kenway has to cut down 15 soldiers before the Hercules is his, and that deck gun did half the work for him already. But even then, he’ll still have to locate and end his original target. Capturing the ship is a separate goal, and it’s the one he accomplishes first. British solders fall to their knees, surrendering to Kenway’s scurvy mates, and that makes finding his mark much, much easier. He’s the only one still running.

Of course, you can only go so far on a boat. Kenway doesn’t even let him gain much distance before shoving a hidden blade though the man’s chest. Mission accomplished.

And yes, all this happened in-game. Nothing broke the flow of the chase or the capture. Only after the bloody business did the game kick to a cut-scene so the player could decide what to do with the newly acquired prize: add the captured ship to your fleet, salvage it to repair the Jackdaw, or press members of the Hercules crew into joining your merry band.

It’s a far different experience from what I’ve seen in Assassin’s Creed before — and an exhilarating change. You’re encouraged to adapt as the situation changes, but you’re still able to play it the way you want. The entire encounter with the Hercules could’ve gone down a half-dozen ways. It even could’ve ended successfully before anyone hit the water.

Now that’s a sandbox, and I can’t wait to play in it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Edward Kenway stands on a sandbar sticking out of the wide ocean and watches two ships trade broadsides in the distance. The skirmish has nothing to do with him. British and Spanish fleets tangle regularly in these waters, each trying to win the West Indies for their crown. But Kenway’s a pirate living in the golden age of pirating, and he only fights for treasure.

That’s just one little slice of life I saw during a live hands-off demo of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (releasing October 29 on PC and all current and next-gen consoles). The sandbar’s another. Kenway spotted it and the hulled ship wrecked upon it as he sailed by in his brigantine, the Jackdaw, so he decided to investigate.

Because while he’s affiliated with the Assassin’s Order and uses its methods, Kenway’s a privateer through and through.

Once he shoos away a mass of crabs, the body of a marooned sailor gives up a hand-drawn treasure map. It shows crudely drawn palm trees, an ancient temple ruin, and a bright red X. That sailor was a traditionalist. Kenway’s more than happy to be such a grand artist’s inheritor.

A school of dolphins leaps out of the water nearby as Kenway swims back to the Jackdaw and sets sail for Mysteriosa Island and that buried treasure. On the way, a whale breaches to starboard — an invitation to the controversial harpooning missions — and the Jackdaw hits bad weather. Rogue winds that push you off course are a thing of the past, but I spy a distant water spout that destroys a passing frigate. Kenway steers well clear of it. The spouts can rip up both your ship and your crew, and you need your men intact when it comes time to attack and board other ships.

A rowboat on Mysteriosa’s beach tips Kenway off that we’re not the first ones here. Rowboats also serve as a fast-travel system around the islands or ship-to-shore.

Sure enough, the island’s crawling with British soldiers. A pirate would do something big, loud, bloody, and rash. Kenway slips into Mysteriosa’s jungle without incident, dashing through the trees and vanishing in the thick foliage. The stealth looks much improved over Assassin’s Creed III, and a few soldiers who wander close to Kenway’s hiding spot get dragged in without anyone noticing, just like the good old days.

Unlike the good old days, Kenway doesn’t have a brotherhood of assassins to call on to strike unsuspecting enemies. He also doesn’t have arrows for silent, long-distance kills. He does have a blowgun and poison darts that drive victims berserk until his own friends must chop him down. That, along with just a little patience, gets him deep into the interior without anyone raising the alarm. Kenway doesn’t go loud until he comes across a pair of hostages facing imminent execution — that’s when he flies down from his perch for an instant double-execution.

Those hostages join the Jackdaw‘s crew, buffing the ship’s stats. This was a recruitment opportunity.

It takes maybe 15 minutes to find the temple shown on the map, and X does indeed mark the spot. But instead of a buried chest, we recover blueprints for a new type of heavy cannon shot for the Jackdaw’s guns. These missions reward with upgrades, not gold.

If this sounds like the Creed you remember — just on a jungle island — that’s because it is. Later on, in the major city of Havana, I spotted cables connecting the rooftops that looked identical to those Altair ran across during the Crusades and Ezio Auditore used in Renaissance Italy in previous Creed games. Some things never go out of style, I reckon.

But while the basics haven’t changed, purely at the visual level, Black Flag works better than Creed has in years. Picking off unsuspecting enemies from hiding carries a smoothness about it that’s been absent lately. Open combat, described as an enhanced version of ACIII’s, looks even more aggressive than before. I saw far more attacks than counters.

And the integration of the pirate setting feels a lot more thoughtful than what you’d expect from just another iteration of the franchise’s formula.

If you wander around a Spanish colony like Havana, everyone speaks Spanish. That’s fine if you speak it, too. If you don’t, the language barrier enhances the alien, exotic nature of that place to an Englishman like Kenway. Naval battles gain more depth now that you aim your cannons. That flexibility is vital to taking out coastal naval forts, Black Flag’s equivalent of British forts or Borgia towers from previous installments. Destroy its six defensive turrets to invade it, and that’s a sight to behold — blowing away the face of this fortress, stone and rock crashing into the sea as its mortars rain down on you.

You kill the fort’s governor to take custody. Kenway accessed the governor’s office by detonating a powder keg with his pistol, then leaping over the desk to plant a blade in his heart. Sorry, matey. Business.

Taking a fort opens up opportunities. For one thing, you can lure enemy ships into the range of its guns to shift the odds in your favor. For another, any known smuggler’s dens in the area now show up on your map, and those caverns are brimming with gold … along with smugglers who want to keep it.

I’ve had problems with Assassin’s Creed lately, but the completeness of this world and watching it in motion has sold me on Black Flag. I won’t know for sure until I get hands-on with it, but right now, I’m excited. Come October, it’s a pirate’s life for me.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Games. Exclusives. Exclusive games. Microsoft largely shifted the emphasis well away from the Xbox One console itself — and much of the controversy surrounding it — in order to showcase the one thing everyone really wanted to see: What we’ll play on it.

But they also took some time to show the outgoing Xbox 360 some love. For starters, it won’t be outgoing anytime soon. Microsoft debuted a new version (no price mentioned) and an exclusive game to go with it. Free-to-play PC hit World of Tanks will get its own custom-built Xbox version and remain free-to-play on the 360 servers

Then Microsoft went full-bore into Xbox One’s opening salvo, with only one crossover title mentioned: Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain, the first open-world entry in the long-running action-stealth franchise.

Only two represented the smaller, indie fare that buoyed Xbox’s Summer of Arcade downloadables — Max: The Curse of the Brotherhood, a fantasy platformer from Press Play (and sequel to Max & The Magic Marker) and Below, from the creators of hit tablet game Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP.

The other 14 were solidly top-tier, Xbox One exclusives. Expected sequels like The Witcher 3, Battlefield 4, Forza 5, Killer Instinct II, Dead Rising 3, and a new iteration of Minecraft all looked like promising — and gorgeous — additions to their franchises. But new IPs got special attention at the conference and generated more excitement.

The crowd cheered when Panzer Dragoon creator Yukio Futasugi’s name appeared on the screen. His new game, Crimson Dragon, looks like it’s won’t divert far from that series’ popular (and long-absent) gameplay. Ryse: Son of Rome showed off a beautifully rendered Roman onslaught, though its combat did look like it was heavily quick-time-event-based. The original Max Payne himself, Sam Lake, spoke about Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break as a game with a personalized experienced that goes beyond what we’ve seen before. Titanfall, from the creators of Call of Duty, might just be the safest bet a new IP can make, featuring infantry fighters going hand-to-hand against giant robots.

And after the lukewarm reception for Fuse, Insomniac Games appears to be back to crazy-firearms form. Ted Price, Insomniac’s CEO, stepped onto a Microsoft stage for the first time to introduce Sunset Overdrive, a wild, parkouring shooter that saw skinny kids headshooting mutants with smiley-face bullets, decapitating LP launchers, and energy-drink-fueled zap guns.

The other big surprise turned out to be Spark, a create-your-own game that can be played co-operatively through Microsoft’s SmartGlass. Its demo featured a game world apparently created on the fly mainly through voice commands and touch controls, right down to the time of day and adding textures. Even more impressive, the tablet player could manipulate the environment to send the player on an earthan tidal wave across a battlefield occupied by goblin airships and elemental mechs.

And as is their custom, Microsoft ended with a teaser trailer for a new Halo game staring the Master Chief. Oddly, though it was described as a first-person shooter, at no point did anyone refer to it as Halo 5, the expected sequel to last year’s Halo 4.

The Xbox One itself also left a lot of questions hanging. Microsoft spent almost no time on the console itself, with only brief callouts to SmartGlass and its social features. Gamers can edit and upload gameplay — which the Xbox One automatically records as you play — and live-stream your sessions with audio commentary via Kinect, the Xbox’s built-in motion-control camera/microphone. That functionality was slipped into a Killer Instinct II demo.

Along with the Spark demo, that also represented the only mentions Kinect rated during the entire conference. Microsoft also gave up the Xbox One’s retail price: $499, about a hundred dollars above what analyst Michael Patcher predicted.

By debuting game after game after game, Microsoft went with the old (and not incorrect) theory that people don’t buy the hardware … they buy the games. And while plenty of mysteries still surround how the console will work, what it will and won’t allow, and what customers must do in order to use it, Microsoft did finally give their fans plenty of reasons to buy in to Xbox One come November.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Wake up, John. Again.

Honestly, the Master Chief’s barely had enough time for a brief nap. It’s only been eight months since Halo 4′s release, but Microsoft used the big stage at their pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo conference to formally announce a new Halo game as an exclusive release for their upcoming Xbox One console. No release window was given.

Another sequel was expected — developer 343 Industries promoted Halo 4 as the beginning of “the Reclaimer trilogy” for Microsoft’s premiere first-person shooter — but not until 2015 at the earliest. Bungie Studios, the original developer behind Halo, spent three years creating the first three Halo games and Halo: Reach, and it rarely even dropped teaser trailers until they were well within a year of release. It appears 343, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, may cut production time down to a shorter cycle.

The teaser trailer gave little away, but showed a lone, hooded figure wandering a desert until a massive sinkhole opened up in front of him and a colossal Promethean construct rose up into the air. The wind kicked the figure’s hood off, revealing the Master Chief’s iconic helmet. The scene ended with the Chief gripping a pair of dog tags in his fist and looking up at the monster.

Microsoft’s presentation didn’t specifically call the game Halo 5, but as first-person Halo game, it seems unlikely it could be anything else. Regardless, for the first time in the franchise history, this Halo will run at 60 frames per second — the holy grail of video game performance — and have dedicated servers powering its multiplayer.

Halo: Combat Evolved, the first entry in the billion-dollar franchise, was an exclusive launch title for the original Xbox and its undisputed killer app. Microsoft credited it half the console’s sales during their first 60 days of release. The Xbox 360 launched without a new Halo game, but Halo 2′s multiplayer mode drove sales thanks to a revised Xbox Live service that made online gaming easy and intuitive on a console platform for the first time.

By announcing a new top-tier Halo so early, Microsoft clearly wants to boost enthusiasm for the Xbox One among their core constituents after a string of PR blunders around the new console’s mandatory-online structure and confusing DRM policies.

If anything can, it’s the Master Chief.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Saddle up. Yukio Futasugi, the creator of the fan-favorite Panzer Dragoon series, is bringing Crimson Dragon exclusively to the Xbox One.

The reveal trailer — broadcast without sound — showed a player in control of a red dragon flying through a colorful fantasy world. A lock-on reticule, a signature feature from Panzer Dragoon, tagged dozens of flying enemies  before unleashing various homing fireballs and lightning-style attacks.

We also saw several other dragons — one blue, one green — but it wasn’t immediately clear if these were simply different forms taken by the same dragon. Unlike entries like Panzer Dragoon Orta, the dragon didn’t appear to have a rider. But we did see plenty of onscreen enemies.

No release window has been announced as yet.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I know exactly what you’re thinking. I thought it, too.

Activision showed us the underwater firefight sequence from their incoming first-person shooter/blockbuster, Call of Duty: Ghosts, at a special pre-E3 event last month. After watching a half-dozen frogmen gunned down with assault rifles in open water, right after the lights came up, I exchanged incredulous looks with a dozen people around me. We were all thinking it: Shooting people with a machine gun in the middle of the ocean pretty much jettisons even a Michael “Armageddon” Bay-like understanding of physics. It simply isn’t possible. After years of excesses, Call of Duty finally jumped the shark.

Except those guns are real, and they really work underwater. Say hello to my little friend, the APS amphibious rifle.

Developed by the Soviet Union back in the early ’70s, the Avtomat Podvodny Spetsialny (APS), or “Special Underwater Assault Rifle,” went into service as the primary weapon for frogmen guarding Mother Russia’s maritime assets. It’s accurate and deadly to a range of about 100 feet, which isn’t far off the upper range of visibility in the open ocean.

Quite a few successors followed the APS — Wired published a history of the underwater arms race back in 2007 — though most are still classified even decades later. The real secret to underwater guns, however, lies in their specialized ammunition.

Firing a gun while submerged is no big deal. A bullet needs oxygen, gunpowder, and an ignition source (the gun itself) to fire, and so long as the gunpowder stays dry inside a shell casing, it contains its own oxidizing agent. The problem happens when that bullet hits the water, which is a much thicker medium to traverse than air. A low-velocity round might make it 8-10 feet before coming to a complete stop. Forget any hope at accuracy. Firing a normal bullet into water pretty much shatters it.

Underwater guns use supercavitating ammunition — in the APS’s case, a steel 5.56 mm bolt in 26-round clips — that creates a gas bubble around the bullet itself to maintain velocity. The rifle barrels are smooth-bored, not rifled like normal guns, so they’re actually less accurate out of the water than in it. Russian frogmen reportedly carried a backup piece for when they hit the beach.

Multi-Environment Ammunition (MEA) like this also comes in armor-piercing and tactical sniper varieties, though an even better “liquid bullet” is supposedly in the works. The current “standard” version can still cut through the tougher parts of scuba gear and make a mess of underwater vehicles. And that’s just what they do in Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Now, I can’t say real underwater guns have a fast rate-of-fire or that the shell casings eject as if they’re still subject to dry-land gravity like those in Ghosts do. I can say that the guns themselves really exist. Call of Duty hasn’t jumped the shark. But it might shoot one full of holes.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Once again, it’s time to let a bunch of immature obsessive-compulsives determine the course of a billion-dollar industry in just four days!

It’s back, and this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo promises to be extra, extra, EXTRA hyperbolic thanks to the arrival of Microsoft’s Xbox One, Sony’s PlayStation 4, and the cascade-of-awesome next-gen launch titles designed to make you see the one true god. To say nothing of the regular (and mandatory) drunken debauchery. That’s a lot to take in, like a horse syringe full of diet cocaine, but we’re here to take the guesswork out of E3. No further coverage necessary! We’ve upgraded our truth bombs for a nuclear strike on innocent fans, because they deserve no less.

So what say you, panel of experts? What’s going to happen at E3 2013?

Launch the gallery for wisdom!

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Jesus Christ, you’d think somebody in South Park would look back on their community history and say, “Y’know, maybe a town-wide, fantasy live-action role-playing game will spin into a major calamity before I even finish this sentence.”

If someone did, they were right.

Jumping into an early game, hands-off demo of South Park: The Stick of Truth (due this year for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC), that friendly LARP had transformed South Park Elementary into a high-fantasy war zone. Players take on the role of “The New Kid,” an agent of destruction sent by Imperial Wizard Eric Cartman — a title fairly appropriate for Cartman and less appropriate for anyone else not affiliated with the Klu Klux Klan — to infiltrate the elves’ stronghold and find the fabled Stick of Truth before its pointy-eared guardians, Stan and Kyle, beat him to it.

And what makes the New Kid special? Why is he the Chosen One? The Dragonborn? Well, he farts. Really, really well. And he’ll need every ounce of gassy PSI he can muster, because the elves are ready for him.

“You’re fighting for a tyrant, but I know there’s good in you,” urges Stan over the school’s PA system. “Stop fighting for your evil lord! Free yourself from his control!”

It doesn’t take long for the New Kid and his wingman, Butters, to run into some opposition carrying wooden swords and baseball bats with nails. “Uh, are you gonna rape us?” asks Butters.

No. But that’s just about the only place The Stick of Truth doesn’t go in just a short, superscatological 15-minute ride. The New Kid nails enemies with big, green clouds of foulness, ignites his own cupped farts to hurl fireballs, and collects his own turds from a urinal to use in a superattack down the road. Burritos are his mana, and more than once, he revives a downed Butters with the Power of Tacos health buff. Butters is back on his feet just in time for Stan’s gay dog, Sparky, to attach with the leg-humping Call of the Wild attack.

OK, fine. Technically, South Park: The Stick of Truth does have a little rape.

It also includes tests of intellect. A desk fan on top of a barricade neutralizes the New Kid’s gas attacks, forcing them to use subterfuge. Their Alien Anal Probe handily teleports them into nearby vents, where they deploy the magical Underwear Gnomes to shrink down and go places they couldn’t otherwise reach.

And going places others can’t reach is pretty much what South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done for the last 16 years. That’s one quality they definitely brought to The Stick of Truth by both writing and voicing the game for developer Obsidian Entertainment. For its part, Obsidian — the studio founded by the team behind seminal role-playing games such as Fallout and Planescape: Torment — brought the genuine South Park to a video-game format for the first time ever. The most amazing thing about The Stick of Truth, hands-down, is how anyone watching others play will easily mistake it for a normal episode of South Park. The characters and their simple animations look exactly like they do on television. It’s an exact translation.

That includes a nice dose of social commentary. South Park serves as one seriously biting satire, after all, even if it presents the message in a purposely offensive, highly juvenile manner. The New Kid can make friends with other kids to increase his power, and he’s the only one who can bring factions like Girls and Goths together in a common cause. And yes, he does see the light and turn on Cartman, who takes it about as well as you’d expect.

“Oh, you motherf***er!” says Cartman. “I thought what we had together was real, douchebag!”

Their duel culminates in a button-mashing, gas-fueled fight as the New Kid superfarts directly into Cartman’s anal armageddon in a war of high-pressure wills. It’s close, but the evil wizard is defeated … and then they find out they’ve all been duped. Via Skype.

It turns out secondary player Clyde Donovan has already taken the Stick of Truth. Worse, he’s got a barrel of toxic waste, and he’s using it Re-Animator-style to resurrect cats with Nazi armbands and German accents. “I shall raise an entire army of darkness,” Clyde gloats, “and kill the Earth!” The gang, of course, isn’t having that.

No, it’s not James Joyce, but one of life’s truths is that you never really outgrow a really good fart joke. The Stick of Truth has a lot of ‘em. I can’t vouch for the gameplay, but speaking purely as an observer, I went on down to South Park and had myself a time.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Halo on your Windows tablet. Let that idea sink in for a moment. Now allow me to manage your expectations.

Vanguard Entertainment, under the auspices of Halo developer 343 Industries, has crafted the first official, non-console entry in Microsoft’s premier shooter franchise. Halo: Spartan Assault is a top-down, twin-stick shooter that puts Mjolnir-armored boots on the ground and brings nearly the entire franchise sandbox to bear — vehicles, weapons, enemies, armor abilities, skulls, you name it — on a mobile platform.

It looks like Halo. It sounds like Halo. It smells like Halo. It just doesn’t feel like Halo.

I spent some time tooling around in Spartan Assault (releasing this July for $6.99 on Windows 8 and Windows 8 Mobile) during a special event hosted by Microsoft, and while it never struck me as worthless, it’s far from exceptional. This Halo feels more like a vicarious thrill than an actual one.

That said, I’ve got to give full credit for the attention to detail. Elites rage when you pop their shields. Puny Grunts do the same spin-drop collapse when shot dead and run away when their nerves break. (Microsoft confirmed Brutes but did not show them.) You can pick up dropped weapons, jump into vehicles, and stick enemies with plasma grenades. Vehicles smoke when damaged. The sights and sounds are instantly familiar to any fan of the series, and Vanguard threw in an impressive depth of field as well. It all moves buttery smooth.

Those aren’t the only positives. Spartan Assault stars Sarah Palmer, the standout character from Halo 4′s Spartan Ops missions/movies, and rewinds the calendar to tell a bit of her backstory via fully animated cutscenes and five-stage missions.

Like the best entries in the series, those stages change things up nicely. A Covenant splinter group has broken the ceasefire with Earth and unwisely attacked the moon that Palmer’s standing on. That initiates a series of very Halo-ish objectives. I started out on a cliffside platform, defending it against all comers with a few marine A.I. helpers. Like Halo 4, your mayhem earns Spartan Points. Spartan Assault converts them to credits that unlock new weapons and abilities. Naturally, you can buy those credits with real money.

Next, I led a small squad though a few corridor-canyons to take out objectives. Then it dropped me into a Scorpion tank (complete with passengers) to slowly wander a map looking for the last few Ghosts and Wraiths to bombard.

That’s when the limitations really start to peek out. The maps I saw lacked inspiration, and combat operates like a foregone conclusion. It just isn’t worthy of repetition.

From a conceptual approach, Vanguard didn’t move very far off its Gorilla Games roots. They’re the team responsible for the nicely gratuitous Gatling Gears, another twin-stick shooter with tougher multistage missions that played beautifully on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and PC. More accurately, it played beautifully with physical controls. Spartan Assault gets itself into the most trouble with its contextual touch controls.

Tight, smartly designed controls really did evolve the combat in the first Halo, and the updated control scheme for Reach made it even smarter. Spartan Assault’s virtual twin sticks materialize wherever your thumbs make contact with the touch screen — that’s a good thing. But they also try to move with you as your thumbs inevitably slide around, and that inevitably leads to serious control issues. Before long, it just couldn’t tell the difference between my thumbs drifting and my attempts to make a Spartan move around and shoot things.

Learning to manage both the tank’s machine gun and its revolving turret on one “stick” also required way too much patience. I overheard one developer mention how he couldn’t even remember how many different control styles they’d tested until they hit on this particular scheme. I don’t doubt it, but I do think they stopped looking too soon.

Watching another 343 rep play, I noticed he briefly lifted his thumbs to re-center the controls roughly ever three seconds. Nice trick, and it worked, but something seems wrong when you have to reset your inputs every few moments in order to make them work right.

Even with that strategy, aiming weapons tips too far toward trial-and-error, and throwing a grenade falls somewhere between guesswork and prayer. Melee attacks respond poorly to the double-tap input to the point of being pointless. Worse still, it locks grenades, armor abilities, and all pick-up/use functions to buttons on the edge of the screen; it’s impossible to do any of these things without stopping dead in your tracks, taking a hand off the tablet, finding the button, and touching it.

Picture doing that on an Xbox controller.

Even the story feels oddly removed. Spartan Assault presents it as a series of historical tactical simulations held aboard the UNSC Infinity, à la Halo 4′s War Games multiplayer. I’m not sure how this “It’s all a dream” approach can avoid bleeding all dramatic tension out of Spartan Assault, but I wish Vanguard the best of luck with it.

And indeed, a lot of those control issues might vanish on a PC … or when Vanguard patches in support for the Wired Xbox 360 controller on Windows 8 PCs, tablets and Surface sometime after launch. On top of that, Palmer’s a reliably entertaining presence when the writing backs her up, and I want to see more of her. She deserves her own vehicle.

Unfortunately, as-is, Halo: Spartan Assault is a vehicle without a reliable steering wheel. Putting “Halo” in the title raises the stakes considerably and invites a much more critical eye. This game has enough problems already; it suffers more for playing around in a franchise where expectations are so high. But a lot must happen — and I hope it does — before anyone can reasonably call this a Halo game.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Something about Fightback just didn’t want me to take it seriously. Maybe it was the dark-haired Duke Nukem-type alpha male sporting tattoos and man cleavage on the title screen. It could’ve been his gold-plated assault rifle with a sniper scope and two laser sights. Or the fact that the game is a beat-em-up played on a tablet with touch-screen controls.

Then Fightback (due this summer on iOS and Android platforms) won me over. It’s not complex — it’s the opposite of complex — but it works far better than a touch-screen brawler has any right to.

That’s exactly what I’d expect from developer Ninja Theory (DmC: Devil May Cry, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West) and its creative director, Lu Gigliotti. This might be his company’s first free-to-play mobile game, but it carries a lot of the familiar Ninja Theory touches.

“We didn’t take [mobile game development] seriously until a big group of us went to this free-to-play summit,” says Gigliotti. “It really opened our eyes. We came out of there saying there’s a massive challenge and a massive opportunity here. After that, we decided to challenge ourselves professionally.”

The result — “it’s Donkey Kong,” says Gigliotti — takes a throwback ’80s action-movie premise and shotgun-weds it to a throwback ’80s brawler using some of the tightest touch controls I’ve seen lately. You play a hulking bruiser ascending skyscrapers floor by floor to rescue your kidnapped sister. Each floor breaks down into three stages where waves of thugs come at you from both sides. Tapping the screen greets them with a knuckle sandwich. Swiping launches kicks. If you run into a particularly tough wave, pull out your upgradable gun, tap-tag every enemy you can in the second you have to aim, and mow everybody down in the ensuing cutscene.

Oh, but here’s where it gets interesting.

You control the angle of your kicks, and launching an opponent into the air with an upward swipe to the jaw turns him into your personal punching bag. Keep whaling on him to your heart’s delight; let him drop when you’re done. That gave me a surprisingly deep combo system to play with, nailing all comers with a blindingly fast mix of attacks and tactics. The touch controls are completely intuitive and surprisingly responsive thanks to some code that uses predictive behavior.

“If you even start moving your finger across the screen, [the game] anticipates it. ‘Oh, he’s swiping up; therefore, it’s a kick,’” says Gigliotti.

Once you reach the roof, Mr. Big drops a few taunts and flies off in his helicopter. Then it’s time to pick another building and work your way to the top again. Two districts were open in the demo, each with six or seven high-rises to conquer. You can also take that time to refill ammo and buy more upgrades with in-game cash (which you can purchase with real-world cash). Those increase punch/kick power, up the kill ratio on your guns, or even turn you invincible for the low-low price of 10 gold bars.

But the real fun begins when Fightback starts throwing different enemy types at you, some of which require dodging with down or up-swipes before slo-mo countering with an insane amount of whoop-ass.

“We created a base of more than 15 types of enemies,” says Gigliotti. “It’s like a bunch of ingredients in a recipe. We can adjust everything about them — spawn rate, speed, accuracy, damage, defense, and their special attributes on top of that. Mix that all together, and you have quite an extensive palette to play with.”

That’s a formula that Ninja Theory exploited to great effect in the past. Gigliotti added that boss characters also come into the equation later on, and some of them just keep turning up even after you defeat them. He almost made it sound like the last few buildings will be wall-to-wall bosses on every floor.

I enjoyed the small dose of carnage I got out of Fightback. Even with its bite-sized stages, Fightback looks like a fairly large game with dozens of levels, and it’ll take quite a lot of carefully-mixed challenges to sustain it all the way through. The opening moments, however, pulled me right in.

If anything, some of the enemies died too fast — I wanted to keep beating on them. In particular, I wanted the option to keep pounding on the last thug on each stage ad infinitum, working him over for as long as I could keep him juggling in the air. Gigliotti assured me that feature would be in the final game.

Let’s just say Ninja Theory knows its audience.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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When video game publisher Bethesda Softworks handed the Wolfenstein license over to Machine Games, staffed by the founders of Starbreeze Studios (The Darkness, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay), it fell to creative director Jens Matthies to figure out what to actually do with it. Enter the white board.

“We were writing down different ideas, 1940s Wolfenstein, World War II style, this and that,” says Matthies. “And then all of us were like, ‘We really want to do one where the Nazis have won.’ We were thinking, ‘Are we really going to write this down? Because if [Bethesda] doesn’t like it, they’re going to think we’re all stupid.’”

They did write it down. Nobody thought they were stupid. Almost three years later, Wolfenstein: The New Order has defrosted series hero B.J. Blazkowicz to kill Nazis and their Nazi robots in 1960s occupied Europe, and Matthies is eager to tell me all about it. Within reason.

GamesBeat: OK, no screwing around. When does Mecha Hitler show up?

Jens Matthies: There is a plan for this, but I can’t divulge anything.

GamesBeat: We started with this very menacing, almost Tarantino-esque scene where [top Nazi commander] Frau Engel toys with B.J. on a train, not knowing who he is. Later on, he’s growling hyper-cheesy lines like, “Fuck you, moon.” What kind of vibe are you going for?

Matthies: I think Tarantino is a very good reference. We’ve certainly used it internally to align our heads around the project. What’s really awesome about Inglourious Basterds is that they’re walking this tightrope between scenes that are incredibly dramatic and full of tension, and then they’re shooting Hitler in the face. It’s completely disrespectful of history, but it has that catharsis. It’s very much that same tightrope that we’re trying to walk.

GamesBeat: B.J.’s definitely a big slab of man. And he actually has that nice Midwestern just-off-the-cattle-ranch look to him.

Matthies: Yeah. He has this little bit of Texan twang to his voice. He’s very much inspired by the action heroes of the day, like the Stallones and the Schwarzeneggers.

GamesBeat: He’s very monosyllabic, isn’t he? There’s this scene with him and [resistance fighter ] Anya where she’s asking simple, personal questions, and he’s giving her, “Yeah,” or “No.” He’s not even being a tough guy. These are the answers he can come up with.

Matthies: Yeah, exactly. He has a very specialized skill set, and that is kicking Nazi ass. It’s very common for your protagonist to be the sort of alpha person all around. They have to be the smartest, the best-looking, the strongest, all of these things. I don’t think that’s necessary.

GamesBeat: It seem very much like just talking to Anya was not his element. But when we saw him in the Nazi base — he was finding information, relaying that back to base, taking the initiative – he was much more energetic and dynamic.

Matthies: I like that you picked that up. There’s a lot of power in letting B.J. be B.J.

GamesBeat: So how do you design the futuristic Nazi 1960s? I noticed something that looked like a Luger machine pistol.

Matthies: We just take everything, and we dial it up to 11. It’s very important for us to start with a world where, if we want to do a Nazi fucking robot, that’s something we can do.

GamesBeat: And why wouldn’t you?

Matthies: Exactly. Why wouldn’t we?

GamesBeat: Is there going to be any sort of multiplayer or New Game Plus?

Matthies: No. We’re passionate about the single-player. We work with a publisher that cares about quality first and foremost, so we’ll be doing what we do best.

GamesBeat: Is there going to be anything to extend the game beyond the campaign?

Matthies: There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay and secrets to uncover. There’s also a point at which something, depending on the choices that you make, might create a fork. You can think of it like an alternate ending, but it’s really early in the game, so it affects the whole game. There’s a good reason to go back and make the other choice.

GamesBeat: What are you adding to the Wolfenstein franchise with this game?

Matthies: We respect the legacy, but we’re also taking such a drastic step. We are taking the soul of the original Wolfenstein 3D and realizing it with what’s possible today. That’s very much how I like to look at it. Back then it was possible to publish a brochure, so to speak. Now we can write a novel. This is the novel version. But the only thing that matters is that you have to kick a lot of Nazi ass with serious weaponry.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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He wakes up hanging from the ceiling while a masked butcher carves off what he needs from another victim. And this is just the start of Seb’s nightmare. He’s still dealing with flesh-and-blood people. Reality hasn’t come completely off the rails yet. He hasn’t been ripped apart by a demon that poured out of a dead body yet.

But that’s coming.

Shinji Mikami, the creator of the Resident Evil series, doesn’t hold back going into his new game, The Evil Within (releasing in 2014 for the PlayStation 4, the Xbox 360, the PS3, and PC). I sat down with his producer, Masato Kimura, to talk about how Mikami plans to scare us to death this time.

GamesBeat: This looks very much like it’s inspired by the old Resident Evil series. How is that influence playing into The Evil Within?

Masato Kimura: Of course, this is Mikami’s game, but we’re trying to make a scary game. In that sense, maybe it may resemble some of the — you might feel some sense of a connection to Resident Evil. But we’re not really trying to be influenced by the Resident Evil games. What we think about is how the player might feel. That’s how we came up with all those elements in the game.

GamesBeat: The basic presentation is over-the-shoulder. You’re stationary when aiming; you’re going through corridors where things pop out at you –

Kimura: You’re probably thinking of Resident Evil 4, right? Maybe that’s because Mikami put forth a lot of effort to come up with that when he was working on the Resident Evil series.

GamesBeat: He found something that worked.

Kimura: Right. This isn’t the camera setting we’ll use all the time, too. In a different situation, we’ll use a different camera. If we find a more potentially scary camera setting, or in a place where it might be more fun, or if we think it’ll help you fight against the enemies and come up with a good sense of achievement, we may use a different kind of camera.

GamesBeat: How dynamic are enemies? It seemed like the butcher character hunting Seb patrolled his little area, and he then followed into the next area after Seb reached it. Does he ever act a bit more proactively?

Kimura: We’re trying to make those enemies smarter. We don’t call them “zombies” exactly, but they’re zombie-type characters. They’re going to be smarter than the typical zombies. They’ll cooperate together. Multiple creatures might try to surround you, one coming toward you and one coming around behind. They’ll be smarter than traditional zombie-type enemies.

GamesBeat: It looks like you’re touching on several different brands of horror. The demo started with something based in reality — a guy with a chain saw — then went into a not-a-zombie attack, and then reality itself started shifting dramatically around Seb.

Kimura: One kind of fear we’re trying to create is the sense that it’s scary because you don’t understand what’s happening. We’re trying to synchronize what Sebastian’s feeling and what the player is feeling. Whenever Sebastian feels that this is strange, that he doesn’t understand what’s happening, we want the player to feel that same kind of uncertainty. That sense of mystery is a key to this game. So I guess we shouldn’t explain too much about what’s happening. [Laughs]

GamesBeat: It was an interesting series of curveballs. The scale of what was going on just kept getting bigger and bigger until we were in an entirely different place.

Kimura: In a typical survival-horror game, you have puzzle solving. I think that this time, the story and how you understand the story is part of that puzzle-solving element. As you play, you start to understand certain things. Then another question comes up. That sense of uncertainty is scary. You always have that feeling in the background.

GamesBeat: You go down the rabbit hole and just keep on going.

Kimura: Yeah, something like that. You don’t really know what’s happening, but eventually you’ll understand. That’s what Mikami is going for this time.

GamesBeat: Are we going to jump between Sebastian and the other two detectives on his team, Joseph and Kid?

Kimura: No, you only play as Sebastian.

GamesBeat: What’s the goal with The Evil Within? What do you want to accomplish with it?

Kimura: Mikami is always saying that he wants players to say, “I haven’t played a game this scary in a long time.” We want players to feel really emotionally involved.

GamesBeat: How do you accomplish that?

Kimura: We always emphasize two things. It has to be very scary, and the other side of that is the sense of achievement in overcoming and defeating fear. That’s what makes survival horror. The balance between those two things.

GamesBeat: Tell me about a moment where you felt that balance click into place.

Kimura: One of the characters in the game that we can’t really talk so much about today, that was my idea. He fits really well into the game, his personalities and his abilities. Another example might be the last creature that you saw there in the demo.

GamesBeat: The one that springs out of the corpse and kills Seb?

Kimura: Yeah. That creature is a great example. Mikami had a really big idea about what it should be. Then some of the character designers came up with that creature, and it was just right. “Yeah, that’s what it is.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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One of the fun things about a fantasy setting is diving deep into a vast, complex world rich with tiny details nobody else could possibly keep straight.

Matt Firor built one with the Dark Age of Camelot series while at Mythic Entertainment. Now, as president of ZeniMax Online and game director of Elder Scrolls Online, he’s responsible for one of the biggest fantasy IPs in gaming. And yes, he keeps all the details from all five massive Elder Scrolls games straight. In his head.

GamesBeat: I know people who are still digging through The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — they just can’t find an end to it. So why move on to Elder Scrolls Online?

Matt Firor: It’s the first Elder Scrolls game you can play with other people. That’s the biggest difference compared to Skyrim and Oblivion. And you’ll see stuff that isn’t just in the province of Skyrim or Morrowind or Cyrodiil. It’s across all of Tamriel, so you’ll see things that haven’t been in other Elder Scrolls games since 1994. You’ll get to see the southwest corner of the continent that no one’s seen in forever.

It’s set in that same [Elder Scrolls] world — it has similar controls and similar visuals – but it has the added factor of other people.

GamesBeat: You’ll party up, go raiding dungeons, all that fun stuff?

Firor: Yeah. We’ll also have in-game Player-vs.-Player. There’s a giant PvP system. We’ll also have in-game Player-vs.-Environment that we’re not talking about so much yet, except to say that we have it.

GamesBeat: I was going to ask a little bit about PvP. My understanding is that it’s in Cyrodiil, the main setting for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. If you want PvP, you just walk into Cyrodiil?

Firor: Yes. The entire province of Cyrodiil is our PvP area.

GamesBeat: So what’s the overarching plot when you’re not in Cyrodiil?

Firor: That involves your soul getting stolen by a daedric prince, Molag Bal. You want to get it back. That happens in the tutorial, basically, the very early stage of the game. The main part of the game is your story – investigating why Molag Bal stole your soul, learning what implications that has for Tamriel, and getting it back. Of course, to do that, you need to save the world.

GamesBeat: When does this take place in the Elder Scrolls continuity?

Firor: Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion took place about 20 years apart, and then Skyrim is about 200 years after Oblivion. We’re a thousand years before Skyrim.

GamesBeat: In what we’ve played so far, I went up against some assassins. I saw a lot of imps. I killed some spriggans. That’s at level 6. What am I going to deal with at level 20 or 30?

Firor: One of the great things about working with this IP is that we have all those creatures that you fought in the other Elder Scrolls games. All of them.

GamesBeat: Including dragons?

Firor: Except for dragons. They’re literally outside Tamriel at this time. Except for just one, but we don’t have any plans for him right now.

You’ll see things like Ogrim, who you’d remember from Morrowind, or Clannfear from Oblivion. We have all the Daedra from all the other games. Kwama, also from Morrowind, and Netch. We have all these great creatures that populate the world. We didn’t really make up any new ones. We have a few, but most of them are from the existing lore.

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Right inside the gates of Daggerfall, a dog named Gibblets came over to sniff my leg. The dialog prompt should have been warning enough. You don’t converse with a mangy stray in the middle of Tamriel and expect to simply walk away unscathed.

Sure enough, Gibblets led me to an out-of-the-way corpse … which quickly spiraled into battling acrobatic assassins, uncovering an entire spy network, and thwarting a plot to kill the local king. I swear, all I wanted was to try my hand at crafting something. Instead, I got sucked into the ever-distracting world of The Elder Scrolls. Again. Only this time, it’s a massively multiplayer game, and those warriors and mages dashing around the city are other players also madly trying to close side quests that just keep twisting and turning.

The Elder Scrolls Online (due to release this year on PC and Mac) looks and plays almost exactly like the last few offline Elder Scrolls games. The experience felt so 1-to-1, it’s tough to really single out any genuine MMO tropes from my 90-minute, hands-on session.

Maybe that’s because The Elder Scrolls already has so much in common with the typical MMO — large maps, lengthy mission-based structures, dungeons to raid, etc. Either way, my luxurious amount of time spent in Tamriel didn’t offer anything close to a deep dive, but it did say one thing loud and clear: This is an Elder Scrolls game first and anything else second.

Set 1,000 years before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, ESO’s main plot revolves around the unsavory daedric prince Molag Bal, who’s stolen your soul and, just for good measure, hatches a plan to annihilate the entire world. My play session dropped me in well away from those events with a Level 6 Redguard human playing the new Dragonblade mage/fighter hybrid class. All the playable races Elder Scrolls fans know are here, broken into three factions, with returning Nightblade and Sorcerer classes joining the Dragonblade and Templars — a precursor to the vampire-hunting Dawnguard. Yep … vampires return, and ESO has day/night cycles for them and werewolves to plan around.

Not that you’ll stand around idle for long. Within seconds of spawning, displaced villagers begged me to clear their town of flying fire imps and tree-like Spriggans. And no, they didn’t tell me the whole story.

Combat with those nasties seemed a little loose — my sword sometimes whiffed the air when I felt it should have connected. It probably didn’t help that my demo defaulted to third-person view. First-person play was available (and will be for launch), but developer ZeniMax Online hasn’t added the hands to first-person yet. The interface itself feels oddly sparse for an MMO, with barely more than a reticule and a few customized hotkeys in evidence.

And despite those options, the most useful move I found was a simple bash that stunned enemies charging up their magic. Not only did that spare me the pain, but it turned my would-be attacker into a convenient piñata. Non-magical opponents, like Rogues who circled me in pairs and Bloodborn Assassins who flipped over my head to stab me in the back, put up a better fight.

Dying gives you the option to head home or stick around right where you fell, spawning first as a ghost before becoming mortal again. It’s a nice way to get you right back in the game without losing ground … with an option to run away from the fully healed enemies that just killed you while still in spirit form.

Now, it’s important to note that all my adventures in that 90-minute session happened either inside or within shouting distance of Daggerfall, which is stuck out on the end of Tamriel’s western-most peninsula, and I accidentally picked up another six or seven side-quests without even trying. It’s slightly terrifying to consider just how much content’s waiting for you once you start heading inland.

Unlike past Elder Scrolls, which limited their stories to one geographic location, Online expands to cover the entire continent of Tamriel — you head into Cyrodiil, the setting for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for player-vs.-player action. That scale is either encouraging or disheartening, depending on what your future leaving-the-house plans are and/or how many hours you put in to Skyrim. I topped out around 50. I know others who walked away after 200 with lots of unfinished business. Elder Scrolls Online feels like it could years to sift through.

Those could be some epic years, too. Molag Bal can’t invade Tamriel, but nothing says he can’t bring Tamriel to him. Like Skyrim’s random dragon attacks, ESO has regions where colossal anchors fall from the sky and hook into the ground for Molag Bal to drag Tamriel into his own plane of existence. It’ll be up to players to cut those chains … and anything guarding them.

I didn’t get the opportunity to party up with anyone outside of backstabbing a few imps for other players, I didn’t see much of its economy at work, and Zenimax won’t even give up the game’s business model quiet yet. But at nearly every point, Elder Scrolls Online nails its source material cold, and it’s not tough to see it pulling existing fans into an ongoing Elder Scrolls experience.

Whether it can draw in MMO players from outside that loyal fan base remains an open question.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Once again, it’s time to get some all-in-one analysis with our second-hand panel of experts!

Surprise! Microsoft’s launching a new hardware console … who knew? And inside a giant circus tent full of magic and dreams, we got our first look at the best fee-charging-for-used-games, not-backwards-compatible, Internet-mandatory, groovy-retro-design game console ever made: the Xbox One!

It won’t be long before this hardware masterpiece matches up against Sony’s PlayStation 4, but why wait to make crucial judgments? A 60-minute event with no Q&A session is plenty of time! What say you, panel of experts? The Xbox One: bringer of world peace or red ring of death?

Launch the gallery below to learn the language of love!

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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343 Industries general manager Bonnie Ross has just announced a new live-action television series based in the Halo universe, and Steven Spielberg is on board as a creative partner.

“The Halo universe is an amazing opportunity to be at that intersection where technology and myth-making meet to produce something ground-breaking,” said Spielberg in a prerecorded message.

As yet, no further information exists on whether Halo: The Television Series will involve the Master Chief, when in the continuity it’ll take place, when it will premiere, or even how many episodes have been ordered. But it’s likely to be similar in design to the Forward Unto Dawn web series and, given its origins, exclusive to the new Xbox One console.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s the end of (another) era. The Xbox 360 didn’t always have the smoothest run over the past eight years, but sometimes that makes for the best stories and the most vivid memories. And as with the PlayStation during the PS4 announcement, the video game community is sharing some of those remembrances on Twitter, using the #XboxMemories hashtag.

Here are a few that nicely encapsulate the grand adventure that was owning an Xbox 360.

Getting our debug original Xbox and only have that anthropomorphic foot-racing game from Eidos to play on it.

— Adam Sessler (@AdamSessler) May 21, 2013

Microsoft reps glaring at me through an entire Dead or Alive demo for no good reason. #xboxmemories

— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories Trashtalking to dudes in Halo multiplayer matches that their mothers must love them & that their fathers were in their lives.

— Stephanie Bayer (@NSSteph) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories Seeing the first Gears tattoos on fans and realizing how big things were going to be.

— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) May 21, 2013

As I’m cleaning up my office this morning, stumbled across my OG Gamertag press kit. #xboxmemories twitter.com/gizmogladstone…

— Darren Gladstone (@gizmogladstone) May 21, 2013

When Sony used crying dolls, Sixaxis and $600 to keep people from wanting a PS3 at launch. #XboxMemories twitter.com/lynchtacular/s…

— Casey Lynch (@lynchtacular) May 21, 2013

My original Xbox outlasting my four Xbox 360s. #XboxMemories

— James Mielke (@jamesmielke) May 21, 2013

#xboxmemories Being legitimately excited to play Blinx: The Time Sweeper for the first time on the Xbox in the Y’s rec room.

— Steven Strom (@stevenstrom) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories That time I was playing and Steve Ballmer broke into my house and lashed me across the face with his giant, whip-like tongue.

— Jim Sterling (@JimSterling) May 21, 2013

My jaw dropping first time I played Gears Of War and saw true next gen graphics. #XBOXMemories

— Miracle Of Sound (@miracleofsound) May 21, 2013

Video capping Dreamcast gameplay as a ZDTV intern while @adamsessler & Gamestop TV covered the Xbox reveal at GDC 2000. #XboxMemories

— Miguel Concepcion (@NormalMode) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories playing halo for hours at ends with my brothers and his friends and laughing to god damn much

— Princess Simon (@sidster21) May 21, 2013

When the Xbox 360 launched I was still in highschool and amazed by Oblivion’s graphics. (Those trees! That shiny armor!) #XboxMemories

— Eline Muijres (@ElineMuijres) May 21, 2013

#XboxMemories singing Metallica at 4am while accompanied by plastic guitar bass and drums

— Tracey O’Donnell (@tracey2213) May 21, 2013

Hooking up 4 TV’s and consoles back in high school for 16 player Halo 1 action. #XboxMemories

— Cyrus Fayazi (@FozzyTheGamer) May 21, 2013

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Few things create a narrative minefield like a prequel. We already know how the story ends, and yet, you’ve still got to keep things fresh. Add in gameplay that’s largely unchanged from 2011, and suddenly, a sure-bet return to a powerhouse franchise might start to look a little shaky.

Ben Mattes, senior producer on Batman: Arkham Origins (releasing Oct. 25 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC), doesn’t see it that way. “The Arkham franchise is one of the richest out there as far as the depth of its core systems,” says Mattes. “We said at the very beginning of development that we’re not interested in adding new features for the sake of adding new features. Where can we move the needle? This is an expression that’s very important to us.”

It’s also very important to Batman fans. So I went to Mattes to find out exactly where that needle moved to.

GamesBeat: This is a new team working on this franchise. How did you depart from where the old team left off?

Ben Mattes: We inherited one of the top-rated games of all time as our launching point. We realized very early on that one of the core fantasies of being Batman was this idea of being the world’s greatest detective. Taking the cool scanning and tracking gameplay, placing it in the open world, and doing that technological scrubbing and rewinding, that digital recreation of the crime scenes. That was an area we wanted to push.

GamesBeat: Playing the demo, a lot of things were very familiar from the past two games. How do you make it feel new the third time around?

Mattes: Our goal wasn’t to throw [the core gameplay] away and say, “No, we can do much better than that.” That would have been a mistake. Our goal was to take that foundation and to help players become the “black belt in Batman.” Taking them through the richness of the system was definitely one of our objectives. On top of that, we wanted to refresh all the content — the enemies, the settings, the stories, the visuals, the aesthetics of some of these gadgets.

GamesBeat: Tell me about the new virtual-reality Detective Mode where you digitally re-create a crime scene. Will detective sequences always be like that in Origins?

Mattes: We have the standard options to go into Detective Mode. In certain key areas, we have this heightened Detective Mode. Sometimes, it takes place in the open world, and sometimes, it takes place in interior locations. Sometimes, they’re big, spectacular events, like a helicopter crash. Sometimes, they’re smaller, like a guy caught in a hit-and-run. But they’re always tied into the story and tied to key characters. They’re optional, generally speaking.

GamesBeat: Are those enhanced Detective Mode sequences mandatory?

Mattes: A lot of them are sidestory challenges.

GamesBeat: One of the things that struck me about the enhanced Detective Mode is that it left the normal POV of the game. I wasn’t Batman anymore — I was in a kind of god mode. What was the thought behind that?

Mattes: Simply put, we tried the first-person perspective and the third-person. We thought it felt cooler to be able to do that — the term that we use is “scrubbing” — from the first-person perspective because you can get right into the action. I encourage you to go stand right in front of the helicopter and have it come and crash-land right at your feet. It’s a more spectacular feeling than if you’re in the third-person perspective.

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Two years into his crusade, everyone still thinks the Batman’s just a myth. Nobody’s gotten a good look at him. Only crime lord Black Mask takes him seriously … seriously enough to put a $50 million bounty on his head. And eight top assassins have come to collect it on Christmas Eve.

Batman: Arkham Origins (due Oct. 25 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC) takes the familiar beat-’em-up/stealth gameplay from the Arkham series and backs it up to an earlier time in the Dark Knight’s career. “We wanted to bring Batman back to a place where he was scary, where people who saw Batman wished they hadn’t,” says senior producer Ben Mattes of Warner Bros. Montreal (the studio replacing original developer Rocksteady). “There’s a certain familiarity that Batman has later on in his career. He becomes part of the establishment. That’s not the Batman story we wanted to tell.”

That’s not the Batman you get in Origins, either. Bruce Wayne’s in a very different place here, his anger still raw and on the surface. As Batman, he’s bestial, unshaven, and snarling at his victims. That’s the main thing keeping a creeping sense of over-familiarity at bay.

And this time, the Dark Knight patrols the entire city, not a walled-off prison, though the demo limited me to a fairly small area and didn’t let me access the map overview. Gotham City’s covered in snow and decked out for the holidays, a scene creative director Eric Holmes describes as, “a party hat on top of a corpse.” The streets look oddly deserted, though you won’t find any shortage of violent criminals hanging out on rooftops. Holmes put the absence of civilian life down to a combination of the holidays and bad weather. Put another way, the franchise is rapidly running out of excuses for keeping Gotham uninhabited.

In terms of combat, Warner Bros. Montreal mainly hit the “repeat” button, though a few new enemies mix things up a bit. The hulking Armored Lieutenant echoes past franchise heavies, this time requiring you to rip their armor off before administering a few rapid, multipunch combos. They’re big, slow, and not much to worry about if you pay attention.

Then you get the new Martial Artists, and going up against trained fighters throws a much better curveball at you. They block and counter just like Batman does, forcing me to engage in a nice, fist-to-face chess match. They also came at me with karate attacks that required repeated blocking — the standard “incoming attack” warning icons get big and angry just before a Martial Artist launches a multihit combo. Squaring off against a few of them pressed me in ways the series hasn’t in a while, forcing me to change up my tactics whenever I saw one on approach. Good stuff.

Less good? Some familiar hiccups return from Arkham City. Booting thugs off a rooftop results in some magical physics to keep them from plummeting to their death. Using the glide boost — a handy way to go from grapple line to flight — can still launch you off into unexpected directions.

Outside of bad guys, I counted exactly two new additions to the series, and they both come with caveats.

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If you cheered Electronic Arts’ decision to end its three-year-old Online Pass program, I’ve got some advice: Don’t fly the victory flag quite yet.

I’m on record calling the Online Pass a fairly smart way to cut in on the used-game market. Inserting a one-use-only code that unlocked a chunk of a game — the multiplayer mode, say — didn’t punish EA’s customers, but a second-hand buyer had to cough up an additional fee to get those features. Consumer friendly? Absolutely not. But as a business tactic, the Online Pass addressed a real financial problem, and other publishers quickly adopted it as a growing industry standard.

“We listened to what the consumer was saying, and it just didn’t look like it was popular,” EA communications vice president Jeff Brown told me at a pre-E3 event this week. “When mainstream consumers make it clear they don’t like something, we listen to them.”

Brown added that with the new console generation coming, “it was time to either do it again or stop doing it. We’re not going to do it again.”

They might not have to.

Leaked details on both Sony’s PlayStation 4 and the successor to Microsoft’s Xbox 360, codenamed Durango, suggest both systems may not support used games. We continue to hear that each requires an always-on Internet connection — an excellent way to verify a first-use disc and reject a second-hand game. Sony also filed a patent on radio-frequency-tag technology designed to handle that verification without an online component.

If true, Sony and Microsoft can handle the used-game issue at the console level, whether it’s a partial or total lock. Then Electronic Arts can and should exercise a little realpolitik, step aside, and let the console manufacturers take the heat.

Indeed, an Online Pass might conflict with whatever system Durango and the PS4 put in place. Possibly, it violates the new consoles’ technical certification requirements — the set-in-stone rules for publication approval on a hardware platform. Certainly, it would become an unnecessary hurdle for customers to jump before playing their brand-new game, and adoption of the Online Pass in the secondary market was fairly low, netting $10-15 million a year, tops. So why not get rid of the thing?

When I put the question to Brown, he had to beg off slightly. “I can’t talk about what my partners are putting into their consoles,” he said, citing terms of confidentially that won’t lift for a while yet. But he added, “You’re making a good point.”

I’ve reached out to other companies, like Warner Bros. Interactive, who’ve used Online Pass-like content locks in the past. So far, no one is confirming or denying their plans to keep using them in the future. But don’t be shocked if they start slowly phasing out.

And don’t celebrate the demise of the Online Pass. It might have felt onerous to charge second-hand users extra for on-disc content, but that content and those charges were always fairly minor. What’s coming next might not be nearly so limited in scope.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I won’t lie … when Warner Bros. Interactive reps handed out the itinerary at a special pre-E3 event, nearly every game journo in the room eyerolled at news of yet another Scribblenauts game. The 2009 original arrived with the freshest concept in gaming that year: Write any word to create any object and solve every problem. Five years later, it’s old hat.

Then they showed us Scribblenauts Unmasked. Yep. It’s cool again.

Publisher Warner Bros. Interactive basically handed their DC Comics licenses over to their Scribblenauts developer, 5th Cell, and it looks like magic happened as a result. Scribblenauts Unmasked (releasing this year on Wii U, 3DS, and PC) contains over 2000 characters and their variants — it has 33 different Batmans — plus items and vehicles from DC Comics’ nearly 80-year history. Including Aquaman, whom no one will ever use.

“We have all the DC Comics characters, the entire roster,” says senior producer Caleb Arseneaux. “We’re talking people who are mainline, New 52 Justice League and also characters who appeared in one panel in one comic in 1976.”

He’s not kidding. The hands-off demo then pulled back to show a hundred or so superheroes on-screen at once. Just at a glance, I spotted the Golden Age Flash and Atom, Ambush Bug, Firestorm, Starfire, Jim Gordon, Power Girl, Red Tornado, Abin Sur, Raven, and Booster Gold. Those are just the ones I haven’t seen in a video game before. Arseneaux confirms Unmasked also has 130 Green Lanterns, pretty much the entire Corps., plus the entire Blackest Night cast of Red, Yellow, Blue, Orange, Indigo, Violet, and Black Lanterns.

It also goes to a lot of familiar places in the DC Universe. We got a good look at the Batcave and Oa, home of the Green Lantern Corps., which featured a nice vista of futuristic green spires in the background. Other levels include Gotham City, Wayne Manor, and Wonder Woman’s home island of Themyscira.

The plot sounds fairly threadbare, but who cares? Series hero Maxwell and his sister Lilly, both avowed comic-book fans, travel to the DC Universe to settle their Batman vs. Superman feud once and for all. Once there, they get involved with the entire Justice League to deal with some as-yet unspecified crisis. But given that every conceivable DC villain lurks somewhere in the game code, writing down “Legion of Doom” in your item-spawning notebook would likely have interesting results.

So does adding adjectives, a returning feature. Just for laughs, we asked Arseneaux to spawn “zombie Batman” into that crowd of characters. Instant pandemonium. Dozens of heroes attacked with ’60s-style “BAM!” punches and energy blasts as the infection rapidly spread across the crowd. That “DC Zombies” moment alone was worth the price of admission.

As for how many characters you can have on-screen at once, “We haven’t found a limit just yet,” says Arseneaux. But he notes that on the PC version, “it’ll probably scale to your hardware capability.”

You don’t even need to rely on every DCU character ever made. The Scribblenauts item-creation tool returns with a hero creator attached, so you can invent your own. Arseneaux showed off a a mashup person made from Superman’s chest, Flash’s “wing” ears, and Aquaman’s arms. We also saw a designs that combined elements from past Scribblenauts games. Arseneaux wouldn’t go into much detail on the Hero Creator, but did say players would be able to add “many” powers to their original characters.

Unmasked also adds a new reputation system, where you earn points for completing dynamic feats around the level. Looking around on Oa, I saw someone calling out, “Rooster! I need a weapon!” while elsewhere, Cyborg shouted “I’m out of electricity! Shock me!” I didn’t get a chance to try it, but I’d bet anything “lightning gun” would’ve earned me some reputation in both cases. “You can spend that on a Batman costume for Maxwell, a new level, stuff like that,” says Arseneaux.

Now, it won’t be perfect. Unmasked won’t feature the Watchmen, for example, though it’s a sure bet the characters who inspired Alan Moore’s classic book (The Question, Blue Beatle, etc.) are in there. But we should finally get the definitive word on Batman vs. Superman … and more importantly, which among the dozens of versions on each side reigns supreme.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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