Stay on top of all our E3 coverage here.

Like a binary Bo Jackson, EA Sports’ new Ignite game engine hopes to excel in multiple athletic pursuits. The next-gen tech provides a versatile foundation for superstar franchises like FIFA soccer and Madden football. Electronic Arts claims that Ignite will enable more realistic — and better-looking — virtual competition.  I visited the EA Sports Ignite Lab during the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo to learn more about the engine.

At the lab, I played versions of the upcoming FIFA 14 and Madden 25 while getting the latest on the redebut of the NBA Live basketball game and rookie-on-the-rise EA UFC release. All of these share the Ignite base. As a result, they benefit from some of the system’s most interesting new features.

A.I. for the next generation

Madden 25′s demo highlighted one of its big selling points, the War In the Trenches mode. The battle between the offensive and defensive lines is more complex than ever, with the CPU calculating multiple scenarios, leading to life-like collisions among blockers and pursuers.

In FIFA 14, multiple players now jostle for headers when an attacker crosses a ball toward the area near the goal. Defenders adjust to situations more pragmatically, too — all thanks to the improved computer control.

While the UFC game didn’t have a hands-on demo, its video presentation discussed the MMAi feature, which should give players a true challenge while highlighting the intricacies of mixed martial arts, including strategic submission battles.

Digital players that behave more like real athletes

While sampling the simple NBA Live 14 shootaround demo, gameplay developer Scott O’Gallagher touched on how Ignite redefines animations and motion. “Being able to change animations on the fly — that’s something we just could not really do before,” he said. “Obviously, you can see here that everything is fluid.” This development, which EA dubbed “true player motion,” became evident as I guided Cleveland Cavaliers all-star Kyrie Irving around the court.

With quick flicks of the right stick, I directed the onscreen point guard to link dribbles seamlessly. “We are releasing the ball to physics on every dribble, which then results in a realistic responsiveness. … Proper foot planting and change of direction, momentum, everything is here with the bounce step,” O’Gallagher continued.

This attention to physics and movement carried over to FIFA and Madden, where the virtual players in those games moved with more realism. On-field FIFA footballers sprinted with added subtlety. Strikers avoided tackles by hopping over the feet of oncoming defenders. Players in the Madden demo galloped more like their real-life counterparts, running and cutting with increased precision.

A new engine means more detail

Ignite brings upgraded visuals as well, amplifying EA Sports’ overall presentation. Uniforms ripple and deform. Madden players’ jerseys and pants accumulate grass stains and dirt with each play. Stadiums come to life with colorful fan demonstrations, and blades of grass shoot up into the air as a soccer ball rolls on the pitch during a FIFA match.

EA Sports UFC will feature fighters who bruise and cut with borderline-discomforting accuracy, and even their skin will discolor as they exert themselves.

Overall, I saw many small changes that didn’t immediately come across like revolutionary leaps. When I played a game of FIFA, it didn’t feel much different than before. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing since EA’s soccer sim is pretty damn good to begin with.

The important thing here is that Ignite is really here to unite … all of Electronic Arts’ sports franchises under one versatile system. While players will see the incremental tweaks and improvements they expect from the publisher’s yearly franchise refreshes, the new engine brings increased development efficiencies and a more consistent final product.

So from a bottom-line standpoint, it looks like Ignite is on its way to victory.

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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 coverage here.

Since the troubled launched of Final Fantasy XIV in late 2010, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada publicly apologized to the company’s fans and committed to relaunching the game as A Realm Reborn. As A Realm Reborn nears its Aug. 27 release on the PC, PlayStation 3, and eventually the PlayStation 4, GamesBeat sought out an in-depth interview with project director Naoki Yoshida to discuss the business aspects behind the decision as well as what both new and old players can expect from the game itself.

After all, it’s not every day a major game company — especially a Japanese one — publicly apologizes for releasing a subpar product. But it’s even less common for that company to then spend millions more rebuilding that years-old title for a second shot at success.

Note: Yoshida spoke through a translator who somewhat paraphrased the lengthier answers.

GamesBeat: What sort of reciprocity will there be for players who paid for the original version?

Yoshida: The first big thing about that is, if you purchased the original game, you’ll be able to have a free upgrade to A Realm Reborn. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that we’ll have a two-week “welcome back” campaign, where you’ll be able to play for free for two weeks. That’s what we want players to try, so we can show them that it’s a completely different game now. We’ll give them the two weeks to see that.

GamesBeat: Are there any sorts of in-game items that might be exclusive to founders?

Yoshida: We have two different types of players. We have players that purchased the game and didn’t like it and then quit, and then we had the players who kept playing the game. We call those our legacy players, the ones who played through all of the updates. Those legacy players will be getting a lot of stuff. They’ll be getting a reduced price on the subscription for A Realm Reborn for the lifetime that they played. They’ll also be getting an in-game Chocobo. They’ll get a lot of extra items. We’ve announced this all in the past. For players that didn’t stick around, but did purchase the original game, they’ll be getting the free upgrade and the two-week period to play for free, but there won’t be any extra in-game items, other than the ones that came with the original game. When you purchased the original game, depending on the version, there were in-game items that you got, and players will be able to transfer those over. All of that data will be transferred.

GamesBeat: As a longtime Final Fantasy XI player, I’m used to calling races “Mithra” and “Tarutaru” and things like that. What was the thinking behind having the same races as Final Fantasy XI but naming them something different?

Yoshida: Because I wasn’t on the team when that decision was made, I’m going to guess why, from what I’ve heard. What I believe is that, back then, they probably thought that a lot of the Final Fantasy XI users would move to Final Fantasy XIV when it was released. But because what they were making was a new game in Final Fantasy XIV, they didn’t want to make them exactly the same. Then it would just be Final Fantasy XI-2, and they didn’t want to make a Final Fantasy XI-2. But they wanted to make it easier for those people who had been playing Final Fantasy XI for such a long time to take a step into this new world by creating things that were similar, but different and unique to the Final Fantasy XIV world. Again, that’s just my guess.

But then again, that lets us see one of the biggest things that was wrong with the original release of Final Fantasy XIV. If they wanted to make it—they should have taken it and made it into Final Fantasy XI-2. Take Final Fantasy XI and make a sequel with new types of systems and new graphics, but build it off of that foundation. Instead of doing that, they decided they wanted to do something new, but still use some of the things from XI. Again, instead of taking one thing and taking it to the next level, they just kept everything kind of in the middle. Nothing was exceptional. That’s why you get this quagmire that was the original release of Final Fantasy XIV. There were a lot of great things that came out of XI, a lot of revolutionary things, like the level sync system. But the fact is, when they made the original Final Fantasy XIV, they made it with a server system that wouldn’t allow level sync. You have this great system you developed. Why not have your new game also use that?

GamesBeat: Do you feel some of those things you were just talking about, like the naming system of the races … has building A Realm Reborn on top of that kind of imperfect foundation held back what you were able to do with this new version?

Yoshida: If I wanted to destroy everything that was in the original XIV, I wouldn’t have taken on the position of rebuilding XIV. I would have gone on to Final Fantasy XVI and made that instead. The fact that I took up XIV is because I realized that, again, even though it had the rocky launch, there were still a lot of people out there who loved the game. You had this new generation of players who didn’t play XI and started their MMO experience with Final Fantasy XIV. For them, they don’t know about Tarutaru. They don’t know about Mithra. For them, they know about the Lalafell and the Mi’qote. To take that and destroy that would be destroying those people’s image of what they got into the game for. There’s tens of thousands of people that, for them, that was the first thing. As a hardcore MMO player myself, I know how important characters are to player. They’re your alter egos. Going in and destroying that and starting over with something absolutely new would crush those people. So keeping that was one of the things I decided we were going to do when we set out to rebuild XIV. Keeping those basic things that people had become used to with Final Fantasy XIV.

GamesBeat: I’ve noticed in almost all of the promotional materials, including the box shot and the giant image on the wall behind us, that “A Realm Reborn” is larger, literally larger, than the “Final Fantasy” title. Do you feel like just the title, Final Fantasy XIV, has a negative stigma following it around that you want to push aside?

Yoshida: Two main reasons. The first reason being – and this is kind of simple – is that we were just kind of tired of this logo, of this Final Fantasy logo. All Final Fantasys, from Final Fantasy I, have been a white background, this black font, this type. You’re getting to a point now that there are so many Final Fantasys that when you look at it, you don’t know which Final Fantasy it is. Is it the newest one? Is it a game from a couple of years ago? The font always looks the same. We wanted something that was new, something that was refreshing, to show that the game is going in a new direction. It’s not just this game. If you look at Lightning Returns, they’ve used a different logo now as well. It’s something that our company is doing as a whole. The series has to evolve if we’re going to evolve as well. So we’re taking that into a new direction. That’s one of the reasons.

And then we want to show is that… We have Final Fantasy XIV, and it’s online. You have this line here that represents the world, the world of Hydaelyn, the world of Final Fantasy XIV. Final Fantasy XIV encompasses this world. But this here, A Realm Reborn, is the game that you’ll be playing. We plan on changing this with every expansion, to show that while it’s Final Fantasy XIV every single time, you’re going to be getting a new game, a new experience, with each expansion. One of my ideas is that once Final Fantasy XV is released, we’ll maybe even remove the XIV from this and just make it Final Fantasy. What’s going to happen is, from a player’s perspective – someone who maybe doesn’t know about Final Fantasy XIV – if you see Final Fantasy XV, you think, “Well, XV is out. Why do I want to play XIV? That’s the old game.” By removing that and making this our title, that sets it apart.

GamesBeat: Given Square’s recent financial troubles, do you think that the company would have greenlit such a massive and costly undertaking as A Realm Reborn if Final Fantasy XIV had launched, say, last month? If Final Fantasy XIV had launched a month ago and it turned out that it wasn’t well received, would A Realm Reborn still be happening?

Yoshida: That’s a difficult question. It’s hard to say, given the economic state of the company. The thing is, when the original Final Fantasy XIV was released, a lot of people around the world had loved this story and this series, the Final Fantasy series. There’s a lot of love for Final Fantasy, so many fans of Final Fantasy. There were so many fans of Final Fantasy XI. They’d come to expect a great experience. When a company that, up until now, has made them great games gives them a game that’s not so great, a lot of people felt betrayed. It wasn’t just a small thing, either. It was a huge betrayal. People felt like, “We believed in you, and you did this to us.” We lost a lot of trust. And so doing something like—if it was released last month and we said, “OK, the release was a failure. XV has just been announced,” I don’t think we would say, “OK, we’re going to cancel XIV. Please buy XV.” We’d still have people feeling like they don’t trust us anymore, because of the recent failure on XIV. So I think we would probably do the same thing. We would try to get back the trust of our users, and getting back the trust of our users would mean saying, “Yes, we made this mistake,” and trying to fix that mistake. Cancelling the game would not be a way to bring that trust back.

GamesBeat: In Final Fantasy XI, I tried all the classes and advanced classes, but I ended up with a ranger with ninja as my subjob for my main character. I was wondering what in A Realm Reborn would mirror that type of gameplay if I wanted to try it.

Yoshida: System-wise, or role-wise in the party?

GamesBeat: Role-wise. The same kind of abilities and playstyle. I saw that there’s an archer. Do you have a subjob system?

Yoshida: The system that we have is similar, but different, in the sense that what we have is called the armory system. You have your one character. The one character can basically be any of the classes that are available. By changing your weapon, you change your class. And so you can have everything be your main class, because when you change your weapon, you instantly change to that class. We have the seven main battle classes, and once you get them up high enough, you can unlock the jobs that are connected to those classes and branch off from the classes.

There are nine of those jobs that will be available at release. What you can also do is, while you’re playing as one of the classes, you’ll be able to combine weapons skills and actions that you learned from other classes. Say you’re playing as the gladiator, which is the main sword class, like a warrior. You can combine to become a pugilist, the fighter type of class, a melee class, and mix those weapon skills. But you can only do that when you’re playing as one of those battle classes. If you switch to a job, which is one of the specialized versions of the classes, then you must use the skills of that job and the class that it’s connected to. You’re pretty much tied into that.

So it allows for two different play styles. If you’re playing as a class, you can mix and match different skills to create your own type. You can do a lot of different things, but you’ll be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. If you decide to go with the job role, then basically you’re put into one role. If you choose the paladin, you’ll be the tank. You’ll be specialized to play as the tank in your party. Depending on what type of game content you’re playing—if you’re playing end content where you’ll need a party and use tactics to defeat a certain enemy, you’ll need certain roles to be able to do that. You’ll want to be able to play as a job – talk it over with the people you’re working with, figure out how you’re going to do it, and fight that end boss. If you’ll be off by yourself and maybe want to do something a little more casual and you want more freedom in how you play, then you’ll want to choose the classes and mix and match those types of things. We’re allowing for different play styles.

GamesBeat: Final Fantasy XI is actually a very punishing game. If you die, you can loss levels. If anything goes wrong, if one mistake is made, your whole team can die. But I put up with it because I enjoyed the world and the characters and the gameplay. The thing that eventually made me leave, though, was actually the lack of variety in enemies. In the starting area, you face a Yellow Crawler, a level 3 crawler. Then, in the level 40 or 70 areas, you face a level 40 or 70 Yellow Crawler. It’s like that across all its regions. Is that something that you’ve addressed in A Realm Reborn — the variety of content?

Yoshida: The original launch pretty much had the same problem. You’d go to one area and see the same [monster] as you did in the high-level areas. We wanted to fix that. We’ve been adding a lot of new monsters. We have a lot of original Final Fantasy XIV monsters, but we’ve been taking monsters from other games in the series, like the monsters that you see in Final Fantasy XII. We’ve taken some of those, rearranged their models, and brought them into Final Fantasy XIV. We’ve also taken some of the monsters from Final Fantasy XI and brought them in. Again, we’re continuing to make even more new monsters. Our monster team, our graphics team, our assets team are making new assets and we plan on releasing even more new monsters. We realize that was one big problem, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen in A Realm Reborn.

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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 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Not everything was cybersoldiers and headshots at Microsoft’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) showing. GamesBeat received a behind-closed-doors demo of Project Spark, the Xbox One’s free-to-play creation game. Somewhere between LittleBigPlanet and Microsoft’s own Kodu and Fable, Project Spark emphasizes building, or “remixing,” fantasy worlds and adventures. But what that means exactly is somewhat blurry, with test players having already created minigames and gameplay mechanics outside the confines of what even the developers believed possible.

As seen in the video below, Project Spark eschews LittleBigPlanet’s sidescrolling presentation for a colorful open world, and it replaces LBP’s immensely dense creation tools with on-the-fly options that players of all ages and skill levels can immediately benefit from.

Although the keyboard demo was impressive and spoke to the seemingly endless possibilities Project Spark allows for, I was more intrigued by a quick demo of a turn-based dungeon-crawling RPG that followed. A hybrid of games like Diablo and Final Fantasy, this demo further solidified Project Spark’s true potential. A member of the development team said that in this dungeon crawler, he had designed it so that you can’t jump. However, his son insisted that jumping was a necessity and so took the controller and a minute later jumping had replaced the “Dodge” ability with jumping.

I was also shown how easy it is to create a customized story campaign, complete with intertwining quests and dynamic collectibles and challenges. It all comes down to Project Spark’s extremely accessible user interface, something LittleBigPlanet wasn’t especially good at. Players can join each others’ games or share and download creations from the community.

Project Spark will be released as a free-to-play title with various paid DLC for Windows 8 and Xbox One.

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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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The winner: Titanfall
Runners-up: The Division, Watch Dogs

Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs nearly won GamesBeat’s Game of the Show for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) for a second year in a row, but it may have split votes with another shooter from the same publisher, The Division. That left the door open for EA’s Titanfall (another shooter — sorry, that seems to be the dominant genre yet again at E3). It’s GamesBeat’s official E3 2013 Game of the Show.

Traditional mech-based shooters — think MechWarrior — are slow, lumbering affairs. But developer Respawn Entertainment infused these giant killer robots with modern speed. On-foot soldiers are nimble, too, with jetpacks that provide a quick boost to reach higher ground. The result is a very fast-paced first-person shooter with the zippiness of Call of Duty and all the good parts of Halo, Tribes, Hawken … well, you name it.

Since the GamesBeat staff split up and saw different things at the industry trade show, we wanted each writer to list their individual top threes to recognize more games that we’re excited about. Keep in mind, these are not finished products. Here are our favorites from what we saw.

For more coverage, please see our E3 page or click on the tags below the article.

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, GamesBeat editor-in-chief

1. The Evil Within (multiplatform)
2. The Division (multiplatform)
3. Dead Rising 3 (Xbox One)

*Note: I won’t put in a vote for Splinter Cell: Blacklist (see my disclosure here), but I want to give it an honest honorable mention here for its Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer mode.

Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat lead news writer

1. Titanfall (multiplatform)
2. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
3. Dying Light (multiplatform)

Jeff Grubb, GamesBeat news writer

1. Titanfall (multiplatform)
2. Super Mario 3D World (Wii U)
3. Pikmin 3 (Wii U)

Source: Nintendo

Pikmin 3 (Wii U)

Giancarlo Valdes, GamesBeat correspondent

1. Eve-VR (PC/Oculus Rift)
2. The Wonderful 101 (Wii U)
3. Fantasia (multiplatform)

Sebastian Haley, GamesBeat correspondent

1. The Division (multiplatform)
2. Warframe (multiplatform)
3. Super Mario 3D World (Wii U)

Stefanie Fogel, GamesBeat correspondent

1. The Witcher 3 (multiplatform)
2. Transistor (multiplatform)
3. Contrast (multiplatform)

Source: Sony

Contrast (multiplatform)

Eduardo Moutinho, GamesBeat correspondent

1. Titanfall (multiplatform)
2. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
3. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z (multiplatform)

Jasmine Rea, GamesBeat correspondent

1. Beyond: Two Souls (PlayStation 3)
2. Contrast (multiplatform)
3. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (multiplatform)

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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 coverage here.

Indie games got a lot of love last week at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. For three days, people crowded the IndieCade booth to see quirky and creative titles like Guns of Icarus Online, 6180: The Moon, and Legend of Dungeon. Sony announced it will allow indies to self-publish their own titles on the upcoming PlayStation 4 console before showcasing many of those games in their massive PlayStation booth. And Microsoft — well, Microsoft had Lococycle and Below. I think.

Here at GamesBeat, we love indie games as well. That’s why we’ve created this list of the top five to come out of E3 that you’ll want to keep your eyes on.

Transistor

Developer: Supergiant Games
Platforms: PS4, PC
Release Date: TBD 2014

Supergiant Games gained the industry’s attention in 2011 with the lovely and poignant Bastion. Now, the studio looks ready to wow once again with Transistor, a science-fiction-themed action role-playing/turn-based strategy game. Whiskey-soaked voice actor Logan Cunningham returns in the role of narrator (he did the same for Bastion), but this time he’s a sentient sword, the eponymous Transistor, and he’s in the hands of a silent woman called Red. After escaping an assassination attempt, Red must travel through a futuristic city to piece together the mystery of the Transistor and track down its former owners. Beautiful and atmospheric, with gameplay that’s both layered and easy to grasp, Transistor could be Supergiant’s finest work yet.

Contrast

Developer: Compulsion Games
Platforms: PS4, Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Release Date: TBD 2013

Contrast made an immediate impression on me when I saw it in the PlayStation booth at E3. Set in the 1920s, a time period not often represented in gaming, it mixes a gorgeous 3D world with shadowy 2D platforming. Both whimsical and dark, it tells the story of two best friends, an 8-year-old girl named Didi and an older girl named Dawn. It’s as if Limbo and BioShock Infinite had a baby while watching Pan’s Labyrinth.

Outlast

Developer: Red Barrels Games
Platforms: PS4, PC
Release Date: TBD

If you happened to hear a lot of yelps and screams coming from the indie section of the PlayStation booth last week, odds are it was a member of the media playing Outlast. The first project from the newly formed development studio, Red Barrels, Outlast is a survival-horror game that forces you to run and hide from the monstrosities inside an abandoned mental facility instead of combating them head-on. Fans of horror movies like REC and The Blair Witch Project will appreciate its “found footage” style, while those who enjoy the niche hit Mirror’s Edge will like its parkour gameplay. Fans of a good night’s sleep, however, might want to steer clear.

Lone Survivor

Developer: Jasper Byrne
Platforms: PS Vita
Release Date: July 2013

I’m a fan of Jasper Byrne’s psychological survival-horror game Lone Survivor (this PC game is on Steam), but I think the upcoming PlayStation Vita version might be even better. It looks great on Sony’s handheld. Its retro, pixelated graphics are well-suited to a smaller screen. The Vita version will include trophies, Cross-Buy and Cross-Play support, as well as 19 new items, new dialogue with all NPCs, two extensive new sidequests, and a brand-new ending, featuring an exclusive piece of music. More unsettling than most recent triple-A horror titles, Lone Survivor feels like a love letter to Silent Hill and Twin Peaks. It’s a bizarre, mysterious, and disturbing experience that will stick with you long after you’ve stopped playing.

Ray’s the Dead

Developer: Ragtag Studio
Platforms: PS4, PC
Release Date: TBD

Unlike Outlast and Lone Survivor, Ray’s the Dead is a light-hearted horror game. You play as Ray, a newly arisen zombie searching for answers about why he was killed, why he was resurrected, and why a giant light bulb is stuck to his head. A blend of stealth, strategy, and puzzle-solving, Ray’s the Dead has you amass a zombie army and guide it around town, wrecking havoc on the inhabitants along the way. It’s basically Pikmin with zombies. What’s not to like?

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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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You know, when you think about it, The Witcher video game series shares some similarities with the hit HBO TV show Game of Thrones. Both are based on works by popular fantasy authors. Both tell tales of characters that are neither completely good nor completely evil. Both are set in harsh fictional medieval worlds populated with mythical creatures, scheming nobles, and the occasional brother-sister incest.

And they both look damn good.

Due for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One sometime in 2014, The Witcher 3 is the final entry in CD Projekt RED’s critically acclaimed action-role-playing game franchise. It’s also the first title in the series to feature a truly open game world and free-roaming exploration, and it’s gorgeously detailed. CD Projekt claims it’s 35 times bigger than The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (a large game in itself) and takes 40 minutes to travel on horseback end to end.

“Basically, the new philosophy of exploring the world in The Witcher 3 is that you can get to every place you see on the screen,” the developer told the media during a live gameplay demo at this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. “This is a massive improvement in comparison to Witcher 2, which had some artificial barriers.”

Of course, a world that big and beautiful is pointless unless it’s filled with interesting things to do. The Witcher 3′s standalone, nonlinear story once again focuses on mutant monster hunter Geralt of Rivia. CD Projekt promises a more personal story for Geralt this time around. Now freed from the political machinations of kings and elves, he’s able to search for his loved ones and pursue the Wild Hunt, a spectral force straight out of folklore that brings death and terror to all it passes. The beginning of the demo shows these skeletal riders attacking a village, and Geralt seeks the lone survivor of the massacre to get some answers.

The ability to track down and slay epic beasts is nothing new — Capcom built an entire franchise around it. But it’s an important part of The Witcher lore, and CD Projekt is putting greater emphasis on it this time around. “We decided we would no longer have this world of enemies who are very weak and who you’re just slashing them and killing them,” said The Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “We decided to create this Monster Hunting system and the Witcher Sense system and create monsters in a way that would be unique. They got their own special abilities, and the hunt for every one of these monsters will be different. You will feel that you’re a monster hunter actually in the game.”

There’s about 80 different monsters in The Witcher 3, the developer says, and each has its own habitat, strengths, and weaknesses. During the demo, the developer showed a side quest involving a formerly peaceful woodland spirit that is now terrorizing the village that used to worship it. Geralt agrees to slay the beast (for a price), but first he has to find it. A simple press of a button activates Geralt’s new Witcher Sense (think Detective Vision in Batman: Arkham Asylum), and it’s not long before he spots the creature’s trail. He discovers that it’s a Leshen — a tall, antlered being that can control the forest and disappear in a cloud of ravens.

Geralt has deep knowledge of his world’s more deadlier creatures, and all of that information is in the game’s Monster Journal. This Wikipedia-like bestiary is incredibly detailed; by reading it, the player learns that the Leshen is very territorial and uses totems to steal power from the forest. It also likes to bind itself to a nearby human and use that person’s vital energy to resurrect itself if it’s slain. Once again, Geralt’s heightened senses allow him to find the marked person, an innocent woman named Hilde. Once she’s dealt with (presumably killed), Geralt is free to hunt down and destroy the totems and finally the spirit itself.

The battle with the Leshen is a spooky, tense affair. Wolves spring out of the shadows at Geralt, and massive tree roots rise up to strike and hinder him. The Leshen itself is a cagey opponent that randomly teleports about the forest, but eventually Geralt is successful and returns to the village to collect his reward.

There he learns that not all of the world’s monsters have antlers or walk on four legs. While he was off dealing with the Leshen, the man who hired him decided to stage a coup, slaying the village elders in cold blood. Geralt calls the man a murderer but ultimately collects his fee and moves on. What else can he do? The world of The Witcher is dark and morally ambiguous, and sometimes picking the lesser of two evils is the best choice available.

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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 coverage here.

One of the most frightening moments during a game demonstration at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) didn’t involve any blood, gore, or monsters. Unless, that is, you consider Nazis to be monsters.

The demo was for Wolfenstein: The New Order, due out late this year for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC from publisher Bethesda. And this particular scene happened during a more story-driven moment in the game.

That’s right: story. That’s a word you normally don’t associate with this first-person-shooter series. Of course The New Order will still have you emptying all manner of ammunition into those fighting for this alternate-history Third Reich, but this Wolfenstein is very different. I could tell just from this this part of the demo.

It started off with you holding a tray with a couple cups of coffee, walking through a dining car on a speeding train. Ahead was an armed guard blocking the doorway to the next section, and flanking him was a giant mech who was practically scraping the ceiling (I wondered how it fit in there to begin with). As you tried to proceed, the mech suddenly turned to you, blocking the aisle with its intimidating girth. “Don’t worry — he’s harmless,” said a female voice off to the side. She saw you disguised as a civilian and figured you were probably uneasy around 10-foot-tall killing machines.

The words came from a woman with short blonde hair, seated to your left. Next to her was a fey, thin man. Both were wearing intimidating Nazi officer uniforms. “Put the coffee down on the table,” she said with an air of absolute authority and a hint of feigned hospitality. “Sit.”

The female officer studied your face. “Strong Aryan features,” she said, admiringly. But looks can be deceiving. She proceeded to explain that she has a simple but full-proof test to see if one has “pure blood.” And if you know Nazis, you know they were not very fond of those who don’t.

Her test? A pure psychological mindfuck. And guess who she wanted to be her test subject at that moment?

I don’t want to spoil the rest of this scene for you, but it was slow, deliberate, and as intense as anything I’ve seen in modern gaming. No firefights. No explosions. No Call of Duty-style roller-coaster rides. Just some fine pacing, writing, and acting that actually made my heart race — even though I was only observing someone else playing the demo.

Watching this reminded me of the opening act in the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, when Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz) visited a Frenchman living in the countryside. Before there was a literal threat, you could just feel the implied threat through Landa’s impeccable charm and smile. If it didn’t make you nervous and anxious as all hell, you weren’t watching the movie correctly.

“That’s so true,” said Sabine Rösgren, a gameplay designer for developer MachineGames, when I made the comparison to her. “We took a lot of inspiration from Inglourious Basterds because it describes what we’re after. It’s dark — a bit of a twisted reality — but it has a hint of humor in it.”

That’s a rather strange source of inspiration for a studio making a Wolfenstein game. No one thinks of Inglourious Basterds as a balls-out, guns-blazing action flick, but that’s because MachineGames isn’t looking to make The New Order the balls-out, guns-blazing first-person shooter we all expected it to be. Maybe that’s not a huge surprise considering the developer’s pedigree.

“MachineGames arose out of Starbreeze Studios, which was heavily focused on story-driven first-person shooters,” said Rösgren. “They developed games like [The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay] and The Darkness. This is the path that Wolfenstein is taking right now.”

Later on the same train, you enter a passenger’s cabin room where your freedom-fighter partner, a woman (you’re a man), awaited. In this short cinematic, you could feel just how alone and frightened these two were, hiding out on a railroaded deathtrap among the overwhelming terror that is the Nazi army. In one simple line, I got another sledgehammer-to-the-head reminder that this was not the Wolfenstein of my youth: “There’s only one bed,” said the woman, sheepishly and nervously. “Is that a problem?”

This wasn’t some titillating moment to get the 13-year-old gamers out there excited. The uneasiness and awkwardness of the situation was tangible, and there was so much more going on here than just the possibility of two adults getting it on.

Might this conversation lead to sex? I really don’t know. The demo cut off right there and moved on to the shooty-shooty stuff. Technically speaking, sure — the scene had some sexual tension. But that’s not even close to the point. The New Order has an interesting cast and some incredible potential for genuine character development in a world that’s isolating and scary in the most unconventional of ways.

And again, this is noteworthy because, remember: This is Wolfenstein that we’re talking about. We know it will have guns, stuff getting blown up good, and maybe even a mechanized Hitler. The shooty-shooty stuff isn’t going away.

“The story makes the shooting relevant, though,” said Rösgren. “You’re in this world, and you have your goal, which is very much emphasized in the story that you’re a part of. You want to save these people.

“You want to create the world that — oh, I’m not going to spoil anything just now,” she continued, laughing and catching herself just in time. “You’re fighting for the world together with your resistance group. We want to create more of an urge than just wanting to shoot and kill everyone.

“Everyone here [at E3] thinks it’s just a straightforward shooter. But it’s so much more than a shooter. We want to make it as immersive and as believable a world as we can manage.”

From what I’ve seen so far of Wolfenstein: The New Order, I love what they’re shooting for.

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Just the term Killer Instinct makes me remember dark, hazy arcades and the musty smell of competition. So I couldn’t help but have a Pavlovian moment when Microsoft announced the return of the beloved fighter during its pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo news conference this year. I had the chance to preview the Xbox One launch-day downloadable title from Double Helix Games and speak with key developers at the show.

“(Double Helix) got it … this understanding of what was great about KI,” Ken Lobb stated, creative director at Microsoft Studios and key architect of the Killer Instinct saga.

The title didn’t immediately feel like the KI I sacrificed so many quarters to during my youth. As I tried to reacquaint myself with the hulking lycanthrope Sabrewulf, I had to grasp the rebooted brawler’s new-ish control scheme. Clearly, the series gained a few dans on its bloody black belt. The new gameplay systems contributed to my learning curve.

“Totally new is this idea … of an Instinct meter,” Lobb mentioned. “What if I had this other buff that I’m building up as a play? … [The meter] is specific to each character. … Jago [the other playable character in the demo] gets hit advantage. He also starts to heal. … Sabre buffs up, gets faster, does more damage.”

I eventually deduced a few of my combatant’s moves and pulled off some of the game’s trademark c-c-combos. These moments directly tapped into my inner 11-year-old KI fanatic. That’s when my brief hands-on experience truly clicked.

Xbox One’s next-gen capabilities will not only help Lobb and company create a more visually striking title, it’ll also help them overcome old-school hurdles to ensure a compelling and fair fight.

“One of the most important parts of a fighting game is balance. In KI1 days … we literally had to have people running around upgrading the arcade machines all over the freaking world. Now we have builds instrumented, so we know if things are broken. … And we build them in a way … that they can be adjusted hourly, daily.”

Along those lines, players can share their beatdowns through the One’s gameplay-recording functionality, which should appeal to the thriving competitive community streaming its matchups and tournaments online.

“You have a ton more people that want to watch this stuff and learn. We showed with upload and Twitch [the streaming online service] … you decide if you want to … send up a video of what you’ve just done. … Push a button, off it goes,” Lobb added.

New features aside, Double Helix has a tough challenge to overcome. Fighting game fans are fickle. KI followers have demanded a sequel for nearly two decades, so expectations will run high. The development team hopes to deliver an authentic successor.

“We thought about [making a sequel] for a long time. …The fighting genre is back. Time is right. We like bringing either new IP or things that people love at the launch of a new platform,” Lobb said.

This reimagined release has new mechanics, new character designs, and even a new sales model — you can purchase characters a la carte or buy all content (including future downloadable additions) at once. But I enjoyed the new Killer Instinct most when it felt like the old Killer Instinct.

I’m talking about landing that 14-hit extreme combo and hearing the familiar bloodthirsty baritone of the combat commentator.

That moment made me reach for my pocket, fumbling for my next quarter. And that’s why I can’t wait to get my hands on the final product.

Fight on.

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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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Titanfall was one of the great new surprises of the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show in Los Angeles last week. The sci-fi shooter has cool, next-generation 3D graphics and definitely has a Call of Duty-style feel to it.

That’s no surprise because it comes from Respawn Entertainment, the game studio that former Call of Duty developers Vince Zampella and Jason West founded. The title offers innovative play and a fresh new intellectual property for gamers to enjoy as they make the leap to next-generation consoles. Set in a distant frontier, the game features a war where 24-foot-tall Titan mechs square off against elite mobile infantry known as Pilots. That might not sound like much to you, but this multiplayer-focused shooter has some wonderful characteristics.

The title emerged from a state of legal warfare. In March, 2010, Activision fired Infinity Ward chiefs Zampella and West for breaching their contract and plotting to start a new studio while still working for the publisher. Electronic Arts stepped in to fund Respawn and lock down the rights to its first release. The litigation almost went to court, but the companies settled the lawsuit on the eve of the trial. That left the team with the creative freedom to do what it wanted and compete with Call of Duty.

Titanfall will come early next year as an exclusive on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 video game consoles. That’s a coup for Microsoft, which promises a lot of exclusives in its war with Sony for the hearts and minds of players. Zampella appeared on stage at the pre-E3 Microsoft press event to announce the game. Titanfall incorporates the Source game engine that Valve uses for its releases.

One of the first things you notice is that the game makes use of vertical space. The demo that Zampella showed featured multistory buildings. You could climb up a wall, parkour style, and surprise enemies who think in a two-dimensional way. If you earn a few kills, you can get enough points to jump into a mech, or Titan. Once you are in there, you become much more powerful. You can riddle your opponents with bullets or missiles. And you can jump to the top of buildings much more easily to gain a height advantage.

But the Titans are not invulnerable. Infantry can fire shoulder-launched rockets at the big mechs and eventually bring them down. As a Titan falls, it makes a big explosion. The battle teems with soldiers, including non-player characters that give you the feeling that the game is heavily populated with troops. This allows even weaker players to succeed by getting multiple kills, and it reduces the number of player deaths.

The game is multiplayer only, but it has single-player elements such as a narrative that serves as a backdrop for the gameplay. It’s too bad that the title doesn’t have its own full-blown single-player campaign because Respawn’s team has a definite flair for the dramatic, as you can see in the trailer below. But you will experience story elements during the launch sequences for the multiplayer matches. Each drop into a fighting zone is epically presented, as you jump off of a drop ship and then run for hardpoints. Once you secure the hardpoints, you can set up a coordinated defense. Clearly, the side with the most Titans is going to have an advantage.

The shooter has the same kind of score points and name tags on friendly players as in Call of Duty offerings, but the gameplay is cinematic in almost every way. You can catch your enemy’s bullets with a force field and send them back in the other direction. As a Titan, you can pick up soldiers and toss them. Or you can stomp on them. You can add jetpacks to your feet and jump off the ground in thrilling fashion. You can also run up walls, and get the jump on rivals. It’s very cool when, as an infantry soldier, you can land on top of a Titan, shoot its computer out, and jump off to watch it explode.

I thought the demo for Titanfall was superb and the action very intense. Here’s a video trailer for the upcoming release.

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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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Call of Duty: Ghosts is a major departure in the gameplay and feel of the fastest-selling game franchise on the planet. As such, publisher Activision Blizzard is taking a major risk. It is balancing the need to give fans what they have always liked against the need to provide them with something new, so they won’t get bored. We’ve seen enough of the game to offer our first impression.

From what Activision Publishing and Infinity Ward have shown so far at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Ghosts will provide both. You can still play intense multiplayer battles and enjoy all-out combat. But the emphasis in this title is on stealth, as with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series from Ubisoft. In this release, the United States is no longer a superpower. A catastrophic event has devastated the southern half of the country, and the American military is in tatters. Survivors are putting up a guerrilla resistance, and they’re known as Ghosts.

This game couldn’t be more different from what Electronic Arts has shown so far with its Battlefield 4 game, which promises epic combat scenes where firepower rules. In that offering, as many as 64 players can fight in a multiplayer arena at the same time, and a single commander can give orders to the troops. With Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision has only showed off a couple of single-player scenes. The company unveiled an underwater level (pictured at top) at the Xbox reveal on May 21. And they showed another sequence in advance of E3 last week. That new level featured a military-trained dog that accompanied U.S. Special Forces on secret missions.

Ghosts isn’t a letdown. But I’d like to see more of the old Call of Duty: the fast-paced action that made the series great and the intense, emotional scenes that showed you exactly what combat could be like in the midst of a harrowing mission. Call of Duty is all about an epic, cinematic experience, and I fear that this title might swing too far in the direction of stealth. After all, the U.S. no longer has the upper hand in weapons superiority and greater numbers, so stealth is the most logical game plan.

A soldier’s best friend

In the first mission, we saw divers secretly navigate through a coral reef and attach a bomb to a nuclear submarine. The divers had to stealthily navigate past enemy swimmers and engage them in open combat using underwater guns. Those guns are actually based on real weapons that the Soviet Union developed in the 1970s. The undersea combat moved in slow motion, but it was still intense.

At E3, we learned even more about the playable main character, Simon “Ghost” Riley, a soldier who, along with his brother and fellow combatant, grew up in America after a calamity had nearly wiped it out. The developers haven’t revealed the cause of the disaster yet, but it happened 10 years ago in the game’s chronology, which will not match the chronology of any other Call of Duty entry. The story is a brand new one set in the franchise’s universe. It has no other narrative connection to the Black Ops or Modern Warfare arcs.

The Russians aren’t the threat anymore. Instead, the U.S. is facing off against “resource rich” entities that include the oil states of South America. One of the battles takes place in a no-man’s-land about 10 miles north of San Diego, Calif. — now a wasteland full of wreckage and collapsed interstates. The Americans and an unnamed faction contest the region.

During the mission, players come upon a mile-wide crater and have to send scouts with hazmat suits and gas masks into the area. The dog participates in this mission as a remote recon scout. Players can track where it is through a tablet-screen viewfinder. The canine is not just a companion character. It’s a real participant in the action.

The dog carries a periscope-like camera and an earpiece. The team can tell it what to do through the earpiece. Squad members can also give nonverbal vibration commands to the dog to send it in the right direction. You steer the dog as you would a soldier. When the dog comes upon an enemy, the player taps a shoulder button that sends the dog to attack the enemy’s throat. It can also bark to distract an enemy and lure him into view. A soldier with a silencer rifle can then dispatch the enemy.

The dog is pretty fierce, but the animations of its kills all look the same for now. It seems like the dog always gets the drop on the human enemies and rips out their jugulars in an instant. I hope that will change by the time the game ships because it feels unrealistic. I mean, a dog just isn’t that good, right? It’s a breathing animal, not a real drone that you can operate with a laptop on a battlefield.

Show us more

As with Activision’s Destiny, I want to see more. The publisher wants to migrate 40 million gamers who are playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II and other titles over to Ghosts.

Is this the stuff of billion-dollar games? From what I’ve seen, I don’t know. Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II generated $1 billion in sales within 16 days of its launch. But Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell series sells at much lower levels than the Call of Duty games. And will the multiplayer be more like Splinter Cell’s, a stealth combat version that is not nearly as fun, or will it be more like traditional Call of Duty releases?

Activision officials assure me that we’ll see a lot of the action later on. The underwater level shows that all hell can break loose. I say, bring it on.

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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.

Bungie showed off gameplay for its long-awaited Destiny at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this week. We had a close look at the title, and this is our first impression. Destiny is a huge bet for Bungie, which moved off its best-selling Halo video game franchise, and for its publisher Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard. And Sony has made a big commitment to Destiny by signing a long-term partnership deal with Bungie and Activision to get some exclusive content for the multiplayer-centric first-person shooter.

So far, we’re not nearly as wowed as we wanted to be. While so many things about the game are impressive, from the graphics to the depth of customization to the unique multiplayer gameplay — we were left wanting more. During the first-hands on gameplay demo at Sony’s pre-E3 press conference, Bungie co-founders Joe Staten and Jason Jones walked out on stage to demo the title in a two-player cooperative session.

On the big-event screen and on the smaller screens where we saw it, the graphics are breathtaking. The demo opened with a view of a huge valley on Earth, where an alien attack has savaged the world, leaving it with a small number of heroes, known as Guardians, defending the last safe city from alien attack. The art work was impressive and first-rate, considering that Destiny is a massively multiplayer online release, which will have hundreds of hours of gameplay and many such environments. I can see why Bungie has 400 people working on the title.

Destiny will contain a shared, persistent online world, set in our solar system. Bungie has announced four playable races so far. The passage of time has made Earth strange, and nothing looks like it does in the present day.  The canyon in front of the players was full of awesome lighting and shadows. Weeds and bushes swayed in a gentle breeze. The trees feature graphic-rendering techniques like tessellation, so the details come to life. The surroundings are alive with audio effects. You can hear the footfalls. Shadows cast in real time, and that makes the world feel alive. The water looks realistic with accurate reflections and ripples. The landscape views are truly epic in scope, with big views of giant buildings and vistas.

The action

When the developers got to the action during the Sony press event, the Bungie co-founders bantered as they showed off Destiny’s features. They went on a mission together into a dark underground space. Staten was chattering a lot, and I couldn’t tell if that was actually the characters in the game talking. In fact, it might have been nice if it was. The lighting in the dungeon-like space was spectacular.

“I’m going to meet some friends, and we’re going to shoot some aliens in the face,” Staten said. “Because shooting aliens is relaxing.”

But the two characters were strangely silent as they went through the world in a section called Old Russia. One character was a male Warlock, while another was a female Hunter. The game will let you customize your character through your clothing, armor, and weapons. One gun was a level 200 weapon, suggesting a huge tech ladder for leveling up your arsenal. Some of the upgrades will completely change the way a weapon feels. That’s how players will express their personalities and abilities in the world over time.

A ghost, or an artificial intelligence character, spoke up and said, “We always visit such cheerful spaces.” That character is a lot like Cortana, the A.I. who always banters with Master Chief in the Halo series.

One of the characters dispatched enemies in a casual manner with a powerful “hand cannon.” It seemed like a very large six-shooter, and it could take hostiles out with a couple of shots. Rockets and machine guns also took part in the action.

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LOS ANGELES — It wasn’t until Dead Rising 3 came on the screen before I was really sold on these next-generation consoles.

Halfway through Microsoft’s press conference at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), it showed off the zombie-slaying action game. It’s under development from Capcom Vancouver and is due out in November with the Xbox One launch.

It looked good. It was huge in scale. And it looked fun.

But you could use those words to describe the last two Dead Risings as well. What’s different for this next-gen edition?

Looks that kill

Despite the intentionally cheeseball humor of the series — goofy characters, ridiculous outfits, over-the-top undead-slaying — Dead Rising 3 has a decidedly gritty, realistic look. The developers completely threw out the cartoony color palette from the previous games and exchanged it for a lot of brown and grays.

“The previous games had this crazy look,” Capcom art director Alan Jarvie told GamesBeat. “There’s only so far you could push in that direction before you want change. But also, it allows the player to make the game as crazy as they want to make it look without us forcing it on them. And we do want the zombies to be scary. I mean, they are the number-one enemy in the game. It’s hard to make them scary if the set around them doesn’t really match that scary feel. So we wanted more realistic zombies, and that said, they should be in more realistic worlds.”

All of this realism lives in a noticeably larger game. As you wander the open city, you can enter in and out of buildings and transition into different districts with literally no load times (of course, since this is still in development, that’s subject to change). The shopping malls and casino blocks from the last two games may have felt big at the time, but they’re no comparison. “Dead Rising 1 and 2 combined fit in [Dead Rising 3's] world,” said Capcom executive producer Josh Bridge. “And there’s still room to be had.”

And of course, more system memory means more zombies. They sometimes pack the streets so tightly, you just instinctively know you have to find another way around them. Or call in for heavy-duty backup.

A smart SmartGlass

Throughout E3, Microsoft was showing off SmartGlass, its tablet and smartphone application that complements Xbox 360 and Xbox One games in real time. During the show, we saw how it’ll be used for Dead Rising 3, and now we’re not so sure we’ll want to go on zombie hunts without it.

You can pull up a GPS-like map on the separate device to show your active location in the game. You can also use the map to search for something in the city — say, a gun store — mark it, then have it show up as a waypoint on your television screen.

You can also use powerups such as drones or artillery strikes that are exclusive to SmartGlass. In this manner, you can play Dead Rising 3 semi-cooperatively, with your partner using your iPhone to call for a hail of rockets to rain down on that thick mass of undead in front of you.

You’re Kinected to the game

The zombies in Dead Rising 3 can see you from farther away — but they can also hear better now, too. That means you’ll have to be careful when firing your gun, lest you draw more of them to you than you had intended. Most of the time, you don’t want the extra attention. So you might want to unplug your Kinect.

If on, the camera and voice-recognition peripheral will listen on behalf of the zombies. It will pick up any noise you make in real life and send it to the game, thus alerting the enemies to your location. “It could be kind of funny if you’re trying to play the game, and your mom comes in the room and yells, ‘What the hell are you doing? Clean up the room, and get a real job!’ [and wakes up the zombies].” said Bridge, laughing.

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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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LOS ANGELES — The Sherlock Holmes you see in developer Frogwares’ new game Crimes & Punishments isn’t quite the aloof character that author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created. He’s a bit disheveled, sneakier, and has the ability to stop time as he scours a person’s appearance for clues. The once gentlemanly adventure-game star is now a deceitful amalgam of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original character and the 21st-century interpretation we find on television and in movies. Finally, Sherlock Holmes has caught up with the times.

This new Sherlock is slightly older, and when we first see him in Crimes & Punishments, he’s in desperate need of a shave. His world is much darker — full of gruesome murders that take inspiration from Doyle’s later stories and a spatter of Russian literature. Crimes & Punishment is the seventh installment in Frogwares’ long-running adventure-game series, and it’s the first built in Unreal Engine 3, making it graphically superior even to the gorgeous Testament of Sherlock Holmes game released last year. But the new engine is only part of the series’ transformation.

Once you start exploring London and search for evidence in the game’s eight seemingly unconnected cases, you’ll see the world through Sherlock’s eyes. Frogwares’ version of the character can pause time during his investigation, a feature that borrows elements from both the new BBC television series, Sherlock, and the recent Hollywood movies. When he does, words hover in the air, alerting the player to signs that give Sherlock his basis for deduction. This process is delightfully fluid and does away with the clunky menu sorting that plagued previous titles.

But you aren’t simply deducting information to catch the right crook anymore. Sherlock’s new flair for deceit, a feature that first appeared in Testament, means he can choose to “absolve” or “condemn” any nonplayable character (NPC) suspected in a case. You’re no longer working toward a definite end of a case now but instead satisfying Sherlock’s odd sense of propriety. Even NPCs that are astoundingly guilty can go freely back into the world if Sherlock decides it isn’t worth his time to accuse them or share his evidence. He can also condemn the wrong person if he chooses.

Crimes & Punishments shows us the very manipulative side of Sherlock that modern audiences expect. He remains an amoral character in a world desperately trying to reclaim its morality, and he seems to revel in it. Frogwares has even reworked its once clunky conversation system to now provide players with weighted dialogue choices similar to those found in Mass Effect. If you want, you can make Sherlock go full rogue just to see how the story changes. The game has a few poignant moral choices that will ultimately change the ending, but Frogwares was not willing to share how many endings you can get.

I’m very interested to see how well moral choices work in Crimes & Punishments. The game isn’t slated for release until 2014, which gives Frogwares plenty of time to tweak the system. Fans of more modern interpretations who found this adventure series too slow or a bit shallow might really enjoy the more complicated path Sherlock now walks. He’s not afraid to push Watson to the brink, and he definitely doesn’t care about combing his hair before waltzing into Scotland Yard. This Sherlock Holmes is teetering on the precipice of antisocial behavior.

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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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Solstice Arena is taking Zynga into the new market of midcore games, or hardcore titles that you can play in a matter of minutes.

The be beleaguered publisher of social (and now mobile) games built an audience of hundreds of millions of players with casual games on Facebook like FarmVille. But Solstice Arena is a bold new expansion area made possible by the acquisition of A Bit Lucky, a San Mateo, Calif.-based game studio headed by Jordan Maynard and Frederic Descamps.

They earned their hardcore game developer chops at Trion Worlds and Electronic Arts. Descamps and Maynard cofounded the company in November 2009. It built titles that blended casual and hardcore elements like Lucky Train and Lucky Space. Then Zynga bought it last September in a gambit to acquire more engaged players. The A Bit of Lucky team has been busy, and its game is now launching on the Apple iTunes App Store on the iPad 3, iPad 2, iPad Mini, iPhone 5, iPhone 4, and the iPhone 4S. It requires iOS 5.1 or later.

Solstice is free-to-play, where you play for free and purchase options via virtual goods transactions. But it’s also “fair to play.” You can’t purchase your way to victory.

Descamps, the general manager of Solstice Arena, describes the game as the world’s first “speed MOBA.” (That alphabet soup stands for multiplayer online battle arena, which are games like Riot Games’ League of Legends or Valve’s Dota 2.)

“We’ve designed Solstice Arena with a distinct mission: take a genre we love and transform it to allow hardcore fans and casual players to experience the fun of MOBA gaming right from their mobile devices,” Descamps said in a blog post. “To those familiar with MOBA games, you will find a deep, competitive, and well-balanced MOBA – one that is unlike any free-to-play game on the App Store. But our goal wasn’t to just attract players similar to us. We want to make Solstice Arena accessible to new players, too – so many of whom may have never tried a MOBA before.”

In the 3-versus-3 multiplayer game, you can jump into a fast-paced battle on a map that encourages players to make tactical decisions. The first to destroy the enemy’s base wins. It’ll have three modes. In single-player, you can play solo against bots. In real-time multiplayer, you can fight against others or play cooperatively with others against bots. It uses a matchmaking and queue system to connect players based on their skill, level, and hero ability. Players can invite friends to play and see who is available in real time.

Each match lasts only five minutes to 12 minutes. That’s a deliberate design choice because it fits well with mobile usage. People have time to play on the run, but they don’t have a lot of time for long sessions, as with League of Legends.

“We have put a lot of emphasis on making the game accessible, with a good user interface and experience,” Descamps said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We think there is a huge opportunity in the ‘speed MOBA.’”

Solstice has no farming. It has no “minions” or “creeps” who can be dispatched as cannon fodder. The battles are distilled to the core of fighting player vs. player. It will have 10 heroes available at launch. Each hero suits a different kind of play. You can level up and gain new skills and shape your personality.

Descamps said the Unity-based game has been tested on servers around the world and that Zynga has figured out how to provide a good experience with snappy game play. Zynga says you can play on 3G, 4G LTE, and Wi-Fi.

Here’s a trailer for the 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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LOS ANGELES — Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) is like a famous footballer who hasn’t been able to sustain his early career brilliance. The franchise endeared itself to many footy fans with genre-redefining gameplay. But recent iterations have stuck to an aging formula, failing to impress the greater interactive-soccer community. This year’s release hopes to regain the series’ previous form with flashy moves and a shiny new jersey to match. Along with a slew of control tweaks, PES 2014 — coming later this year to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC — features the Konami-tested-Metal-Gear approved Fox Engine, giving the game a whole new level of graphical fidelity. I had the chance to play the title and speak with some of its key developers at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

“We have developed a different system on top [of the Fox Engine] to make it more football-specific,” senior producer Naoya Hatsumi stated through translator Akane Oyagi. ”[Fox Engine] has enabled us to have more options and more detailed presentation.”

I saw these new enhancements firsthand as I played a demo match between recently crowned European champions Bayern Munich and Brazilian stalwarts Santos F.C. As the athletes walked onto the field, Munich fans created an elaborate mosaic of their club’s crest, spanning the entire diameter of the arena. Player models appeared more detailed, and I noticed small touches like the sun reflecting off the ball and players’ boots.

“[The engine] executes the emotions of the players for each situation. … The characteristics of each stadium are re-created to their detail. … Each blade of grass … are completely recreated as well,” Hatsumi said.

The enhancements are not all cosmetic. PES 2014 also boasts multiple gameplay additions.

“The player’s weight shift, his barycenter [center of gravity], and the ball can be controlled on separate levels,” Oyagi mentioned at the beginning of the presentation. ”This leads to more freedom and precision in control, positioning, attacking, blocking, contact, and delaying.”

Unfortunately, these mechanics made the game feel more sluggish. My footballers seemed to react a millisecond too late, and I had difficulty acclimating to the stilted action on the pitch. Passing didn’t feel as crisp and responsive as I’d like, and I couldn’t stitch together the types of triangulations needed to create scoring opportunities.

Regardless, PES 14 clearly provides a more authentic experience than its recent predecessors, but I’ll have to go through a few more derbies before I can say whether the franchise is back to its goal-scoring former self.

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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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LOS ANGELES — Telltale Games is back with more The Walking Dead, its critically acclaimed episodic point-and-click adventure series (and GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year). The title’s first downloadable content, 400 Days, is coming out in July for $4.99 on PC, Mac, iOS, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network.

The DLC will serve as a sort of bridge between Season One and Season Two, telling the stories of five survivors in the first 400 days of the zombie apocalypse.

If you never played The Walking Dead, you’ll need at least Episode One of Season One to play 400 Days, but Richard Iggo, Telltale Games’ senior director of marketing, doesn’t recommend playing it without having first finished the entire season.

“First of all, it’s just nice to have that continuity all the way from Season One and experience the world of The Walking Dead,” Iggo explained during a demo at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. “But more importantly, the decisions that you made in Season One will come to echo in 400 Days. And even more importantly, the stuff you choose to do in 400 Days will resonate forward into Season Two.”

400 Days’ five characters each have their own short, playable story, their own perspective of the zombie apocalypse from Day Zero to Day 400. You can play the stories in any order, and they all contain some amount of crossover. Each takes place in the same location, a Georgia truck stop not far from where Season One’s ragtag band of survivors fought their own battles against the undead.

During the E3 demo, Telltale introduced Vincent, who shoots an unknown man for unknown reasons before winding up shackled in a bus on the way to prison. His situation eerily echoes that of Season One protagonist Lee Everett, another criminal on his way to prison before zombies intervene. But Iggo told GamesBeat the similarities are not intentional.

“I don’t think it was an intentional connection other than it’s … with Vincent’s story we wanted to write a real pressure cooker-style environment. All of the other stories are very, very different both in tone and in the type of character you play.

“Even though they’re all linked by this truck stop, some of them are very open, some of them like this one are kind of pressure cooker stories, but they’re very, very different. So it’s not really trying to echo back to Lee — it’s just trying to give you that experience of different viewpoints on the zombie apocalypse.”

Throughout the demo, Iggo emphasized that, once again, your choices will matter. Trapped on the prison bus by walkers, Vincent must decide which convict’s foot to blow off with a shotgun to escape. It’s just as brutal as the leg chopping scene of Season One, and it definitely has an impact on the story.

“The thing about 400 Days is that it allows you to definitely explore those things we had in Season One,” Iggo added, “but there are certain ways in which we told the story in Season One from a storytelling and a game dynamic point of view, which kind of wandered into a certain direction. With 400 Days, there were ideas that we had that really couldn’t work in Season One. But now we can explore those different mechanics and different ways of telling a story around an environment. [It's] different from Season One, but still The Walking Dead you know and 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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LOS ANGELES — Nothing says “bad day” quite like waking up in a dilapidated hospital with nothing but a cellphone to light your way. This is the scenario you face in Atlus’s first publishing venture on next generation consoles: Zombie Studios’ Unreal Engine 4 game Daylight.

The curious thing about Daylight is that it is procedurally generated, meaning that it is unlikely that you’ll find the same hallways or spooky broken dolls in the same place across multiple playthroughs. But what makes Daylight particularly strange is that IGN host Jessica Chobot not only voices the terrified protagonist but even contributed to the story.

“Chobot is a big horror fan,” said Atlus press representative John Hardin in an interview with GamesBeat. “She’s really into spooky haunted hospitals, and I think [she's] planning to go on a tour of famous haunted places.”

Daylight might seem like an odd publishing choice for Atlus, given the company’s long history with role-playing games, but many of its products have a definite horror spin to them. Ghosts and people-eating demons are common occurrences in an Atlus title.

“Did you see that,” Hardin said as I jumped back in my chair a little. “All the ghosts in this game are intentionally colored the same color as eye floaters, so you can’t really tell if they’re there or not.”

Shortly after that, a ghost strangled me. You can’t fight back in Daylight, and the only way to secure your release from this hospital of horrors is to track down possessed items scattered throughout the endless shadowy hallways all around you. This is certainly creepy, but I’m not sure if it is truly unlocking the full potential of Unreal Engine 4 with lots of darkness and a cellphone as your only friend.

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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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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 — Beyond: Two Souls is out to capture the moral dilemmas that you face when you have supernatural powers. Will you use them for good? Or evil?

That’s the heart of the preview scene that Quantic Dream is showing at the E3 video game conference this week. Beyond: Two Souls is a cinematic game with an engaging story, and it was one of the top titles previewed at E3 last year. Sony is promoting it heavily again at this year’s show in anticipation of its Oct. 8 launch on the PlayStation platforms.

The story tracks the life of Jodie Holmes, a girl who has an invisible, ghost-like soulmate named Aiden. She can summon Aiden when she needs him, and Aiden can use supernatural powers like going through walls, choking people, and possessing them. The voice and motion actors include Willem Dafoe and Ellen Page (Jodie). The title is heavily anticipated in part because Quantic Dream always pushes the limit on making artistic, movie-like video games. Its past games include Heavy Rain and Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

With Beyond: Two Souls, Jodie has been recruited into the CIA. But it’s not for her own prowess as a spy, as she is one of the weakest-looking heroines you’ll ever see in a video game. It is because she can tap Aiden’s supernatural powers to do things that no one else can do.

Quantic Dream chief operating officer Guillaume de Fondaumiere told GamesBeat in an interview that the scene shows the choices that Jodie has to make and how she has been repurposed into a weapon by those who want to use her and Aiden for their own purposes. She has been assigned to take out a warlord named Jamal in Mogadishu, Somalia. At the demo’s start, she had just made a harrowing escape with a small Somali boy. Breathless, she says that she must part ways with him. He becomes emotional about that, but they separate.

Then Jodie begins to move up on Jamal’s compound in stealth. She can move quietly behind someone and then take them out herself. Or she can tap Aiden, who can choke the guards to death. If they catch Jodie, it’s all over. Once she spots the compound, she finds it’s heavily guarded. She switches over to Aiden, who crosses the street unseen. He finds a side door and unlocks it for Jodie. She then sneaks into the compound and sends Aiden out once again.

“As the player, you can switch between Jodie and Aiden at any time,” de Fondaumiere said. “You have to find a way to work together.”

Aiden is kind of a wispy smoke character who moves through walls and overhears conversations. He sneaks into a command center and identifies the warlord. You then have to decide how to attack. You can use Aiden to take possession of the body of one of the guards. The guard then walks over to the command center and sprays everyone with bullets. Jodie runs in to view the massacre and confirm the kill for the CIA. But then the little boy comes in and finds that the slain killer is his father. He points the finger at Jodie, who runs into the street.

A bunch of angry Somalis gather in the street and block Jodie’s path. She uses Aiden to clear a path. Some of the soldiers shoot at her, wounding her in the leg. She moves into a house and opens the door. Then she seeks help from others in the bar. No help is forthcoming. Jodie escapes into a building, but the Somalis surround it and pound on the door. She can escape through the roof. But if she is captured, she is taken out into the street. At that time, an extraction helicopter arrives and strafes the crowd. Soldiers drop down and rescue Jodie.

The scene is riveting, and the acting is top notch. But it is not very interactive. If you make a slightly wrong or late decision during the pursuit, you will be captured. The scene tells you what it’s like to become a supernatural agent for the government and what happens when you allow yourself to be manipulated in a bad way.

We caught up with de Fondaumiere at a recent Sony press event in advance of E3. Here’s our video interview.

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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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LOS ANGELES — Dark Souls 2 is so hard, I actually died while playing it as an invincible sorcerer.

Maybe I’m just really terrible at this notoriously difficult action-RPG fantasy series. But among the other players at a pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo’s preview event hosted by publisher Namco Bandai last month, I felt like I was holding hold my own.

Until I somehow managed to die with god mode turned on.

Namco Bandai had two versions of developer From Software’s newest game available to play. One was the regular Dark Souls 2, where the lowliest of undead knights can and will kill you with just a couple swings of his sword. The other was Dark Souls 2 as well, but with this version, the player wouldn’t take damage from attacks. It had a necessary tweak so the writers would have a shot at finishing the demo in a reasonable amount of time.

I began with the normal version. I traveled down into a cavernous dungeon, tossed around some fireballs, and began to figure out which attacks worked best against each foe. For taking on the giant armored knight with his two little minions, that was a matter of dodging their gang assault and casting a lightning spell that would hit all three — something I needed to do repeatedly. Getting to that point and realizing that strategy, however, was the tricky part. I died countless times. So much so, I began to feel bad for the other people waiting to play, as they watched my sorcerer go down at different times in almost every corner of the level.

I gradually was able to get better and progress farther (considering the average of each play attempt). The trial-and-error process was enlightening, especially considering how demeaning it felt to die at the hands of the first unassuming nemesis (just like mistiming a jump against that first Goomba in Super Mario Bros.).

I eventually knocked out the big armored knight, but not without taking a few licks. So when I left the dungeon for a grassy outside area, I swiftly died at the hands of the next simple adversary. Sure, I was frustrated, but that’s what people love about this series: Getting your ass kicked and then improving your skills so the enemies don’t kick your ass as hard the next time.

But I had to know what was beyond that baddie outside? To get back there quicker, I booted up the special press version of Dark Souls 2 that was in god mode. It wasn’t easier at all, really. I actually did worse since I neglected all the tactics I had already devised. Even though I couldn’t take damage, the knights could still strike me down. So what happened when I got back to that grassy area? The chump that took me out the last time knocked me into a bottomless pit.

Even though my sorcerer technically still had all his health, he was stuck in limbo and we had to reset. Bullshit. But it’s fun bullshit for gamers who like a serious challenge (and won’t have an invincibility option to fall back on).

From Software is developing Dark Souls 2 for them. The team is improving the flow from Dark Souls to make the maddening gameplay a little smoother. A Namco Bandai representative told me that this means no more (or more likely, not as many) cheap deaths and less grinding through drawn-out areas.

Factor in advanced lighting, clothing, and environmental graphic effects thanks to the new development system From Software is using, and hopefully, the devout will be satisfied. They will have to wait until March 2014, however, when the game comes out for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

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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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LOS ANGELES — Watch Dogs is breaking new ground in multiplayer action — your friends can barge into your single-player game and challenge you. They can break into your game, hack your defenses, steal the data that belongs to your character, and then try to escape with it.

Watch Dogs is a very imaginative and original work that has drawn a lot of attention for Ubisoft, the French video game publisher that plans to launch the game Oct. 8. If successful, Watch Dogs could generate huge revenues for the company and establish a new franchise. I’m predicting success because this game is full of so many fresh ideas, like its seamless connection between the multiplayer and single-player modes.

With a multiplayer demo at the E3 video game trade show, Ubisoft has shown that lot of thinking has gone into making the game fun. In a single-player game, cyber-vigilante Aiden Pearce can hack into the central computer system of Chicago (think of him as a one-man National Security Agency) and obtain data on everyone. He uses that information to hunt down criminals and other enemies and deliver street justice. Aiden is all-powerful, acquiring secret codes, stealing money, buying upgrades, and making cars crash by changing the street lights. But the authorities in charge can use the same technologies to hunt him down. That basic tension drives the single-player experience.

But multiplayer mode can intrude into your game. Using a companion app on an iPad, another player can direct the police as they try to trap you and hunt you down during a car chase. The player with the iPad can see the chase happening on a city map. They can direct a chopper to chase after you and can control other forces as they try to trap Pearce.

Here’s another way that multiplayer gamers can intrude into your game. Since Watch Dogs takes place in a big city, you can’t always tell who the people are when you pass them on the street. Some of them might actually be your friends. If a player enters your game as another random character, they can sneak up behind you and use a smartphone to hack into your own mobile device. They have to stay within a certain range in order to do that as they follow you, said Dominic Guay, senior producer on the game.

“This is core to the game experience,” Guay said.

It’s similar to the way that multiplayer works in Assassin’s Creed games, which Ubisoft also makes. In that series, you try to find an assassin or target in the crowd and take that person out. Then you try to blend back into the crowd. But this is a modern-day version, where players duel with their smartphones rather than their knives.

If you, as Aiden, discover that you’re being hacked, you can try to run away. If the hacker succeeds in compromising your phone, they can then run away and download your data as they do so. The download takes a couple of minutes. During that time, Aiden gets an alert that he is being hacked. He knows that the hacker must be nearby, so he then as to chase down the intruder and kill them. That’s easier said than done in a large city, since the hacker will likely pretend to be an ordinary nonplayer artificial intelligence character. So begins a cat-and-mouse chase in a crowd.

This portion of Watch Dogs looks enormously fun, because it makes the city come to life. You don’t know if the people who are in your city are just faceless A.I. characters, or if they’re actually real human beings. That’s a brilliant way to make the player believe in the reality of the world, and it’s one more reason why Watch Dogs is going to be such a compelling title.

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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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LOS ANGELES – Company of Heroes 2 captures the full brutal effect of Russian winters and the suicidal charges that Russian commanders ordered during World War II. The tactical-combat video game is able to convey that brutality in part because the team at Relic Entertainment did its research, including feeling the sting of a modern Russian winter themselves.

The result is a real-time strategy game that, when it debuts on June 25 in the U.S. and Europe, will give players an experience that is rooted in historical realism. Sega, which picked up Relic from the ashes of THQ, is showing off the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game conference this week in Los Angeles.

The PC title is looking very good. We recently got to play another full level of the game at a press briefing, and we got to see the environmental effects in action. The Shlisselburg level showed an attack across a frozen river, with troops and vehicles falling into the freezing water when artillery shells crack the river’s ice.

Quinn Duffy, the game’s director at Relic Entertainment, told GamesBeat’s Alejandro Quan-Madrid in an interview that the goal of including the effects of nature and the environment is to convey just how hard it was to survive on the Russian battlefield. Advanced simulation technology helps make battles more believable.

“The Essence Engine 3 gives us the horsepower to show the winter, the cold effects, the breaking ice,” Duffy said. “We wanted to show the Russian winter in all of its glory and horror. We talk about authenticity. We want to deliver the feeling of danger and effort. We want to make it fun. We want to tell a story.”

The team visited Russia during the month of February, and it was horribly cold at about minus 20 degrees Farenheit. They shot video and tried to see what it was like to run through snow that was thigh deep.

“It’s like trying to run in the ocean,” he said. ”You flounder. You try to get out. You instantly understood the challenge. Seeing it was an important part of the research.”

The animations show the soldiers struggling in the snow. If you set up a machine in front of those soldiers, it’s much easier to take them out.

“This snow has not only texture but depth,” Duffy said. “The vehicles leave tracks. When a blizzard comes in, it wipes out the tracks.”

The team spent time in Russia and also visited Berlin. They noticed from the research that the jaded Russians had a dry sense of humor. So they put that into the dialogue of the game to give players a flavor for the personality of the Russian soldiers.

Across the Neva River

The battle we played was set in Shlisselburg, Russia. The Russians stormed the German fortress by crossing the Neva River in 1943. The attack was critical to restoring access to the besieged Lengingrad, which was under siege for more than 900 days. The cinematics introducing the battle to the player were very dramatic and appealed to the Russian sense of patriotism. Many soldiers didn’t appear to mind the suicide attacks, or at least they didn’t flinch when ordered to make them.

In the battle, I launched my set of Russian infantry across the river amid a withering German artillery strike. Some of the troops fell into the water as the ice cracked from the artillery shells. German machine guns pinned down some of my soldiers, but I ordered my troops to outflank the machine guns. Once we made it across, the first task was to take out the line of infantry along the embankment. Then we had to push deeper inland to take out the artillery. Once that was done, we pushed deeper into the buildings along the embankment.

The battle was chaotic, with lots of shouting, cursing, and shooting. The Germans started doing a lot of damage to my soldiers with a flamethrower. But we took it out with grenades and then used it to attack the Germans. Then we had to put our soldiers into a defense perimeter and hold off the German counterattack. The Russians were under a lot of pressure from multiple sides.

It seemed like a suicide mission to cross that river, but my soldiers survived. The tables had turned, and what seemed like a suicide mission for the Russians now became one for the Germans as they ran across a narrow access bridge right into machine gun fire and a flamethrower.

Why it’s looking good

Company of Heroes 2 delivers on the seasonal winter and spring play. The winter effects make the game a lot harder to play. The gameplay is cool, the graphics are beautiful.

Just a few weeks ago, Relic dropped a very pleasant surprise on fans by showing off the new Theater of War mode, which is a cooperative single-player mode that serves as a bridge to multiplayer play. The title will ship with the 1941 pack of Theater of War missions, including nine German and nine Russian missions. That’s a huge amount of additional content considering that the single-player campaign itself has just 14 missions.

While the single-player campaign follows a strict narrative — a story about the war — this new mode offers battles that illustrate other important moments between the Russians and the Germans during the first part of the war. Big battles of 1941 are in the Theater of War missions — engagements that the main game doesn’t cover.

We’ve tracked the progress of this game through multiple previews, and Relic hasn’t let us down yet. Overall, I’d say this game is another big reason to stick with gaming on the PC.

Alejandro Quan-Madrid contributed to this report.

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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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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!

---

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!

---

Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Parents, beware. Your kids are going to want this stuff.

Activision Blizzard is unveiling new details of its Skylanders: Swap Force hybrid toy-game today that show just how clever it can be in getting consumers to come back over and over. Swap Force is the third entry in the Skylanders series, which has generated $1 billion in revenues in less than two years. The gimmick in Swap Force is that the toys now have interchangeable halves that you can use to create 256 character combinations. There are 16 figures, and they are going to turn your kids into Portal Masters.

“What’s happened with Skylanders?” said Eric Hirshberg, the president and chief executive of Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard. “We pushed all of our chips into the middle of the table. During a generation of gaming that was in decline, we went all in for one reason: We believed we had something special.”

The simple idea was to “bring toys to life,” and it was executed well by the original developer, Toys for Bob, which made both Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure and Skylanders: Giants. The result is that Skylanders is the top-selling game franchise in the industry right now, with more than 115 million toys sold. That sales rate is exceeding the number of Harry Potter or Star Wars toys sold.

Accordingly, Activision has put more resources into development. The new game comes from the Vicarious Visions studio while Toys for Bob is no doubt working on something secret.

“There are ton of gameplay and character combinations,” said Guha Bala, the president of Vicarious Visions, at a press event in advance of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) game trade show under way in Los Angeles. “This game inspires kids’ imaginations.”

What’s new

Swap Force takes place in the Cloudbreak Islands, or floating lands in the sky where a mystical volcano erupts every 100 years to replenish the world’s magic. During a battle, a group of hero Skylanders were caught in an eruption, and they were sent to earth. But they gained the ability to swap halves. The result is you can take an existing character, set it on the portal, and transfer it into the game. You can then take the same character, swap halves, and create a whole new one with a mixture of characteristics.

This Swap Force has to fight against the evil portal master Kaos, who has an evil plan to attack the Skylands. He is trying to “evilize” creatures in the Skylands using the power of “petrified darkness.” He has allies such as Sugar Bats.

But Kaos runs into a host of heroes. Freeze Blade is a new water character. Free Ranger uses the power of weather. A Ninja Skunk is stealthy. Magna Charge magnetic tech weapons. They all have new capabilities. They will also be animated in high-definition, and you can dynamically swap their parts on the fly. If you combine Night Shift with Stink Bomb, you can bring to life Stink Shift. He can teleport and throw barbs at the Sugar Bats in a more effective way.

Kids will have to go through battles like this and figure out which combination will work for them. The game will have eight different types of Swap Force powers, and each will have its own gameplay characteristics. Skylanders: Swap Force will have all new player-versus-player arenas and survival arenas.

In addition to the 16 Swap Force Skylanders characters, this new game comes with 16 new regular Skylanders characters, eight LightCore Skylanders, and 16 returning Skylanders with new in-game powers and abilities. Older characters from the first two games will work in the new release, and those characters will still be leveled up and have their upgrades. That means parents won’t lose their investment they have made for their kids.

All of the characters now can do something phenomenal: jump. Yes, that’s right. That adds a whole new dimension to the levels. The levels vary from Wild West locations in the clouds to snow-covered regions.

The competition

With the launch of Skylanders: Swap Force this fall, Activision is doing what it does best: taking a blockbuster game franchise and milking it for all it’s worth on an annual refresh cycle. Most big games come out once every two or three years, but Activision has put enough developers on the Skylanders property to release one every year. Hirshberg has said that the stakes are higher now because the second half of 2013 will have more competition. The company will have to spend more, according to Activision marketing executives Josh Taub and John Coyne.

And Activsion is facing its first true threat to Skylanders: Disney Infinity.

The competition is heating up in August with the launch of a similar toy-hybrid product family, Disney Infinity, which is based on its own characters. Such franchises are huge “transmedia” efforts, or those that cross different media. Disney has been working on its title for several years, said John Blackburn, the head of Disney’s Avalanche Studios. Disney will include three “playsets” of branded characters in its first game, and it will sell two more playsets separately. The powerful brands include The Incredibles, Monsters University, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars 2, and the new The Lone Ranger.

But Disney doesn’t have the same level of customization that Activision is introducing with the Swap Force. If you combine Magna Charge’s lower half with the upper body of Wash Buckler, a close-range fighter, then the combined character is faster and good at close-range fighting. Each part will have unique capabilities and produce a new kind of character with unique abilities, all recognizable as you swap them. Activision thinks that’s going to result in endless replay value.

The new game is coming out on the Wii U, Xbox 360, 3DS, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 3. The Beenox studio is making the Wii version while N-Space is making the 3DS version. It’s not yet clear what Activision will do with mobile versions of the Skylanders on an ongoing basis.

“It’s done well in the world of mobile games. It hasn’t done as well as it has in the world of the consoles,” Taub said. “We have yet to hit the nail on the head for how to bring the franchise magic to the mobile world.”

Skylanders: Swap Force starter packs with a portal and toys will sell for $75. Action figures sell for $10 for core characters and $15 for Swap Force characters. The games will debut on Oct. 13 in North America, Oct. 16 in Australia, and Oct. 18 in Europe.

Here’s a video interview below with David Nathanielsz of Vicarious Visions.

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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 — Ever since it left behind the Halo series, the acclaimed Bungie development studio has been working on its upcoming online first-person shooting game. And this week, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the developer is finally showing off a playable version of the game.

In fact, the demo just happened on a giant screen at the Sony PlayStation pre-E3 press briefing. Jason Jones, one of the founders of Bungie, is on stage demonstrating a two-player cooperative  gameplay session. We know it is live in part because the game’s frame rate slowed down a couple of times during the demo.

Destiny is a highlight of the Sony press conference today at the beginning of the trade show, which we expect to draw 45,000 to 50,000 industry professionals to Los Angeles.

“Clearly everybody wanted to see gameplay,” said Pete Parsons the chief operating officer at Bungie, in a recent press briefing. “We spent many sleepless nights to bring destiny live to the E3 floor.”

In the gameplay, the two shooters used powerful single-shot revolvers against the big and fearsome red-cloaked enemies, who look and sound like Elites from Halo. The players met up with another group o f players who had to dispatch the enemies in a “public event” that other players could join. They proceeded to fend off alien fire teams and a big boss.

Destiny is due out on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2014. Activision Blizzard is the publisher, and it’s bills Destiny as “the next evolution in interactive entertainment.” Destiny’s sci-fi world is a first-person shooter in a shared, persistent online world.

Little by little, Bungie has been opening up. The company has had to keep a lot of secrets, especially since it split from Microsoft in 2009 and began working on a top-secret project. We learned earlier this year that the project codenamed Tiger is in fact Destiny

In Destiny’s story, you become one of the Guardians of the last city on Earth. The tale traverses the ancient ruins of the solar system, from the “red dunes of Mars to the lush jungles of Venus.” You’re trying to recover Earth’s lost glory and stave off a collapse of soci.ety.

In a trailer, we saw some beautiful environments of the future, including starfighter action in the skies. Andrew House, head of Sony’s games business, said that Sony has a long-term partnership with Activision over the Destiny property.

After a couple of leaks spilled the beans, Bungie acknowledged Destiny and said it would make a series of games over the next 10 years. For the first time since the Halo series started more than a decade ago, Bungie is working on a series that’s multiplatform, publishing on platforms such as the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 along with the next Xbox and perhaps the PC.

Check out our story on a guided tour of Bungie’s headquarters.

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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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LOS ANGELES — Argggh! Assassin’s Creed IV features a main character who is a lot more pirate than assassin. And one of the men responsible for that twist is Darby McDevit, the lead writer for the next big sequel from Ubisoft. The French game publisher is previewing the title this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo video game trade show.

The man above McDevit is Assassin’s Creed new main character, Edward Kenway. He is detached from the usual Templars vs. Assassin’s plot because he would really rather be making money as a pirate who takes the side with the winning pot of gold. The Caribbean is a vast playground for him, where he can hijack ships and assassinate characters for money at the same time.

The result is a game that is both familiar and different from the last title, Assassin’s Creed III, which was set (mostly on land) during the American Revolution. It’s set in 1717, at the end of the golden age of piracy. McDevit told us all about it, and here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: For how long did you know you were going to do the ship combat? Was that the heart of what this was going to be?

Darby McDevit: For a long time, yeah. We started work on this game in August 2011. As Revelations was finishing, this team took a look at the naval combat as it was forming in Assassin’s Creed III. With ACIII being even more than a year out, we saw that the naval combat was working well.

We already wanted to try to do a story about Edward Kenway, because we were doing the Haytham-Connor story in ACIII. Very early on we had this idea to also do the grandfather, so we had a family saga. As the same time as we saw the ship combat coming in, we had this idea to do Edward, and we looked back in time and saw that the Golden Age of Piracy was right there. All these things came together and showed us the way forward. Even before ACIII came out, we immediately began prototyping extra features for the naval gameplay that would have to be upgraded for a pirate game.

GamesBeat: What is Edward’s background again?

McDevit: He’s a kid who was born in Swansea in Wales. He moved to Bristol with his family at a young age, grew up fairly poor, married very young, and decided that he needed to go to the West Indies as a privateer to make money. His wife doesn’t like that very much and that leads him into some trouble, but he goes there anyway, and that’s where our story begins.

GamesBeat: In Assassin’s Creed III, some of the naval combat seemed too easy. You could take out another ship with one shot or something like that. It doesn’t necessarily seem that realistic. Are you shooting more for entertaining combat?

McDevit: What we’ve done, very specifically, because a boat can be upgraded so vastly—You’ll begin the game with very few cannon. I think it’s six or eight right now. You can upgrade all the way to 56. There will be ships at the very beginning of the game which you absolutely will not be able to defeat. They’ll destroy you in a matter of seconds. They’ll make a hash of your sails and rigging. It’s going to be very obvious. People, I think, will have one or two experiences as they play through our game where they will pick on somebody that vastly outclasses them, and they’ll be killed immediately.

We’re actually excited about this, because with hand-to-hand combat, it’s always very hard to make boss characters in a realistic game. We can’t give them special powers. We can’t upgrade a human being too far. We can give them weapons that do a little bit more damage, is all. But with boats we can go up to a crazy scales. When you’re in your eight-gun brig, the Jackdaw, and you come across a British man o’ war with a hundred guns, you will know very quickly that you need to upgrade – your hull, your sails, your guns, all the weapons and ammunition.

GamesBeat: Does the world feel larger than in earlier games, larger than ACIII?

McDevit: Yeah. ACIII’s naval gameplay took place in self-contained arenas. There was no free roaming. The West Indies as we’ve made it is a massive area. It’ll take quite a while to sail from one end to the other. Of course, to accommodate that, we do have fast travel once you’ve discovered locations. That’s the balance that we tried to strike very early on. We did lots of tests. What’s the happy medium between having a vast world to explore and sinking into utter boredom sailing across miles of ocean? That was a challenge we gave ourselves, and we tackled it pretty early on to try to get it right.

GamesBeat: How did you have to change the ship-to-ship combat coming in from ACIII?

McDevit: We added a couple of new weapons. There are things that you’ll probably see in another demo, but we’ve tried to make the experience more varied. The boarding itself gives a new element to the combat. You can actually sink ships, or you can just whittle them down to a little bit of health and then board them. The boarding is a very important aspect. If you want to get the maximum amount of loot – wood and steel and gold and rum – you’re going to need to accomplish a boarding.

We throw lots of different AI types at you. We’ve only showed a very small portion of the selection. We have AI types that will try to ram you. We have AI ships that will try to get away from you and bomb you with mortars from long range. That’s another way to try to change up the pace. We’ll have lots of different enemy archetypes and sizes of ships and things like that.

GamesBeat: You also changed the aiming mechanic. You have to elevate the cannon and arc your shots now. Is that because it has an emphasis on more than just ship-to-ship combat, with the new battles against land targets?

McDevit: Exactly. We needed to be able to do that. A lot of the towers, for instance, are a bit higher than the level of the ocean. We also wanted to just give you a little bit more control over where you fire. Before it was just making sure of your rotation in the water and maybe the size of the waves. Now, if you’re in stormy weather and the waves are causing you problems, you can angle the guns up to arc over the waves.

GamesBeat: We saw a boarding where you had multiple goals. You had a contract to fulfill to assassinate a guy on board. You also had a goal to take the ship, which would happen when you killed 50 soldiers. Are there a lot of different objectives like that?

McDevit: There are other goals as well, yes, like taking out all the snipers in the crow’s nest. There might be three or four, depending on the size of the ship. The galleons, I think, are triple-masted, so they might have three or six snipers. There might be multiple officers on board that you have to specifically kill. Our designers are working on as many little goals as possible, so we can change up the boarding. The other thing is that the boarding can be accomplished kind of any way you want it. If the objective is just to kill 15 sailors, well, you can get on board that ship and kill them. But you could dive off the back of your ship and swim around, or go some other way.

GamesBeat: If I’ve taken the ship before killing the contract target, what would happen then?

McDevit: No, you still have to kill him. The boarding won’t end at that point. The contract is added to your list of boarding constraints, so you still have to kill him.

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