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

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

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

Launch the gallery below to learn the language of love!

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

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Updated on May 22 at 4:34 p.m. PST to include Ryse.

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

Ubisoft, Square Enix, and other companies have confirmed a host of new games for Microsoft’s upcoming all-in-one games-and-entertainment console, the Xbox One. Microsoft said today that it would be releasing 15 exclusive titles, eight of which are new properties, in the first year of launch.

Ubisoft in particular is planning a good many titles. It’s promising “at least” six releases in the system’s first 12 months. Action-adventure games Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Watch Dogs are due out later this year, which is when Xbox One is set to debut. Both are multiplatform titles. The rest are a mix of new entries in existing series, new intellectual properties, and digital titles, according to a press release.

Square Enix and Eidos Montreal have confirmed the reboot of the stealth game Thief for Xbox One as well as PlayStation 4 and PC in 2014.

Alan Wake and Max Payne developer Remedy Entertainment is making a game called Quantum Break [above] exclusively for Xbox One. Activision announced the new multiplatform Call of Duty: Ghosts, which features storytelling from Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the screenplays for the award-winning films Traffic and Syriana. You can watch the new trailers and videos from the Xbox Reveal show below.

Another exclusive Xbox One title is Crytek’s Ryse, which features “controller-based gameplay enhanced by Kinect.”

Forza Motorsport 5 is also in the works from publisher Microsoft Game Studios. The racing series has long been exclusive to Xbox. In addition, EA Sports is releasing four titles: FIFA 14, Madden NFL 25, NBA Live 14, and EA Sports UFC, all of which use the new game engine Ignite. It “enhances the human intelligence of athletes” through their movements, which boast even more depth in animation. Take a look at the engine in action below.

EA’s games will release on Xbox One within the first 12 months of the console’s launch. Madden NFL 25 will also be available on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Aug. 27. FIFA 14 is coming to these platforms and more, including PC, at an undisclosed date. All four games are also making their way to the PS4.

Electronic Arts and DICE’s Battlefield 4 is scheduled for release on Oct. 29 on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and is arriving later on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. And Bungie’s upcoming new property, the action-role-playing first-person shooter Destiny, is also coming to the Xbox One in addition to PS4, Xbox 360, and PS3.

Some of these are hitting Xbox One first though Microsoft has not set official release dates for them or the console. We’ll update this post with more games as the news rolls in.

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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 dancing is starting to slow down for Ubisoft, but it’s still squeezing plenty of money out of Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry.

French publisher Ubisoft reported that its game sales for fiscal 2013, which ended March 31, were up 18 percent for the year. Games like Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 3 led a 60 percent increase in revenue from core titles. At the same time, the sales of Ubisoft’s casual games dropped by 32 percent despite Just Dance 4 selling 8.4 million units.

The company also reported an 86 percent increase in digital sales. That segment composed 11.7 percent of Ubisoft’s total sales.

“The expertise and talent of our teams enabled Ubisoft to manage the year’s difficult market conditions and the drop in the casual segment remarkably well,” Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot said in a statement. “In addition, the success of Far Cry 3 confirmed our strong comeback in the major segment of shooter games.”

Looking forward, Ubisoft pointed to the diversification of its lineup. It believes the rejuvenated Far Cry franchise and the upcoming open-world Watch Dogs game will bolster its already strong roster of titles.

“We began fiscal 2013 with two major franchises: Assassin’s Creed and Just Dance,” said Guillemot. “Twelve months later, we have substantially extended our reach by establishing Far Cry as another major franchise, building upon the great potential for our newest brand, Watch Dogs, and making our online/digital segment an increasingly significant part of our business.”

For fiscal 2014, Ubisoft expects a favorable comparison. It will launch five major games: Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Watch Dogs, and two unannounced title. One of these is a new property. For comparison, Ubisoft only launched three major games in previous annual period.

“The steady rise in our operating and financial performance during the last three years is the direct result of the long-term investments we have made, with the continued development of our creative capacity and the bolstering of our expertise in online activities.”

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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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If you want to see Kevin Shortt, lead story designer on Watch Dogs, geek out a little, bring up how Ubisoft completely shocked everyone when they revealed their open-world actioner to the world during last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.

“Wasn’t that fantastic?” says Shortt. “We couldn’t believe we surprised everybody. We were putting it up [on the show floor] and thinking, ‘It’s gonna leak, now it’s gonna leak,’ and it didn’t!”

That’s no small feat for a game centered around stealing secrets. Watch Dogs (releasing November 19 on PC and all available consoles) follows career hacker Aiden Pearce on a high-tech path to revenge in modern-day Chicago. Only this windy city’s been upgraded to a so-called “smart city” run by a central operating computer (ctOS), a system Pearce exploits to dispatch his targets … and to invade the private lives of ordinary citizens.

It’s one hell of a playground for a writer like Shortt.

GamesBeat: So you guys started out with this idea of an interconnected city. How did that become Watch Dogs?

Shortt: At the time, four years ago, we were just hearing small murmurs about smart cities. We thought, “Wow. What would that be like, if it’s in a whole city?” There are the opportunities it would give you from a gameplay perspective, but also, there are the questions it raises about privacy and information. It raises a lot of interesting issues that we wanted to explore in the game.

GamesBeat: Then you add this hero, Aiden Pearce, or an anti-hero–

Shortt: Definitely an anti-hero.

GamesBeat: He’s taken advantage of these systems in the past, and now he’s using them even more to his advantage. How do you balance that aspect?

Shortt: He’s a guy who has questionable morals. Aiden comes from a past where he’s done things wrong. He’s always been on the other side of the law, but now I think he’s trying to do things right. We don’t want people to come away saying, “Okay, he’s the guy with the cape. He’s the hero,” or “He’s the evil villain.” We don’t want those extremes. We want to find a middle ground. That’s what’s great about an anti-hero. You understand why they’re doing what they’re doing — they’re caught in a situation — but they’re willing to take steps that cross a line. Then it becomes debatable. Is he crossing the line for the right reasons?

GamesBeat: Or crossing too many lines.

Shortt: Or crossing too many lines. Part of what’s cool about our game is that the player is going to define that. They’re going to decide how many lines they’re willing to cross. A good example I can give you is in the demo, there was a husband whose wife was attacked, and he says, “I want to kill [the rapist].” So [the demo player] gets there and he said, “Well, I don’t really care what happens to him.” He lets him die. I couldn’t do that. I don’t know if this husband guy’s telling the truth. He just sent a text message to his buddy. Maybe there’s another reason here.

GamesBeat: And how does that chnage what happens next?

Shortt: Had [the demo player] stopped the crime, your reputation would have gone up. People would have heard about it and that affects how they respond to you in the future. If you’d just let him go, well, that’s one of those things you have to live with. You didn’t commit the crime. You just turned your back on it.

But I can give you another good example. Remember the guy with the baseball bat? He takes off, and Aiden chases after him. We could have intervened much earlier and knocked him out, just stopped it right there. That would have been positive across the board, because you stopped him from beating the crap out of the other guy. [The demo player] let it go, the guy started shooting, so we had to use more extreme measures. You pay for those extreme measures. Yes, we saved the other guy and Aiden got a positive reputation out of that, but he had to kill someone to do it. That gave him a bit of a negative hit.

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Activision reveals strong first quarter earnings while Blizzard loses 1.3 million World of Warcraft subscribers, EA lays off 1,000 but expects to develop Disney’s Star Wars games, indie charity drive Hunble Bundle now accepts the virtual currency Bitcoin, and the Amazon Appstore beats Google to distributing paid apps in China.

We’ve also got a lot of previews for you, including Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Deadpool, and Watch Dogs, and reviews of Star Trek and Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move.

News

• The DeanBeat: Why Nintendo should have bought Ouya and other might-have-beens
• Brenda Romero’s Train board game will make you ponder the Holocaust
• Warner Bros. gets a new digital games chief
• Battlefield 3 servers under DDoS attack; DICE ‘working around the clock’
• Sony insists the PlayStation 4 won’t kill its bottom line as the PS3 did
• Death by dubstep: Saints Row IV demo reveals gameplay and weapons
• Assassin’s Creed mastermind Patrice Désilets claims Ubisoft fired him
• After 1,000 layoffs, EA could find itself short-handed for Star Wars games (analysis)
• Xseed Games unites with Marvelous U.S.A. for bigger mobile and online presence
• Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon director already considering the sequel

Mobile news

• Mobile game Airport Scanner helping TSA officers screen luggage more accurately
• BlueStacks steps into gaming with Gamepop — a Netflix for mobile games
• Beware the Angry Bulls: Zynga launches Running With Friends
• Amazon Appstore invades China, beats Google itself to paid apps
• PlayScape partners with Amazon for custom content on the Appstore

Tech

• With $3.2M in funding, Dekko unveils a clever tech to insert animations into the real world
• Sony to begin making PlayStation 3 in Brazil
• Sims creator Will Wright: Next consoles can become ‘connective tissue’ between games & entertainment
• Ouya spills its guts for repair firm iFixit

Strange happenings

• Download version of Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D requires at least a 4GB SD card
• Humble Bundle now accepts the Bitcoin digital currency
• World of Warcraft loses 1.3 million subscribers
• Diablo III patch glitch results in gold duping that breaks auction house (UPDATED)
• Dota 2 replaces World of Warcraft as Raptr’s third most-played game
• SimCity moves 1.6 million copies despite troubled launch
• Star Wars: Battlefront III footage leaks online

Fighting words

• Developer Warren Spector slams Wolfenstein: The New Order

Fund it

• Crowdfunding for Eternal Darkness successor off to sluggish start
• Cryptozoic launches Kickstarter for Hex: Shards of Fate online trading card game

Earnings

• Not all game companies are hurting: Nexon posts strong Q1 results
• PlayStation a nonfactor in Sony’s first profit in 5 years
• Activision Blizzard says Call of Duty: Ghosts will be a huge launch, but stock falls on weak Warcraft numbers
• Activision blows away first quarter earnings targets, raises estimates for year
• EA misses slightly on revised earnings but hits its revenue targets

Safeguarding the future

• Activision ups marketing over fears of Battlefield 4, Disney Infinity, and Dota 2
• Sony teases something new for Gran Turismo; reveal coming May 15
• EA scores a licensing agreement to lock up FIFA brand until 2022
• EA has 11 big titles, 15 mobile games coming in the next year (but no Star Wars)

Previews

• Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs highlights the down side of smart cities (preview)
• Watch Dogs creates an open-world morality (preview)
• Katanas, daggers, and guns are no match for Deadpool’s mouth (preview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s co-op mission feels more like a solo op (Preview)
• Splinter Cell: Blacklist sneaks in new and classic Spies vs. Mercs modes (Preview)

Reviews

• Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move is a puzzler with delightful variety (review)
• The crew of the Enterprise finds an unremarkable shooter in Star Trek (review)

Interviews

• Watch Dog creators bring the reality of “smart cities” to games (interview)

Pieces of flair

• How 3D scanning helped create the face of Bioshock Infinite’s Elizabeth
• Valve’s experimental psychologist discusses sweat detection and eye-tracking for games
• Return of the Tweetbook Q&A: BioShock vs. BioShock Infinite

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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 premise behind Ubisoft’s upcoming Watch Dogs game is scary because it’s not so far from the truth. A computer hacker could break into a city’s central nervous system and cause all sorts of vigilante havoc. And the more connected cities become, the easier it will be to take them over and control them.

Dominic Guay, senior producer on the game, said in a preview this week in San Francisco that the team started out with a mandate of creating a new brand that could resonate with modern gamers. The team chose the code name Nexus, the central point of an interconnected network, to reflect their focus on the idea of ubiquitous connectivity. They pulled that idea from the things that they saw around them. And they saw that it could be vulnerable.

That’s where Guay, who could pass for a great salesman at IBM, starts veering off the sales pitch for better technologies and the wonderful visions of the future that tech companies are trying to sell city governments on. If the security gets hacked, you have a world of trouble.

“There’s a guy on our team whose father works for a big city in Canada,” Guay said. “They’ve implemented a system so that water distribution in the city can be monitored from smartphones. They can close down valves and stuff like that. He told me that at some point they got worried because they realized that most of the employees were using simple passwords: ’1111′ or ’2222.’ Any 13-year-old could have accessed it and stopped the water supply to two million people.”

During the 4.5 year it has taken to build the game — which comes out Nov. 19 — reality is catching up with the fiction. IBM has a major initiative to build “smarter cities” using a complete overhaul of the technology for running the cities through the IBM Intelligent Operations Center — just the sort of thing that Watch Dogs’ main character Pearce loves hacking.

Pearce is a masked man with a scarf. That scarf has a logo on it: a symbol for connectivity.

“The core influence that brought us to technology came from looking at our own lives,” Guay said. “More and more, we were using computers and smartphones. Technology has always impacted our daily lives, but in the past 20 years, it has accelerated tremendously. We saw we were moving from smartphones to smart cities.”

Indeed, modern cities in Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe have futuristic control systems for monitoring transportation, surveillance, subways, traffic lights, and electrical grids. In existing cities, those technologies are coming in a step at a time, Guay said. In Watch Dogs, the team focused on a smarter version of Chicago. In the real world, so-called smart cities include Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Edinburgh, Lyon, Malaga, Kochi in India, and Stratford in Canada.

“It’s natural that we try to make those cities run as efficient as they can,” Guay said.

But accidents can happen. In the great Northeast Blackout of 2003, 11 people died in the dark. Fifty million people lost power over two days and the cost was an estimated $6 billion. That problem could very well have been caused by terrorists or a disgruntled employee who unleashed a computer virus in the grid and shut it down. At the time, the fear of hackers was very real, with suspicion falling on the Chinese army.

Since then, modern systems have advanced. Data centers are in place, collecting huge amounts of information on people through their computers, smartphones, and entertainment systems. Ubisoft’s marketing material for the game notes that we all carry a 2.8-gigabyte digital shadow, consisting of all of our records kept in data centers.

That “big data” can be analyzed and used by major corporations to sell consumers all sorts of things. But the big “what if” in the game focuses on what would happen if that data could be used to figure out what you think and what you believe. Could that information be turned against you, to influence your world views?

In the game, the smart city’s own ctOS (City Operating System) can take control of everything in the city and connect it with the big data analysis of all of the citizens. If a criminal is stalking somewhere, the police can identify the person through the centralized database and calculate the odds of a crime occurring. Such crime prediction systems are being implemented in many major cities, Guay said, in another tip of the hat to the plot of Minority Report, the Tom Cruise film where police try to stop crimes before they happen.

The police can then be allocated to the right spots to prevent crimes. Watch Dogs warns us that, “the next assault will do more than just turn out the lights.”

Kevin Short, the lead story designer for Watch Dogs, said that the character Pearce is sucked into an addiction. A man who has made questionable choices, he hacks the system and gets inside the heads of the people around him. He uses the access to the network to protect those close to him. He uses a universal electronic key to steal any vehicle. He preys on people using free WiFi, and literally steals money from people he passes by hacking into their phones and siphoning funds from their bank accounts.

“The problem is, if you start spying on people in every aspect of their lives, it becomes addictive,” Short said. “What if you see a woman being mugged in a back alley or a man being extorted? It becomes hard to do nothing.”

Almost by accident, Pearce becomes a vigilante hero. The police don’t like that, and they try to use the city operating system to hunt him down. They become very powerful in their ability to track suspects quickly and corner them. When shots are fired, they can triangulate on the sound to find the location, much like the real-world ShotSpotter does. But the digital vigilante can use the system against them. Beyond the police, there will be a corrupt organization that Pearce has to fight against in the game. Ubisoft isn’t spilling the beans on that part of the plot yet.

Just like in the game, you’ll be able to use a smartphone companion app to play Watch Dogs. You can also make contact with other players through a multiplayer mode, which hasn’t been fully described yet.  That gives you the weird feeling of mixing fiction and realism. Perhaps the only really unrealistic part of the demo that I saw was that Pearce’s smartphone never ran out of batteries.

Does it sound far-fetched to you? Well, consider the fact that the following companies use the term “smart city” in their marketing: Schneider Electric, Thales Group, IBM, Oracle, Siemens, Living Planit, and Invensys Operations Management. The topic is under study at universities such as MIT and it is the subject of conferences such as Smart Cities Future. The city of London is famously monitored by millions of surveillance cameras. And the subject of hacking smart cities comes up regularly at security conferences.

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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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Dominic Guay, a senior producer on Watch Dogs, has been working on Ubisoft’s high-profile game for four and a half years. His mandate was to “create a new brand,” and Watch Dogs is certainly original.

As Aiden Pearce, you’ll be a digital vigilante who hacks into a city’s computer network and controls any connected devices to fit your own needs and  wage a one-person war against the enemies and authorities trying to track you down. Guay says that the game imagines a world where the city of Chicago in the near-future has moved from “smartphones to smart cities,” where virtually everything can be remote-controlled, observed via surveillance camera, or hacked.

During the time it has taken to build Watch Dogs, which comes out Nov. 19, reality is catching up with the fiction. IBM has a major initiative to build “smarter cities” using a complete overhaul of the technology for running metropolises through the IBM Intelligent Operations Center — just the sort of thing that Pearce loves to hack. He can then use the Central Operating System (CtOS) to discover intimate details about people he passes on the street and then use that knowledge against them. It all seems plausible, and this sort of realism will make players feel like they’re living inside a real city. That’s the illusion that Guay wants to create.

We caught up with Guay this week after we saw a half-hour hands-off preview of the game. Here’s an edited version of the interview. We’ve also included a video of the talk with Guay at the end of the article.

GamesBeat: In terms of your inspiration, was there any talk of city operating systems and smart cities at the time when you guys were starting this up five years ago?

Dominic Guay: That’s a good question. When we started looking at how connectivity and technology were being embedded in our daily lives, we started seeing glimpses of smart cities.

It’s a funny story. There’s a guy on our team whose father works for a big city in Canada. They’ve implemented a system so that water distribution in the city can be monitored from smartphones. They can close down valves and stuff like that. He told me that at some point they got worried because they realized that most of the employees were using simple passwords: “1111” or “2222.” Any 13-year-old could have accessed it and stopped the water supply to two million people.

That’s an example of how we’re seeing those sorts of things happening. When we started our research, we realized, “Wow, this is happening while we’re thinking about it. Reality is getting ahead of us.”

We made a few decisions early on in the project that we thought were a little bit ahead of reality. Within two years, we were already behind. That’s telling us that there’s a very strong trend right now to include these technologies all around. It makes our life easier, so it makes a lot of sense. But I think we’re at just the right time to kind of lift the veil over that a bit. I don’t think it’s going to change the fact that these are good things and they’re probably going to keep happening. But it might change a few things about how we see the vulnerabilities that this opens up in our lives.

GamesBeat: I’ve heard a lot of talk from IBM,  and a lot of other big enterprise software companies, about its smart cities project.

Guay: It makes a lot of sense. If we’re able to make services in cities more efficient, that’s great.

GamesBeat: Do you think this will make people start thinking it through a bit more — thinking about what could go wrong?

Guay: We’re definitely looking at and listening to the reality around us, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to change how people approach it. Maybe it’ll have them thinking about it a bit, and if so, I’m happy, especially thinking about the vulnerabilities and the flaws, so we don’t have “1111” as a password to the whole thing.

I’m quite aware of hacking because I’m working on this project, and I still use my smartphone every day. I still use the internet. I’m still very open in how I deal with my personal information. It’s making our lives so much easier that we realize it, but we still go forward.

GamesBeat: You showed this half-hour of gameplay. I was struck by how similar it could be to something like Grand Theft Auto as an experience, yet you have so much more at your disposal as far as what you could use in, say, a car chase. You can bring up street barriers or another thing. Was there some intent to do an open world in a different way from what we’ve seen before?

Guay: Our mandate was to create a new brand. There aren’t that many new brands in triple-A games coming out. When you get a chance like that, you don’t waste it on re-doing what somebody else is doing. So we’re definitely set on creating something that’s going to be fresh and relevant.

We knew we wanted to make an open-world game because we think they’re great. We think that gives a lot of freedom to the player. But most of the other choices we made were based on our team’s core inspirations: hacking, connectivity, and vigilantism. We’re really creating our own beast.

When it comes to how it compares to other games, I’ll let you be the judge of that. By having very different objectives and very different creative pillars, you naturally create something that’s completely different.

GamesBeat: What sort of problems arise from an open world that you have to handle? I can see that you might lose track of your missions. You want to get revenge for your family, but it seems like you could get totally sidetracked from that goal.

Guay: You’re right. There’s a balance.

In this case, we had no core story mission activated. We were simply roaming around the city. What we’ll do is — for players who want to focus on the core storyline, we’ll give them indications of how to do it. But not to the point where they won’t benefit from having the freedom to define their own goals. What we find is that there’s a balance there. You give the information to the player, you put them in the driver’s seat, and you let them decide how they want to play the game.

What we see when we do playtests for the game is that most players don’t even really differentiate the main missions from random encounters — stuff happening around the city. That’s a good sign. That says they’re getting immersed in the open world and making their own decisions about what to do next. That’s the sweet spot for us.

GamesBeat: It seems like there are two sides to the CtOS. It can be a very powerful tool for the police to use when they’re tracking you down — it can almost make it easy for them to catch you — but once you hack into it, then it becomes easy for you to stop everyone else from catching you. Is that the nature of the gameplay here? At one point, you’re escaping, and then at another point, you’re hunting?

Guay: It’s always a little bit of both. When you perform acts within the city — when you commit crimes or violence — the city will respond to it.

It’s true that it’s a very powerful system. We’re basically giving control of that whole system to the player, but that’s not to say that they’re the only one who has control over it. You’re right in saying that if others can control it, there’s going to be a balance there, absolutely.

GamesBeat: What are some things that help you keep a balance between the player being too vulnerable and too powerful?

Guay: The player will have a lot of power, but they’re also lined up against some very powerful enemies. We don’t want to give all the details on the storyline, but the player isn’t fighting any simple group of criminals. They’re fighting a citywide corruption. They’re dealing with very powerful enemies, new types of enemies who are very much aware themselves of all the vulnerabilities within the system.

It’s not going to be a walk in the park. It’s going to be a big challenge for the player. They’re going to need all of their access to the system. They’re going to need all of their abilities for driving and shooting and dealing with people directly.

One thing that’s going to make the player unique and more powerful than their enemies is that they can mix that all up. They’re able to drive, hack, shoot, and work all of those things together. We’re helping the player do that.

GamesBeat: You had a stretch of slow motion there. Is that intended to deal with the challenge of using your smartphone in the middle of a car chase?

Guay: [Laughs] Yeah, we definitely want to give the player a good view of all their opportunities at any given time. In a moment of panic, you can hit the focus ability and take in all the available opportunities for hacking. In the city, there’s always an opportunity to hack something around you. You can use a weapon or drive or mix all those things together in that moment. It’s helping the player to explore and experiment with the various tools and make plans of their own.

GamesBeat: It looks like every person Aiden passes on the street has her own story. You can sneak into their apartments and see that they’re hanging out with mannequins or something. That sounds very complicated to put together.

Guay: I think we have twice as many writers as we normally have on a project like this one. We’re crafting a lot of those backgrounds. Some are created on the fly — actually, assembled out of databases. It’s a lot of content, but I think that’s core to what we want to do in Watch Dogs.

People are all a bit voyeuristic, right? They want to be able to hack into people’s apartments and see what they’re doing behind those closed doors. It’s definitely part of the fantasy here. We want to deliver on that. By adding a storyline and a real life to the characters in the street, we’re creating a lot of interesting nuances around the events in the city.

We showed someone trying to kill another guy with a baseball bat. Now, if we show you that the guy being attacked is a poor father of three and the guy hitting him is a gangster, well, then you say, “Hey, I want to stop that guy.” But what if I switch it around? What if the guy with the baseball bat is the father of three and the guy he’s hitting raped his wife? Now all of a sudden it’s a different story, and you might decide that you want to act differently. It’s enriching the way the player sees the game and what’s happening in it.

GamesBeat: It has elements of an open-world game, but it seems like a different kind of game in the sense that you have so much control over the environment.

Guay: It’s an open-world game, but we want you to be in the driver’s seat. We want to give a lot of control to the player. You’re basically able to control the city, which means that there’s a lot of different plans you’re able to put into play in order to take the enemies out.

Check out our video interview with Guay below.

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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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Reads to school children. Failed CPR training. Father is currently in jail. Churchgoer. Makes porn films. Related to Dutch royalty. In possession of stolen credit cards. Potential victim. These slivers of data hang by every pedestrian you see walking down the street in Chicago.

Information is power, and career cybercriminal Aiden Pearce can access that information at will. Watch Dogs (releasing Nov. 19 on PC and all available consoles) then makes you decide what to do with it, diving deeper into strangers’ lives or quietly moving on. As Pearce, you constantly intersect with people on the street, mine their information with your smartphone’s Profiler, and make decisions based on what you learn about them.

In a fairly unusual move, Ubisoft showed us a 30-minute, hands-off demo that steered clear of any story or side missions in favor of various “random” encounters in Watch Dog’s open-world sandbox. After trading notes with people who attended other sessions, it’s clear that key moments repeated almost exactly across the different presentations, suggesting many in-game events were, to some extent, canned. On the other hand, I also saw a hatchback mow down Pearce just as he stepped out of his car.

I’m guessing that was unscripted.

Regardless, the game that took shape showed me a different kind of free-roaming playground with a different set of rules. Call it open-world morality.

“You start spying on people, looking into their lives, it becomes addictive,” says lead story designer Kevin Shortt. “You start seeing things you didn’t expect. It becomes hard to look away. Almost by accident, Pearce becomes a vigilante hero.”

Abusing the system

That’s when Pearce slips on his mask and goes to work.

The unusually symbol that mask bears comes with its own backstory; it started as part of the placeholder logo for Watch Dogs’ project codename, Nexus. “This was the symbol for connectivity,” says senior producer Dominic Guay, “but we added a little gap in the middle to represent themes of vulnerabilities, flaws, and hacking the connectivity.”

But before you can hack the world, Pearce has to slip a back door into a well-guarded City Operating System (ctOS) control center. It’s a lot like conquering the towers in Ubisoft’s other games — Far Cry 3 or Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, say — only with more options for breaching security. Pearce mixed it up a little, luring guards in by remote-hacking forklifts and then beating them down with his telescoping blackjack. Watch Dogs features a crafting system to build IEDs and decoys, but for the purposes of this demonstration, Pearce fell back on his assault rifle and a wad of dynamite to finish off the opposition. A hacked CCTV camera, rewound to the moment of detonation, confirms those kills.

After that, accessing the ctOS hub is a breeze, and the grid opens up. Pearce can now hack the “smart city” systems on every corner and pull info on everyone around him; age, occupation, income, and a tiny, 3-6-word story that gives them some personality.

That makes all the difference. Now you know a little something about them. They aren’t just faceless units wandering around in a Grand Theft Auto metropolis or an ancient Assassin’s Creed city. And if Mr. “Filed adoption papers” stored his bank information on his cellphone, you can siphon off his life savings to help bankroll Pearce’s personal mission of vengeance. But c’mon … the guy’s trying to do a noble thing. Should you steal from him?

That’s not a question I ever asked while pickpocketing scores of people as an assassin in ancient Rome. The man who solicits prostitutes, on the other hand, sounds like fair game.

Anti-heroics

You won’t find any shortage of ways to use information and the network against people, either. Tapping into free Wi-Fi hubs lets you spy on people inside their homes through their laptop webcams, tablets … anything that’s connected. I found one guy whispering sweet nothings into a dressed-up mannequin’s ear. Perfect blackmail material. I could’ve rifled through his email for more dirt, too. “Threaten” is always an option while negotiating prices at the local Pawned Off store. Pearce can also hack ATMs for quick money, or replace musical selections on public speakers with his own (purchased in-game, iPhone-style). Goodbye, muzak. Hello, thrash metal.

But unlike a Grand Theft Auto or even Red Dead Redemption, Pearce can proactively choose to help people.

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Publisher Ubisoft impressed gamers last year when it debuted its latest open-world title, Watch Dogs, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Now, the company is hyping up Watch Dogs as it prepares for its Nov. 19 release.

As part of that promotional campaign, Ubisoft today released a new gameplay trailer for Watch Dogs, which is due out on current and next-gen hardware. The video shows hero Aiden Pierce, who has a gravely vigilante voice, using his super-hacking powers to overtake Chicago and defeat his enemies.

Check it out below:

In addition to the new trailer, Ubisoft revealed a preorder bonus for Watch Dogs. Players who reserve the game will get a poster of Aiden Pierce from comic book artist Alex Ross.

The art shows Pierce using his cellphone to manipulate the environment. Ubisoft used this art as the inspiration for Watch Dogs’ cover.

We’ll have more on Watch Dogs in the coming days.

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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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Jade Raymond, managing director at Ubisoft Toronto, is one of the video game industry’s highest profile game designers. In 2004, she joined Ubisoft Montreal, where she became the producer of the original Assassin’s Creed title. In July 2009, she became managing director of the Ubisoft Toronto studio. Her team has grown to 300 employees, and it is working on releases like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Watch Dogs, and another unannounced project. She built the studio from scratch while raising two kids.

All of those titles are very ambitious, and Raymond isn’t shy about wanting to make “blockbuster” games rather than the hip, new social, mobile, or online offerings. Raymond is one of the developers who clearly loves her trade. She set her heart on joining the game industry at the age of 14. She played as many games as possible and programmed in her spare time. She got a computer-science degree and broke into the trade as a programmer at Sony. She went on to become a producer on The Sims Online at Electronic Arts, and then, she finally got her dream job making Assassin’s Creed, which ended up being the fastest-selling new intellectual property in video games in 20 years.

“Being a woman in games rocks,” she said in a speech at the DICE Summit in 2011. In that speech, she actually said many of the changes happening in the industry were “depressing,” given the success of lightweight social games. But she has continued to marshal the resources necessary to make huge bets on new intellectual properties in the game business. Ubisoft has given Raymond an enormous amount of resources to invest in AAA blockbuster games at a time when social, mobile, and online games are becoming more prominent. If she fails, the opportunity cost will be gigantic. And if she succeeds, then Ubisoft will be one of the industry survivors with multiple entertainment franchises.

GamesBeat’s Sebastian Haley and I sat down for an interview with Raymond at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation.

GamesBeat: As far as the ongoing debate over women in games and women in the industry, what do you think of all that? You landed on the “hottest women in tech” list or whatever it is. It seems like the subject is coming up more intensively this year. How do you feel about the whole issue?

Jade Raymond: In my day-to-day, I don’t really think about it. In my career, I find that working in the games industry has been a great experience for me. I agree that there aren’t as many women as I would like to see, but at the same time, women draw more women. In the teams where I’ve been, there have always been more than the average number of women. By default, women feel more comfortable if there’s a woman producing or whatever.

On Assassin’s Creed, it wasn’t a ton, but I think the Ubisoft average is about 20 percent women, and we had 30 percent on the AC team. You wouldn’t guess that by looking at the game, but that was the case. At EA of course I worked on The Sims, which is a brand with a lot of female followers. At Ubisoft Toronto, half of our management team are women. The tech lead for the studio is a woman. There’s Heather Steele. Heather Hooker, our director of HR. There’s Leslie, who is the head of the IGDA in Toronto and also one of our producers. When you look around the steering team for the studio, it’s half women. Looking at games from the outside, partially in the press and maybe also looking at the number of female characters in games, there’s a lot of work to. Working within the industry, though, I have never had a hard time.

GamesBeat: It seems to come up over and over again, but do you see signs of progress?

Raymond: I hope so. I think so. Games used to be much more niche. It used to be that not so many people played games. My sisters and I grew up playing games, so that’s why I wanted to get into the games industry. It’s only by being exposed to games that you think, “Oh, someone makes games. This is something I want to do.” But now games are much more mass market. There isn’t that niche type of gamer. All kids play games. They’re all on their tablet or their PC or whatever. Because all kids, whether they’re boys or girls, are playing games, a more diverse group of people are thinking they want to get into games. With the graduates that we’re hiring out of school, it’s a much better ratio.

GamesBeat: So what have you been doing lately? Setting up the studio?

Raymond: I was producer on Assassin’s Creed, and then I was executive producer on Assassin’s Creed II. I was also overseeing new IP at the Montreal studio. I was executive producer on the AC brand but also on some of the new IP in development there. Then, I was pregnant with my first daughter. When I was eight months pregnant, Yannis Mallat asked me to move to Toronto and start up the new studio. My husband and I moved there with our daughter when she was five months old. I was hiring some people while I was on maternity leave. Now, the studio has been up and running for three years. We’re about to ship our first big game.

GamesBeat: How many people are there now?

Raymond: It’s a little more than 300.

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All right, quick-time events. You’ve served your purpose. Please exit the premises, or I’ll have you tased. Yes, that means now. Yes, Tasers hurt. A lot. How do I know? Well, I’ll tell you this: Never take your pants off when you’re — wait a minute; quit stalling. And stop crying. You’re embarrassing yourself. Look, you’ve had a good run, but let’s face it: You were a stopgap at best. No, you don’t get a severance package. Stop giving me the finger; it’s juvenile.

Best I can tell, game designers have used quick-time events in the same way that rednecks use duct tape. They asked themselves how they could best convey complex in-game cinematic moments in a way that still engages the player, and (after three beers and a hearty shrug) decided that a series of predetermined button presses at just the right moment could hold the whole thing together while they waited for a part to come in the mail.

Unfortunately, it took over a decade to get the part, and in the meantime, they had company over and had to make the duct tape look attractive, so they decided to draw some designs on it. Then they forgot it was there for a while, and by the time the part showed up, they’d already started doing meth and had completely forgotten what the damn thing was for and — OK, this metaphor seems to be getting away from me. Let’s take a step back.

I don’t know that quick-time events were ever intended to be a permanent solution, but they’ve certainly become pervasive. If you have a narrative-heavy video game, then by god you’re going to have some quick-time events. How else are players supposed to feel like they’re part of an interactive storytelling experience? Actually control it? Madness.

Not that we can really blame game designers. They’ve been grappling with the magnificence of their own creation. Utilizing a relatively new artistic medium to tell stories in ways never before told isn’t exactly a precise science. As graphics, physics, story quality, acting, control, and every other aspect of game creation has improved and evolved over the past decade, the delivery method for these cinematic moments has remained decidedly unchanged.

My reaction to quick-time events in modern games is akin to watching a prerendered trailer. The hero does amazing things that I’m completely incapable of doing once it’s my turn to guide the action. This disappointment was one of the very reasons I joined the masses in uproarious applause after seeing the first demo of Watch Dogs last May. I knew it was gameplay all along, but it wasn’t until the protagonist entered a car and sped off into the night that I realized Watch Dogs was a sandbox game. At any point the player could have veered off in a completely different direction, handling the presented situation in her own way. The inherent cinematic elements of the game would then turn those choices into something amazing.

Source: Sega AM2

More amazing than dodging cardboard boxes by pressing “A”? Witchcraft!

Time is eventually going to make a fool of quick-time events (there’s a really bad pun in there somewhere). They served their purpose for a while, sure, but we seem to have broken through the barrier that was preventing us from experiencing in-game narrative in a truly unique way. We’ll have it all: The cinematic benefits of quick-time-event-driven experiences like Uncharted or Heavy Rain and the gameplay mechanics of a sandbox title. No more strings to hold us up. The player is left in complete control of the cinematic aspects of gameplay. The story will be written for us, but the nature and quality of the action will be a direct product of our play style.

And that would seem to be rub, wouldn’t it? To break the chains of Hollywood’s linear storytelling guidelines while utilizing its refined means of character conveyance. The story must be told to us, but we must simultaneously tell ourselves the story. We must control the actions and decisions of the character but not in such a way that completely derails a well-crafted tale.

Or at least be tricked into thinking that we’re in control.

In February, Gabe Newell took to the stage with J.J. Abrams to discuss methods of storytelling in film and video games. In the midst of some awkward scripting, bad jokes, and clips of movies that everyone has seen and games everyone has played, there was one absolutely brilliant insight from Gabe Newell in regards to Portal 2.

We had to spend a bunch of time with the Portal 2 ending … to the point where not only did it seem possible that you could to shoot a portal to the moon but [that] it was the obvious choice, and yet the player felt incredibly creative for coming up with that as a solution … . When players are constantly trying to optimize, we give them a focus that allows them to isolate on the variable that we want them to optimize.

I felt clever when I shot that portal to the moon. There was no other decision to make, but for some reason it was my decision. Though, I do like Newell’s use of the word “allow” when speaking of manipulative methods of controlling the player’s decisions — quietly making us tell Portal 2′s story with our own hands. Still, this is a beautifully conceived, brilliantly executed replacement mechanism for the shoehorned monstrosity that is the quick-time event.

Source: Forbes

You magnificent bastard.

Part of me can envision a world in which quick-time events still have their place. A world in which the iPhone generation saddles its withered, girdled frame to a dusty old 3D TV in the game room next to the ping-pong table and mindlessly presses square, triangle, circle, or x while they wait for that hot nurse to bring them their meds. They hope that their grandkids are coming for a visit today, but a combination of dementia and — “Ooh, look at that Nathan Drake and his toned buttox! Hey, Skyler! You remember the good old days when games were really games and not these brain-operated whatevs that the kids are using these days? Lawl!” Then their colostomy bag bursts. And while that might sound a little depressing, fret not: It’s pizza day in the commissary!

I just made myself sad. I’m going to go do something youthful and reckless while I play with my smart phone.

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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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Making a modern triple-A video game is a massive undertaking — just ask Ubisoft.

It took six Ubisoft teams to make Assassin’s Creed III. The company spreads out development for its big games because it’s not viable to produce something so massive at one studio. That’s because, according to Ubisoft Reflections managing director Pauline Jacquey, it takes hundreds of people to make a triple-A title.

“‘There are games that Ubisoft specializes in, like open-world action games, with a lot of production value, and you need a team of 400 to 600 people,” Jacquey told Games Industry International in an interview. “That’s a lot, and the next-gen is increasing this.”

Jacquey goes on to say that not all games require such massive teams. Some games only require 100 people, but a next-gen console like the PlayStation 4, with all of its extra capabilities, adds to the amount of work.

“For the new PS4 console, you need teams of up to 600 guys so you can’t do it at just one site,” said Jacquey to Games Industry International. “So there’s organization within Ubisoft to make sure that collaboration happens and works.”

Ubisoft has teams all over the globe. For the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed III, Ubisoft Montreal led development, Ubisoft Kiev/Ubisoft Romania ported the game to Windows, Ubisoft Annecy designed the multiplayer, Ubisoft Singapore led development on the naval combat, and Ubisoft Quebec handled the Wii U port.

It’s a lot of effort and overhead, which increases the financial risk.

“Ubisoft is very generous with resources, making sure product quality is top notch,” said Jacquey to GI. “But then the outcome, the production revenue, should be much higher as well so it balances. It’s just the risk is higher, so if we miss it once or twice the impact is big.”

Big hits drive revenue in the games industry, but this certainly seems like a precarious position for Ubisoft to put itself in. If one of these juggernaut games flops, the publisher could take a huge loss. At the same time, gamers crave these immersive experiences, so the money is apparently there for any company that can capitalize on this craving.

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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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Read all of our PlayStation 4 coverage here.

As the curtain closed on Sony’s revelation of the PlayStation 4, I was pretty excited. After all, Sony hasn’t revealed this much about the future of games since 2005 and 2006. But some of that reality distortion field is wearing off, and I’ve decided to take a step back and rate the overall goods that Sony delivered against expectations.

I was annoyed that Sony didn’t say more. The Japanese company revealed a fall launch, but not a launch date. It didn’t show the box, talk about the price, or say if it had functioning hardware. Given the history of console-first revelations, that’s typical. After all, it doesn’t want to give too many answers to its rivals Microsoft and Nintendo, which will maneuver based on what they learn about Sony’s strategy. And it doesn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver.

Still, I come away unsure about whether Sony “gets it” and really understands how to make itself relevant in game world that is full of business and technology disruptions. Sony answered this in part, but not in full.

But some questions are being answered as I write. Sony didn’t say, for instance, if the PS4 would play used games — considered a sacred right of fair use by many gamers. But Sony’s game studio chief Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that players would indeed be able to. By the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Sony should address all of our lingering doubts.

I was intrigued to notice that Sony is continuing a tradition of learning from Westerners. It didn’t learn all that much from former chief executive officer Howard Stringer, the first Brit to run Sony. But Andrew House, the head of the company, came out on stage instead of current CEO Kaz Hirai.

The lead system architect was Mark Cerny, who has tremendous respect among game developers (and is fluent in Japanese). I hear from a good source that Cerny was able to get good feedback from the West and translate that to the Japanese system engineers, and most of the user interface for the new machine was created in the West as well.

Dave Perry, the CEO of Gaikai (the cloud-gaming startup which Sony bought for $380 million), talked about Sony’s broader network strategy.

This fresh crew of leaders shows that Sony is listening to the markets that matter, as the U.S. and Europe are critical to the success of any console. In the past, Sony’s thinking seemed to be too insular and too focused on Japanese styles of doing business. Fair or not, I associate that with being unable to learn from startups — not open enough — and failing to listen closely to the desires of game developers.

Perry’s technology has brought some much-needed flexibility to Sony’s console business. Cloud gaming is potentially disruptive as it allows a publisher to run a game in an Internet-connected cloud and stream it from the data center to any client. Sony can use it for backward compatibility, allowing you to play older PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 games on the PS4.

It remains to be seen how much full game streaming will be enabled by the Gaikai technology. You can certainly use the game streaming to play demos, and it’s good that Sony fully embraced game downloading by enabling you to do it in the background, while you’re doing other things like playing games, said analyst Atul Bagga.

And the streaming technology from Gaikai also allows you to play PS4 games on a handheld PlayStation Vita and perhaps other devices as well. I really like this aspect of the technology, which House said puts the gamer at the center of the ecosystem, rather than the living room console. It embraces the reality of mobile devices being used in concert with a console.

The cloud gaming technology can get rid of the need to put backward-compatibility hardware in the console, lowering its costs. Ultimately, no one cares about backward compatibility except at the very beginning of a console sales cycle. So enabling it with as little cost as possible is an absolutely necessary ingredient of a modern game console that Microsoft has to match.

The cloud solution also allows Sony to break with the mistakes of its past. The Cell processor from IBM, Toshiba, and Sony was never popular with developers, who hated its complexity. Intel’s own chips were too expensive, but the accelerated processing units (APUs) from Advanced Micro Devices fit the bill. The eight x86 64-bit cores are both powerful and inexpensive. They can be put on the same chip as a graphics processing unit, reducing the cost and complexity of the console. And they bring the economic efficiency of the PC and its volume cost reductions to Sony while offloading considerable engineering tasks.

PC gamemakers will embrace this solution as they already know how to program PC games using the same technology. This is a big step toward simplification of the game development process, and that could help lower costs, rather than constantly increase them. The move toward the PC will get more developers on Sony’s side. After coming in third place with the PlayStation 3, Sony needs to convince developers that they will profit by sticking with Sony. And it needs to reveal games that are better on the console than they will be on the PC.

Sony showed off a bunch of cool-looking games from a number of third-party developers. But many of them are not that exciting when you consider whether they will be exclusives. Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, Bungie’s Destiny, Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls, Capcom’s Deep Down, and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy game will likely also appear on the next Microsoft console. Those games certainly show off the kind of outstanding entertainment that will define the next generation. Quantic Dream’s rendering of a human face looked extremely realistic.

But Sony didn’t show off the “only on PlayStation 4″ titles. Bungie’s game, for instance, will also debut on the PlayStation 3 at the same time as it appears on the PS4.

But I can’t fault Sony too much here. It did show off some cool Sony-owned content. Sony’s Killzone: Shadow Fall looked stellar, but it is one more installment in an aging franchise. The Killzone demo certainly looked like it was running live, in real-time, on prototype hardware. That’s a good sign, and it is welcome, considering that it’s easy to play tricks by faking game play by using animated movies in place of real-time live gaming. I may have been fooled, but it certainly looked nice. I hear that the prototype hardware is plentiful and developers are using the machines to create their games.

The Drive Club from Evolution Studios is a unique take on social racing. Knack could have a place in the comic-combat genre. And Media Molecule seems to have a weird gesture-based sculpture game in the works. I was impressed that some of these developers said they had been working for years on PS 4 titles, or at least were working on their concepts for a long time.

But many fans were flabbergasted that there was still no mention of Sony’s The Last Guardian, a title that has been missing in action for years. Square Enix made a major fumble, too, when it showed an old trailer and still didn’t describe the game that the video revealed. The company obnoxiously told the crowd to wait until E3.

I wondered why Electronic Arts wasn’t there in a big way as the company is still a major player in the industry. But EA probably didn’t have a brand new intellectual property that was ready to unveil yet. Still, the absence of the big player will set some conspiracy theories in motion. I have no doubt that Sony has enough backers, but it should show more of them.

I was also disturbed that Sony said little about its own response to two major disruptions in the games business. Sony didn’t say what operating system the PS4 runs, but I hear it isn’t Android. It’s another custom-made Sony operating system, designed to run games fast.

Is it a mistake? Sony might have embraced the open nature of operating systems like Android and the innovation that comes from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. An open OS is upgradeable and flexible to change with the times.

Embracing Android would also invite large numbers of indie game developers to make games for the PS 4. Sony did not do a very good job of communicating this goal of getting more indies in its press conference and in a follow-up interview with Gamasutra. It is being too vague. But from what I hear, the console isn’t going to be as magically easy for indies to self-publish games on — at least not as easy as it is on Android. Until we know where Sony stands on this, we won’t know what it really means by being “more open.”

Sony did embrace sharing on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. It embraced video spectating via services such as Twitch. And it also will host a variety of non-game video services, from Netflix to Vudu. That will help it fulfill the PS4′s role as an entertainment device, beyond a game console. But I saw no evidence that Sony will catch up with Microsoft’s superior Xbox Live service.

Sony also didn’t speak much about free-to-play games. Indeed, other players like Nvidia, PlayJam (GameStick), Ouya, and others are trying to bring those disruptive forces to the TV. If Sony doesn’t do it, then these other players have a chance, and so does Microsoft.

I do think that Sony showed off enough to do a great deal of PR damage to Nintendo, whose Wii U game console isn’t selling as well as it hoped. If Sony comes out with the right games, the right price, and the right launch date, the PlayStation 4 could be a huge threat to Nintendo’s console.

To sum it up, Sony’s revelation raised more questions than it answered. That’s par for the course in the games business, as most major revelations don’t take place until E3 in June. But I wish there were more “wow moments” than questions or disappointments. In that respect, Sony left some major openings for Microsoft to exploit.

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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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Sony revealed many of the details about its next-gen PlayStation 4 console at an event in New York City today. We saw the new controller, some cloud functionality, and a bunch of other features. But what about the games, man? Well, I’ve got you covered there.

We went to Sony and the third-party publishers and asserted our dominance until they forked over their highest-def trailers for all the new PlayStation 4 games. Let’s check ‘em out:

Destiny

Watch Dogs

Killzone: Shadow Fall

Infamous: Second Son

Knack

The Witness

Drive Club

Deep Down

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

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It’s official: The PlayStation 4 is coming out this fall.

Sony announced its latest gaming hardware at an event in New York tonight, but if you weren’t around to see it, we have you covered. The GamesBeat staff has spent the past couple days writing up the big reveal, and we’re collecting all of our stories here. And we’re still working, so be sure to check back for the latest news about Sony’s big night.

Speculation, part one

Ever since that frustratingly vague video came out last month, the gaming world has wondered what Sony was planning to show at tonight’s event. We were all pretty sure from the start that it was the PlayStation 4, but beyond that, we only had rumors and wishful thinking to point us anywhere. But those things aren’t really news, so we passed the time getting nostalgic and trying to see what the past could teach us.

Here’s what we expect from Sony’s Wednesday event

Rumor: PlayStation 4 will launch in November and comes with a PlayStation Eye camera

PlayStation Meeting: Six disappointing scenarios that aren’t PlayStation 4

What we can learn from past PlayStation reveals

Thanks for the #PlayStationMemories: The industry tweets Sony’s legacy

The system

Finally, it was time to see which of those speculations, if any, were correct. Over a two-hour press briefing, Sony made its announcement, had some developers come out, and showed off some games — all without ever actually telling us what the console is going to look like.

Everything you need to know about the PlayStation 4 (so far)

A play-by-play of Sony’s big PlayStation 4 reveal

Sony finally reveals the PlayStation 4 for holiday 2013 — but not the console or price

PlayStation Cloud streaming tech the ‘fastest gaming network in the world’ — and promises PS4 games on Vita

Used games will work on the PlayStation 4, says Sony

Good news: Move controllers work on PlayStation 4. Bad news: DualShock 3 doesn’t

The games

Here’s a look at what you’ll be playing when the PS4 launches late in 2013.

PlayStation 4 video trailer roundup

Knack is the first game confirmed for the PlayStation 4 (and it looks like a Pixar movie)

Sony unveils Killzone: Shadow Fall for the PlayStation 4

Sony’s Evolution Studios reveals social racing Drive Club for PlayStation 4

Sucker Punch reveals Infamous: Second Son as a PlayStation 4 exclusive

Indie darling Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is headed to the PlayStation 4

Blizzard announces Diablo III for PlayStation 4 (and PS3)

Ubisoft announces Watch Dogs for the PlayStation 4

Sony closes PS4 event with a trailer for Bungie’s Destiny

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is officially a next-gen title for PlayStation 4

Speculation, part two

Now that we know that the PS4 is coming, where do we go from here? It’s time for another round of analysis and speculation, but now we have way more confirmed information to work from. Here’s what people are talking about now that the briefing is over.

Here’s what a chip expert says about the PlayStation 4′s potential

PlayStation 4: Reactions from around the Internet

Sony’s Shu Yoshida talks PlayStation 4: PS3/PSN compatibility, microtransactions, and more

PlayStation 4: Sony impresses analysts — others not convinced the next Xbox won’t overshadow it

Grading the PlayStation 4 rumors

The biggest PlayStation 4 disappointments

The DeanBeat: Sorting through the significance of Sony’s PlayStation 4 revelation

Killzone: Shadow Fall demo reveals that Jimmy Fallon isn’t good at first-person shooters

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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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Read all of our PlayStation 4 coverage (including games) here.

Ubisoft never met a video game console it didn’t like. After all, it is making eight games for the Nintendo Wii U, which is sinking pretty hard right now. But the French game publisher announced today that it will take its much-anticipated video game Watch Dogs to the just-announced PlayStation 4.

Yves Guillemot, the chief executive of Ubisoft, said on stage at Sony’s unveiling of the PlayStation 4 today in New York that Ubisoft has multiple development teams at work on new titles. These games will be “more connected, more immersive, and more interactive.”

“We are creating games that can be played anywhere, anytime, across many different devices,” Guillemot said. He suggested that Watch Dogs is going to be that kind of game, as Ubisoft mentioned at last year’s E3, where it showed a version of the game on the Apple iPad. But Ubisoft hasn’t shown all that much of Watch Dogs’ gameplay until today. The title’s presence on the PS4 is sure to please more than a few fans who have followed the game since last year’s preview.

Late Wednesday, Ubsisoft announced that the open-world-adventure game Watch Dogs is coming to the PlayStation 3, Nintendo’s Wii U, the PC, and the Xbox 360 — though the publisher made no mention of a next-gen Microsoft console. At last year’s E3, Watch Dogs won 83 awards from various game critics.

Jonathan Morin, the creative director at Ubisoft in Montreal, introduced a new gameplay video for Watch Dogs.

He talked about the theme of Watch Dogs, where you can take control of “smart cities,” a future scenario where advanced camera, monitoring, and networking technology enables you to control every aspect of life in a city. And you can do this for good or evil.

The video showed the masked protagonist, the vigilante Aiden Pearce, (pictured above) as he passed by people in the streets of Chicago. As he goes by a homeless man, an icon appears over his head and describes him as “Marcus Rhodes, Iraq war veteran.” (Pictured right). Pearce has used his smartphone to hack into the “central operating system” for Chicago, giving him omnipotent powers to control the city.

Ubisoft says, “Aiden will be able to tap into the city’s omnipresent security cameras, download personal information to locate a target, control systems such as traffic lights or public transportation to stop a chase, and more. The city of Chicago is now the ultimate weapon.”

So, of course, he hacks an ATM machine.

He witnesses a criminal robbing a woman and springs into action. He pursues the criminal, and you can see the location of the thief on the minimap on the lower right corner. It shows that the main character is aware of the criminal’s movements at all times thanks to the city’s ubiquitous monitoring technology. He chases the criminal down, and a sign eventually appears, saying, “Criminal neutralized.”

He has a shootout with the police and escapes by hacking a train and then jumping on top of 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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Video game trailers are a big deal. Where once big budgets were the exception, they are increasingly becoming the norm. Deep pockets are not always key to creating a stand-out trailer, though. Ingenuity, innovation, and a healthy sense of humor can also go a long way to help sell a game.

Here we present the best game trailers to grace our screens during 2012. They represent a cross-section of the gaming world and feature a variety of styles and budgets. The one thing they have in common? They’re done right.

If you think we’ve missed any trailers of note, feel free to drop a comment below.

Borderlands 2

Gearbox Software gave its first-person role-playing shooter Borderlands 2 (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) a sing-a-long soundtrack that just shouldn’t have worked. The genius is that “Wimoweh” has never sounded as gloriously out of place since its original 1939 release. Even better than Tight Fit.

Watch Dogs

Eschewing both gameplay and prerendered footage, this trailer for Ubisoft’s open-world action-shooter Watch Dogs (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) brilliantly sets up the game’s premise with a starkly delivered blurring of fact and fiction that sounds eminently believable. Watch Dogs is certainly a title to look out for next year.

ZombieU

Zombies. Are we sick of them yet? Ubisoft doesn’t think so, having created one of the year’s most atmospheric trailers for its Wii U-exclusive survival-horror game. The film succeeds in making ordinary environments look extraordinary by subtly twisting our perspective on the dark streets of London.

Dyad

Independent developer Shawn McGrath unleashed his psychadelic musical shooter, Dyad, on the PlayStation 3 this summer. Its original trailer received an unkindly greeting in some quarters, with PlayStation Blog user Mattsta009 saying of its star: “It doesn’t look like that girl is even playing Dyad, she is kind of just holding a controller, acting badly and smiling vacuously at the screen.” In a stroke of genius, McGrath recast himself in the lead role. Watch from 20 seconds in to see him in action. The original trailer is underneath for a neat “compare and contrast” opportunity.

The Last of Us

Proof of the power of soundtrack, developer Naughty Dog used the Hank Williams song “Alone and Forsaken” to great effect in this trailer for upcoming PlayStation 3 action game The Last of Us. The atmosphere seems even more bleak and unforgiving with Williams’ raspy vocals layering on the tension.

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The sensory smorgasbord of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) heaved itself upon the video game industry for three straight days, and GamesBeat’s intrepid crew enthusiastically hit showfloors, conference halls, and meeting rooms to offer our readers piles of previews, interviews, and news.

What follows below is our collected coverage during the show. You’ll find everything here sorted into categories for easy navigability.

Awards

Who needs stickers? We analyzed, judged, and sorted our top picks for the show’s offerings directly for you. Take a look — the results might surprise you.

GamesBeat’s E3 2012 Game of the Show…plus staff picks – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The GamesBeat E3 non-award awards: The least prestigious awards in the industry – by GamesBeat staff

The coolest technologies we saw at E3 2012 – by Dean Takahashi

The best family games of E3 – by GamesBeat staff

The top 8 trends of E3, from bows to brutality – by Mike Minotti

The top 15 swag shirts of E3 2012 – by Rus McLaughlin

Previews

You’ve found the beating heart of E3′s overwhelming magic. Whether from observatory impressions or direct, hands-on experiences, GamesBeat discussed and dissected a sizable stable of upcoming games and hardware.

Hands-on

Hitman Absolution lets you perform hits in giant crowds – by Dean Takahashi

Metro Last Light fights shooter fatigue with deeper single player – by Dean Takahashi

Crysis 3 brings the jungle, gun hacking, and silent stealth kills to Manhattan – by Dean Takahashi

EA reveals Dead Space 3, coming with drop-in cooperative play – by Dean Takahashi

Sleeping Dogs turns Hong Kong crime movies into a video game – by Dean Takahashi

From the creator of Portal, Quantum Conundrum caters to physics-based puzzle gamers – by Dean Takahashi

Capcom remakes hack-slash-shoot-grapple formula with upcoming DmC: Devil May Cry – by Dean Takahashi

Capcom shows three playable characters for Resident Evil 6 – by Dean Takahashi

Finding similarities between Arma III and Carrier Command: Gaea Mission – by Omri Petitte

Neverwinter’s user-generated content could elevate it above the competition – by Stefanie Fogel

DmC: Devil May Cry is full of swagger…and F-bombs – by Eduardo Moutinho

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed leaves Mario Kart in its dust…and wake…and vapor trail – by Mike Minotti

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is an anime you can actually play – by Eduardo Moutinho

Sony Online Entertainment’s PlanetSide 2 – by Rob LeFebvre

Slice, dice, and julienne enemies in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – by Eduardo Moutinho

Medal of Honor: Warfighter deploys fire teams to the front lines – by Eduardo Moutinho

Hell Yeah! is like Metroid with a chainsaw jetpack-riding demon bunny – by Mike Minotti

Dead or Alive 5 wants to deliver a power blow to the competition – by Eduardo Moutinho

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s simplicity is just what consoles need – by Omri Petitte

Hands-off

Just what kind of game is Star Wars 1313? – by Dean Takahashi

Warner Bros. confirms LEGO: Lord of the Rings video game – by Dean Takahashi

EA’s cute The Act romance game exploits iPad’s touchscreen for unique gameplay – by Dean Takahashi

Turn the snow crimson with redcoat blood in Assassin’s Creed III – by Dean Takahashi

Far Cry 3 demo leads you deeper into drug-induced insanity – by Dean Takahashi

Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls is one of the best games of E3 – by Dean Takahashi

The 5 different games you’ll be playing in Dishonored – by Sebastian Haley

Final Fantasy XIV brings new gameplay and western sensibilities to venerable franchise – by Rob LeFebvre

Windows 8 works hard to meet the needs of all gamers – by Rob LeFebvre

A trio of Mario games strengthen Nintendo’s 3DS lineup – by Mike Minotti

OnLive’s MultiView spectating entices multiplayer and co-op gamers – by Omri Petitte

Player choice matters in The Walking Dead: Episode 2 – by Stefanie Fogel

The Last of Us is even smarter than you think – by Rus McLaughlin

Star Wars 1313 is a game of firsts for the sci-fi franchise – by Eduardo Moutinho

The adventure-game renaissance continues with The Cave – by Eduardo Moutinho

Heroes and villains join forces in Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion – by Mike Minotti

007 Legends proves personality makes or breaks a game – by Omri Petitte

Breaking down what’s exactly new in God of War: Ascension – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Turning technology against your friends in Watch Dogs – by Omri Petitte

Interviews

Chasing after the wayward developer or evasive executive amid a sea of journalists and industry luminaries didn’t slake our interview appetite, and we nabbed a slew of thoughtful talks with members across various gaming companies. Take a look.

Why Ubisoft is pouring a lot of resources into Wii U games – by Dean Takahashi

Harvest Moon creator wants to spread happiness with his new game – by Jacob Lopez

How Shenmue’s lead programmer rescued a bad game – by Jacob Lopez

The Last Story developer talks Operation Rainfall, reason for cover system, and Wii U – by Jacob Lopez

With 1.3B tanks obliterated and 30M players, Wargaming.net plans to conquer the online gaming world – by Dean Takahashi

Even Scribblenauts’ creator is surprised by the things people make in his new game – by Jacob Lopez

The Witcher developer CD Projekt RED wants to set new standards with Cyberpunk – by Stefanie Fogel

Japan’s Gree moves mobile gaming into the spotlight at E3 – by Dean Takahashi

THQ’s Brian Farrell talks about looking for a bottom and staging a comeback – by Dean Takahashi

Crytek says CryEngine 3 already does awesome graphics as good as Unreal Engine 4 – by Dean Takahashi

Our opinions

During the craze-filled days of E3, our minds typically busied themselves with ensuring our legs avoided snapping off our torsos and running away with yelping noises. But sometimes, a cohesive thought miraculously coalesced within our overloaded brainpans. Our hands shakily reached for the keyboard, keys started tapping, and well…these are the results.

The DeanBeat: What to expect at E3 – by Dean Takahashi

4 ways developers will use SmartGlass to enhance Xbox 360 experiences – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Nintendo’s Wii U: Safe on first, weak on third-party – by Rus McLaughlin

Why Nintendo will have a tough time adding a second GamePad tablet controller to the Wii U – by Dean Takahashi

Tomb Raider is not torture porn – by Rus McLaughlin

Would it be a mistake for E3 to move out of LA? – by Dean Takahashi

Bored, impressed, and giddy: Our final thoughts on E3 2012 – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Move over, consoles – mobile is the future – by Rob LeFebvre

Microsoft’s E3 2012: Analysis of 16,000+ comments shows Halo 4, South Park impressed, rest did not – by Andrew Hiscock

Sony’s E3 2012: Analysis shows “shotgun blast” won big, Wonderbook lost – by Andrew Hiscock

Nintendo’s E3 2012: Reactions show hardcore gamers lost faith in Wii U – by Andrew Hiscock

Memes

All it takes is one memorable quote, one Freudian slip, or some facepalm-worthy banter to prompt the Internet community’s creative and unrestrained hand at animated gifs, a worshipful use of Impact font, and hastily jangled Photoshop edits. Here’s what we’ve found.

The best memes of E3 – by Jeff Grubb

Remember these crazy memes from past E3s? – by Jeff Grubb

The wildest memes from the Microsoft E3 press conference – by Jeff Grubb

Silly memes inspired by Sony’s E3 press event – by Jeff Grubb

Aisha Tyler: Ubisoft’s meme machine – by Rus McLaughlin

The oddest Nintendo E3 gifs and Photoshops from the Internet – by Jeff Grubb

Galleries

We snapped plenty of pictures while attending parties, pressers, and meandering the showfloor. Direct your eyeballs upon these galleries, and enjoy the view!

The big gallery of E3′s huge banners – by Mike Minotti

E3 2012 will get your hands up – by Evan Killham

Our editor-in-chief’s E3 adventure – by Evan Killham

The many costumes of E3 2012 – by Jacob Lopez

Retro games have a place at E3, too – by Jasmine Rea

Videos

Dubstep. A beleaguered Lara Croft. Ham-handed hosts. No, this isn’t the latest entry in Alex Trebek’s dream diary — it’s some of our E3 video and trailer content below. Enjoy!

Tomb Raider trailer shows how Lara Croft feels sorry for shooting you – by Dean Takahashi

Konami pre-E3 2012 event: More Castlevania and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – by Jasmine Rea

Ubisoft shows strong commitment to the Wii U – by Mike Minotti

6 awkward moments from the E3 press briefings – by Evan Killham

Why we wub wub wub E3 2012: The dubstep of E3 – by Jacob Lopez

Press conferences

Surprises and snooze-fests alike emanated from E3′s five major press briefings held by Microsoft, Electronic Arts (EA), Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Check out all the announcements and debuts here.

Microsoft (video)

Halo 4 trailer video shows Forerunners, new tech – by Rob LeFebvre

New Splinter Cell: Blacklist borrows from Uncharted – by Jeff Grubb

Gears of War: Judgment sets Sera on fire (again) – by Rus McLaughlin

Microsoft previews Xbox Music at E3 press conference – by Rob LeFebvre

Forza Horizon brings street racing to the franchise – by Jasmine Rea

Microsoft introduces Xbox SmartGlass to integrate smartphones and tablets with Xbox 360 – by Dean Takahashi

Nike+ Kinect Training brings in-depth fitness measuring to Xbox 360 – by Jeff Grubb

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer coming to Xbox 360 this fall – by Jacob Lopez

Usher hits the stage to announce Dance Central 3 – by Rob LeFebvre

Xbox Live is getting Nickelodeon, Machinima, and tons of live sports – by Tom Cheredar

Kinect voice commands hit EA Sports flagship titles – by Eduardo Moutinho

South Park creators introduce their game and playfully mock Microsoft – by Jeff Grubb

New Xbox 360 games coming from Signal Studios, Twisted Pixel, and…Gore Verbinski? – by Stefanie Fogel

Microsoft E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

Electronic Arts (video)

SimCity Social: If this free-to-play game is too good, will you pay $60 for the full PC version? – by Dean Takahashi

EA reveals Battlefield 3 Premium and fields “15 million players worldwide” – by Omri Petitte

Star Wars: The Old Republic gets new planet, new species, and free trial – by Jacob Lopez

EA nabs UFC from THQ – by Jeff Grubb

Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s beautiful carnage – by Rus McLaughlin

EA shows off Need for Speed: Most Wanted at E3 – by Rob LeFebvre

Ubisoft (video)

Rayman Legends rhythmically runs to the Wii U – by Eduardo Moutinho

You are the network in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs – by Rus McLaughlin

Here’s where that Watch Dogs cube-head QR code goes – by Jeff Grubb

Sony (video)

Experimental developer Quantic Dream reveals the haunted life of Jody Holmes in Beyond – by Jasmine Rea

Nathan Drake and the Big Daddy Bouncer join PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale – by Mike Minotti

J.K. Rowling is writing PlayStation’s Wonderbook – by Rus McLaughlin

Sony announces Assassin’s Creed III Vita and PS3 bundles with exclusive content – by Jeff Grubb

Sony brings down the house with The Last of Us demo – by Dean Takahashi

Sony E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

Nintendo (video)

Social networking comes to Wii U, Miiverse will interface with PCs and phones – by Jasmine Rea

First look at action-strategy game Pikmin 3 – by Jeff Grubb

Nintendo confirms 23 games at E3, video streaming, and more for Wii U – by Mike Minotti

Wii Fit U will make you sweatier, livelier, and happier – by Rob LeFebvre

Brag to the Miiverse and take on new modes in New Super Mario Bros. U – by Eduardo Moutinho

Zombify your face with ZombiU for the Wii U – by Mike Minotti

Nintendo bets big on “asymmetric” tablet-based gameplay – one player against several – by Dean Takahashi

Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition utilizes Wii U’s GamePad screen – by Omri Petitte

Nintendo details 3DS Mario titles, Luigi’s Mansion, and third-party games – by Jeff Grubb

Nintendo Land brings asymmetrical multiplayer to Wii U – by Jasmine Rea

Nintendo’s E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

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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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Right after the GamesBeat staff got back from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, we started wondering if we were all at the same event. Despite a combined 38 years of experience attending the annual game-industry trade show, lead writer Dean Takahashi, culture editor Sebastian Haley, and I (GamesBeat’s editor-in-chief) came away from the 2012 edition with drastically differing opinions on what we saw.

Here’s what we thought of this year’s E3:

Sebastian Haley, culture editor:

I might be alone on this, but E3 was a disheartening experience for me this year. Sure, I’ll buy and love Borderlands 2, Dishonored, and a ton of other games that were shown off, but everything was just so iterative — from the countless sea of sequels and spin-offs, to even the press conferences that seemed to focus less and less on what gamers like myself actually want.

After years of being the punchline of the Internet, why is it so hard to make a good E3 press conference? Microsoft gave carte blanche to Nike and ESPN to talk as long as they wanted, but when it came time to show off the only three original intellectual properties (IPs) in the entire lineup, if you blinked you would have missed it. And even if you didn’t blink, you’d still have no idea what the games were even about. Then Usher and Joe Montana come out for awkward performances, and that’s supposed to make things better?

The industry more or less seems to be on autopilot, and I can only hope it’s saving up all its energy for a massive 2013. But again, maybe that’s just me.

Dishonored

Dean Takahashi, lead news writer:

The game industry didn’t have such a bad showing at E3. The traditional game publishers showed off new original games such as Beyond: Two Souls, The Last of Us, The Unfinished Swan, Dishonored, Warface, Hawken, World of Warplanes, and Watch Dogs. New technologies such as Unreal Engine 4, facial animation, SmartGlass, the Wii U, and Sony’s Wonderbook were cool. The staple franchises such as Assassin’s Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Tomb Raider, SimCity, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and Crysis 3 will keep gamers delighted and busy in the next year.

But like Sebastian, I also have high expectations of game makers in the core console market. And I’m not sure they have done enough to shield themselves from the disruption that is hitting their industry. This E3 was an in-between year. Next-generation consoles are in the works, but only Nintendo showed off its cards, and they weren’t very disruptive this time around.

From the outside, the game industry is under pressure. Apple is one of the driving forces of the real disruption, but it isn’t alone. Samsung announced at the show that it will create its own cloud gaming service in partnership with Gaikai and Nvidia. It will in effect become a fourth major platform for game makers, launching a cloud-based game service that could threaten the core console business. Apple and Samsung could bring cheap, high-quality games into the living room that could compete quite nicely against $60 games that come with the number “3″ or “4″ after their names.

This is a very real threat. At E3, I didn’t see a masterstroke to deal with it. There was innovation, but not enough of it to make a difference.

The Last of Us

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, editor-in-chief:

Last year’s E3 only gave me one stick-with-me moment: the BioShock Infinite demo. It left me near breathless, and even though I don’t smoke, I felt like I needed a cigarette after watching it.

Nothing this year quite matched that, but three games came awfully close, all from my personal top 3 games of E3: Watch Dogs, The Last of Us, and Dishonored. I saw The Last of Us on the last day of the show, and it just put the biggest smile on my face. Right when that amazing, frightening, tension-filled demo finished, it cemented this E3 as one of the best in recent years for me. So I’m quite surprised at Sebastian’s reaction — this show was amazing! When was the last time so many new IPs surprised and wowed us like this? We’re always complaining about the sequel parades (and rightfully so), but it’s up to us to look past the flashy hype of the Call of Duties of the world to champion original games like the ones I just mentioned.

Nintendo Land and ZombiU on the Wii U were both pleasant surprises as well (though the latter proved to me that first-pers0n-shooter controls will take a lot of hand-eye-coordination reconditioning due to the controller’s new layout — a reconditioning I’m not sure I want to commit to). Even the known quantities got me excited again: I honestly thought I was over Halo and Gears of War, but both Halo 4 and the overrun mode in Gears of War: Judgment were a lot of fun to play in multiplayer.

I went into my 16th E3 jaded and thinking I’ve seen and experienced it all. I left a surprised, giddy gamer.

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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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Your secret’s out, and it’s a weapon used against you.

Ever since Ubisoft’s open-world techno-thriller Watch Dogs floored attendees at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), websites, Twitter feeds, cameras, and microphones gorged themselves on protagonist Aiden Pearce’s unscrupulous mastery over a grittier Chicago’s webwork of information hubs and electronic devices. It paints a bleakly exposed world where, as the politically charged debut trailer ominously intones, “you are no longer an individual.”

But like everyone else in this interconnected dystopia, Aiden’s actions occur under constant surveillance. Our first impressions touched upon possible cooperative play accompanying Aiden’s vigilantism, with players downloading missions from the network in an online environment. During Ubisoft’s more in-depth demo of the game, we quickly learned rivalries form just as quickly as convenient alliances, thanks to Watch Dogs’ elaborate cross-platform mobile app.

Although Ubisoft refrained on details about supported devices and a release schedule, its unveiling of the app brushed upon one of the most intricately intertwined cross-platform mechanics we’ve seen.

Aiden’s unrestrained access to Chicago’s info-troves extends into your fingertips, as players can hack, access, and track people and systems of interest in real-time within a constantly updating map of the city. Landmarks and critical mission areas can be scoped in preparation of any groundwork, enabling a liberating degree of contingency within an already emergent world. Hacked financial data such as credit card numbers and bank accounts plug into the app for fast cash when needed, and any new information gleaned on one platform transfers seamlessly to the other.

Not Orwellian enough for you? Dig this: App tracking includes second-by-second updates of your friends’ progress within Watch Dogs…and you can hack everything they see within their game.

Consider our minds blown. The possibilities of mischievous multiplayer meddling are almost endless, and coupling total control over all things digital with a flair for sabotage has already hatched more than a few nefarious schemes among our staffers. As a refresher, check out some of the tools at your disposal for hindering friends at the touch of a button.

Traffic lights: Aiden’s graceful creation of a 12-car wreck within a rain-slick intersection involved jumbling the signal patterns of nearby traffic lights during a carefully timed opportunity for catching acquitted criminal Joseph Demarco. It’s safe to say playing red-light-green-light with the evening commute will become a favored toy in everyone’s bag of tricks, but think of the adversarial elements as well – what could be a more perfect roadblock to your buddy’s speedy getaway from the inevitable police response than the impromptu sandtrap of a colossal fender-bender?

Security cameras: Sure, the app’s bird’s-eye view of your friends’ struggles elicits plenty of cackling laughter and steepled fingers, but when that personal touch is needed for the calling-card finale of your latest ambush, Watch Dogs’ legions of security cameras await your command. Not only do cameras give enhanced looks at the whereabouts of impending victims, their digital-grade visual quality ensures your friends’ expressions of horror are captured with crystal clarity. Remind me to shoot every camera I see like a paranoid wretch once I start playing.

Bridges: Hightailing it out of the neighborhood in style invariably involves the many bridges dotting the Chicago River. Of course, your friend’s dream of pulling off the perfect aerial stunt over a raising bridge kind of hits a wall after you’ve already fully raised it long before. No, really, we mean literally hit a wall.

Public transport: Chancing the metro? Too bad – in Watch Dogs’ connected world, even rails fall under the digital sway, and normally effective trains turn into cylindrical deathtraps. Mix things up by cutting the juice to your friend’s ride right in the middle of a pitch-black subway tunnel. And don’t worry; those screams of claustrophobia won’t scar the mind too much. That’s why therapy exists.

Watch Dogs has a planned 2013 release for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

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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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Each year, during the various press conferences surrounding the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) game-industry trade show, people applaud. Some of it’s polite (some guy we don’t care about is getting on stage). Some of it’s fanfare (yay, a new Zelda!). Some of it’s fake rah-rah (come on, we know you’re employees trying to pump up the crowd).

But once in a while, it’s pure, legitimate wow.

An extended, genuinely enthusiastic ovation awaited the conclusion of publisher/developer Ubisoft’s demo of Watch Dogs, a new modern-day drama/action/adventure game with a touch of cyberpunk. It’s stylish. It’s violent. And it’s oh-so-pretty. Of course, it’s way too early to judge whether this upcoming (date: TBD) Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC release will be any good or not, but read our quick-look preview and peep the gameplay video below to see why we picked Watch Dogs for GamesBeat’s E3 2012 Game of the Show.

Ubisoft’s thriller wasn’t the only star of E3. Here are the final top-threes by the rest of the GamesBeat staff who were in attendance at E3 2012. (To check out more coverage of any of the games, just click on the tags below the article or follow our E3 tag.)

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

1. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
2. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
3. Dishonored (multiplatform)

Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat lead news writer

1. Beyond: Two Souls (PlayStation 3)
2. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
3. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)

Sebastian Haley, GamesBeat culture editor

1. Metro: Last Light (multiplatform)
2. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
3. The Cave (multiplatform)

Omri Petitte, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. Assassin’s Creed III (multiplatform)
3. PlanetSide 2 (PC)

Mike Minotti, GamesBeat writer

1. Assassin’s Creed III (multiplatform)
2. Disney Epic Mickey: The Power of Illusion (3DS)
3. Rayman Legends (Wii U)

Jacob Lopez, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
3. Scribblenauts Unlimited (Wii U)

Stefanie Fogel, GamesBeat writer

1. The Walking Dead — Episode 2: Starved for Help (multiplatform)
2. Borderlands 2 (multiplatform)
3. Quantum Conundrum (multiplatform)

Rob LeFebvre, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (PlayStation 3)
3. Gravity Rush (PlayStation Vita)

Rus McLaughlin, GamesBeat writer

1. Watch Dogs (multiplatform)
2. The Last of Us (PlayStation 3)
3. Tomb Raider (multiplatform)

Eduardo Moutinho, GamesBeat writer

1. Star Wars 1313 (multiplatform)
2. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (multiplatform)
3. Injustice: Gods Among Us (multiplatform)

Please vote for your own favorite in our poll and explain your vote in the comments.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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 GamesBeat team has returned from the Electronic Entertainment Expo with minimal casualties. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to change our motto from “leave no man behind” to “leave no more than three men behind in West Hollywood at 3 a.m. and don’t ever talk about this.”

We saw some messed up stuff at the Los Angeles trade show, man. We were horrified to find dudes in 20-year-old Sonic t-shirts, a cubic ton of crossbows, and “We Are Young” by that one band playing on repeat in every booth. It was a lot to deal with. Instead of running to safety, like any well-adjusted human would, we handed out awards to celebrate all of the weird.

Enjoy GamesBeat’s E3 2012 non-award awards:

The Most Charming Booth Babe award: “Jane” from Ubisoft

Oh, Jane. You broke my heart. This hard-working lady laughed at my jokes. She ignored my body odor. Her eyes sparkled every morning when I was waiting for her in the ZombiU booth. Although, I’ve been told that I can’t read facial expressions, so that sparkling could have been her silently screaming for help. No way to know for sure.

I wasn’t the only one to fall under her spell. Jane apparently ensnared one fellow so desperately that he took to posting a Craigslist advertisement to find her. I’ll let this love-sick man explain our affections for Jane: “Maybe it’s your dark, flowing hair, your ready smile, your toned, tan little body, your playful laugh, your personable demeanor, or something that simply can’t be quantified…I don’t know!” Me neither, buddy. -Jeff Grubb

The Biggest Group of Sheep award: Everyone who gathered in a giant crowd to watch a Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 trailer

Activision adorned the front of its gigantic booth with a very, very wide screen. In the middle of this display was a counter, and when it reached zero, all traffic in that area of the show floor would stop and almost a hundred people would stand around to watch a trailer for Black Ops 2. A trailer! They’re at E3! They can play unreleased games, but instead they’re going to watch a trailer! Just go on YouTube when you get home or something! -Mike Minotti

Press conference most likely to get you fired: Ubisoft

If you’re not one of the super-special journalists invited to the major E3 press conferences, chances are you’re watching remotely. This year, each company seemed determined to out do one another with adult themes, and Ubisoft definitely wins. When the infamous Far Cry 3 trailer (you know, the one with the shirtless woman) popped up on-screen I was actually at my other job. Yeah, Ubisoft nearly got me fired. – Jasmine Rea

The Most Overused Motivation Award: Revenge

Game creators used the word “revenge” in the taglines and trailers for a lot of titles this year, including Dishonored (“Revenge solves everything”) and the four player co-op mode for Far Cry 3 (featuring four characters who are looking for…yup, revenge). And then we have Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. I’m not sure exactly what “revengeance” is, but I’m assuming it’s a lot like revenge (which is the cheapest and easiest form of character motivation a writer can possible employ). -Mike Minotti

Coolest Not-Cool Line: “My body was ready” by Reggie Fils-Aime (Nintendo briefing)

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime took an opportunity during this year’s press event to take ownership of his meme-spawning line from E3 2007. During the Wii U maker’s press briefing, Fils-Aime reminded us all that he had uttered that sentence, seemingly in an attempt to reconcile himself with the .gif makers who have been laughing at him for five years. It was an endearing moment of self-deprecation…that the subsequent awkward Wii Fit U video immediately ruined. -Evan Killham

The Brown Nose trophy for the Biggest Flatterer: Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion’s Peter Ong

Peter Ong, director of Epic Mickey: Power of Illusions for the 3DS, was quick to praise my amazing platforming skills during my demo of his 2D side-scroller. Now, I am pretty awesome at video games, so I can’t blame him for being stunned at my incredible ability to bounce off of enemy heads. Still, I guess it is possible he was just buttering me up so I would be kind to his game. Naw, I’m probably just that awesome. -Mike Minotti

The Carpet That Most Felt Like It Was Making Love to Our Feet: Gree

Folks, E3 hurts. You spend three days standing when you’re not walking and walking when you’re not running. Mid-way through day two, your feet experience the kind of sensation that makes you consider amputation as a viable option. But when I happened to cross over the Gree booth on the show floor, it felt like walking on clouds made of whipped cream. I’ve walked barefoot on grassy hills that didn’t feel as wonderful as that amazingly plush, cushy, off-white masterpiece. Seriously. I’ve got hardwood floors in my house. I love having hardwood floors in my house. And I still want whoever put down that flooring to come into my home and carpet everything, including the walls and ceilings. -Rus McLaughlin

The Cutest Piece of E3 Swag: The Neverwinter Dragon Hat
T-shirts. Baseball caps. iPhone cases. PR reps love to hand out promotional swag during E3, but Neverwinter publisher Perfect World Entertainment cranked the “d’awwwww” up to 11 this year with its knit, tasseled dragon hat. I’ve received a lot of compliments on it at work, including, “What the hell is that thing on your head?” and “I need to see you in my office.”  -Stefanie Fogel

The Greatest Threat to the Uncanny Valley award: Beyond: Two Souls (PS3)

It’s hard to believe, but real-time facial animations are starting to make games like Mass Effect and L.A. Noire look outdated. The creepy uncanny valley is starting to go away, soon to be replaced by another creepy phenomenon: that game characters are starting to look an awful lot like real people. -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Most (Literally) Show-Stopping Moment: Wonderbook presentation (PlayStation 3)

I’ve heard from people who were there that Wonderbook will provide hours of entertainment and learning for people far younger than I can remember being. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that impression after Sony’s eight-and-a-half-minute-long demonstration of the augmented-reality platform brought the entire show to a screeching halt. Eight and a half minutes is a long time, especially at a trade show at which Microsoft presented a product that makes watching a movie just one thing you’re doing. -Evan Killham

Stealth? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Stealth award: Assassin’s Creed III

In the Assassin’s Creed III trailer, the newest assassin character Connor, is such an acrobatic combat master that he charges a whole British troop formation in pursuit of a target. Connor charges past the line of bayonets and muskets, hurtling past red coats until he finds the leader to dispatch. In a real playable scene, Connor blows up a gunpowder barrel and then takes out a few soldiers in a frontal assault on the way to a fine assassination as he leaps from a fort structure onto the back of his target. Who needs stealth when you can take out a whole army with one assassin? -Dean Takahashi

Best — or Grossest? — Quote: “Girl wood” by Aisha Tyler

During Ubisoft’s press conference, emcee/actress/comedian Aisha Tyler gave us this gem after seeing some exciting demos: “Let’s play a game entitled ‘How many times Aisha gets girl-wood during this presentation.’ We’re up to two.” There’s plenty more where that came from. -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Year of the Bow Award for the Most Bows: Ubisoft.

In a year where every game seemed to bring a bow/crossbow to the party, Ubi really pulled out all the stops to take this one home. Assassin’s Creed 3. Far Cry 3. Splinter Cell: Blacklist. ZombiU. For all we know, Just Dance 4 has a move called “The Archer.” Well played, Ubisoft. Well played. -Rus McLaughlin

Longest Applause: The debut of Watch Dogs (multiplatform)

In the 16 years I’ve been attending E3, I’ve never seen a new, non-sequel game get this level of reception after it debuted at a press conference. Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs genuinely wowed the audience with its absolutely stunning modern world with a slight cyberpunk flair, brutal and stylish combat, and hack-everything gameplay. I can’t wait to see more. -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The You Couldn’t Have Made One of These a Kirby Game or Something? award: Nintendo

Between New Super Mario Bros. U, New Super Mario Bros. 2, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, and Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, Nintendo isn’t suffering from a dearth of Mario-universe titles. Now, we’re all huge Mario fans, but isn’t this a bit of overkill? Maybe the guys back in Kyoto could tap into the vast library of characters and mix it up a bit with Kirby or the Ice Climbers or something. -Jeff Grubb

The New “Space Marine”: Climbing and stringed weapons

In the recent past, a lot of games were hopping on the space-marine, zombies, or first-person-shooter bandwagons. This year, it’s all about new climbing and scaling moves (Splinter Cell: Blacklist, God of War: Ascension) and bows or crossbows (Tomb Raider, Blacklist). And that’s just a tiny sampling! -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Best Emotional Rollercoaster: Watch Dogs reveal (multiplatform)

I’m beginning to think that the horrifyingly awkward Ubisoft briefing was all an elaborate plan to keep us confused and off-guard to maximize the impact of the Watch Dogs announcement at the end. There we were, all ready to leave (or turn off the livestream) and wash our hands of this whole ordeal, but Ubisoft had one more thing to show. “Fine,” we thought. “Let’s get this over with.”

And that is when Watch Dogs melted our goddamned faces off.

It didn’t happen immediately; that wouldn’t be enough of a mindjack. What we got first was a reaaaaaallly loooooooooong video about digital footprints and other lines that the Wachowski brothers cut out of The Matrix for being too pretentious. That’s when the awesome gameplay footage started, and we were like, “HOLYSHITTHISISAMAZING,” and we stayed that way until the hero drove off, and the camera pulled back to reveal a second character who had what appeared to be an online handle floating over his head. I don’t remember what happened after that because I was trying to figure out how that gameplay we’d just seen would work in online multiplayer, and what that would mean for everything, that I blacked out for about 10 minutes before waking up in a puddle of Mountain Dew. I hope. -Evan Killham

We’ll Just Go Ahead and Assume It’s the Richest Company: Gree

With a massive E3 booth (complete with a bar right in the middle), a ritzy after-show party with popular mash-up artist Girl Talk as the main attraction, and, of course, a huge hiring spree over the past few months in Silicon Valley, mobile publisher Gree seems to have plenty of moolah to toss around. We’re willing to bet that conversations in its check-writing department typically end with, “Go ahead and add a couple of zeros to the end of that figure.” -Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The Mr. Caffeine Memorial Cup for Special Achievements in Terrible Public Speaking: Toby (Ubisoft)

This cup is given in memory of Mr. Caffeine who spoke so ineloquently at the Ubisoft press briefing in 2011.

Ubisoft had a wonderful E3 press briefing this year, but that was in spite of a man named Toby Turner (or Tobuscus on Youtube). Comedian Aisha Tyler handled the hosting duties for the French publisher’s E3 event, while Toby stood backstage with a camera and made bad joke after bad joke. His banter with Tyler, which was apparently supposed to be playful, seemed to genuinely annoy the host. No one has seen Toby since, and witnesses claim Tyler sprinted away covered in blood. Don’t worry, Aisha, we’re on your side in this. -Jeff Grubb

Get more E3 coverage from our hub page.

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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 video game industry’s biggest trade show was once again like a Disneyland for tech geeks. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles last week, we saw the latest technological marvels that will be coming into games in the not-so-distant future. The most exciting 10 technologies range from platforms such as Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, which could be the foundation for a whole generation of games, to the cool facial animation from Quantic Dream that will be used in a single PlayStation 3 exclusive, Beyond: Two Souls. We picked these technologies because they show the innovation that is alive in the industry and because of their ability to delight us.

For a fun comparison, here’s a link to our story from E3 2011.

1. Unreal Engine 4 (Epic Games)

Unreal Engine 4 could be the foundation for a whole generation of cool-looking video games. It is the newest version of Unreal’s graphics technology since Unreal Engine 3 debuted six years ago for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. This new technology will likely be used in video games that run on next-generation game consoles as well as other kinds of game platforms.

The image above from Epic’s 153-second Elemental demo shows that the engine can display scenes with high-dynamic range, or regions with sharp details in low-light in the same scene as a region with bright light. The engine can also display millions of particles such as smoke and ashes or snowflakes.

Not only is it a cool tech, it is also practical. Epic created its Kismet 2 technology to make artists working with Unreal Engine 4 more productive. They can, for instance, make changes to their 3D animations and see the effects in real-time — all without having to consulting a programming expert. Unreal Engine 4 will compete with a new CryEngine coming from Crytek. We’re betting it will lead to video games that are like Pixar movies or dazzling light shows.

2. Facial animation in Beyond: Two Souls. (Quantic Dream)

Sony and Quantic Dream showed a scene from this game that popped our eyeballs out of our heads. The character Jody Holmes (played by actress Ellen Page) looks so real that it may cross the Uncanny Valley, the notion popularized by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, who argued that the more the appearance of a computer-generated character looks human, the more the human eye detects something wrong with the image.

The faces in the game look so real, with cuts and bruises discoloring the skin and sweat running down a face in just the right way. Quantic Dream captured these images using a novel motion-capture technology, said David Cage, director of the game. It used a motion-capture system that simultaneously recorded an actor’s voice, facial and lip movements, and body movements. It was thus able to capture lips moving in synchronization with the voice and a body moving in a coordinated fashion.

This game will set the bar for realistic facial animation, and all of the other game developers may be forced to follow.

3. Wii U gamepad controller (Nintendo)

This tablet-style game controller doubles as a television remote control and a replacement for a traditional game controller. You can use it in a multiplayer living room game against other players in “asymmetric games.” In these games, four players could use a traditional Wii remote controller to control characters moving on a screen, while one player with the tablet could use touchscreen commands or the thumb sticks on the tablet to place obstacles in the way of the characters. Ubisoft’s Rayman Legends game and Nintendo’s New Super Mario Bros. U game showed how players could work cooperatively in a game, where one placed objects that the other player could jump on.

For sure, Nintendo needs to make sure the system can use multiple gamepads, but we found the tablet surprisingly fun.

4. Xbox SmartGlass (Microsoft)

Microsoft found a way to integrate tablets and smartphones so they can function seamlessly with the Xbox 360 via a technology it called SmartGlass. This software application extends Xbox 360 experiences onto new devices that can enhance the user’s overall entertainment experience. For instance, while watching Game of Thrones on HBO, you can activate the Game of Thrones app on the SmartGlass tablet, which will then call up a map of Westeros, the fictional land in the TV series, and show you where that scene is taking place.

For games, the tablet could function as a separate game controller, allowing another person to join in the fun. The tablet could also offer tips and tricks that might be useful at the precise moment in the game that you are playing. The good thing is that Microsoft is embracing the existing base of tablets and smartphones in an open fashion. It isn’t creating an app that will work only with Windows Phone 7 or Windows 8 devices.

5. SOEmote face emoticon technology (Sony Online Entertainment)

A collaboration of Sony, Image Metrics, and Vivox, the SOEmote captures your voice and facial expressions via a webcam and pastes them into your in-game character in an online game. It also modulates your words into the pitch appropriate for your race, such as the deep baritone of an ogre or the gnome’s tinny squeak. The new technology could make communication with fellow players much easier and more intuitive, saving you from typing in all the words that tell another player how you feel at a given moment.

6. Watch Dogs city exploration iPad app (Ubisoft)

Ubisoft got a sustained round of applause after it showed a demo of its Watch Dogs original game. The title casts you as Aiden Pearce, a fugitive who has hacked into a city’s operating system and gained access to all kinds of digital secrets. He can control security cameras, change traffic signals, and eavesdrop on live phone conversations. The game is coming out next year and will likely be a big hit.

Ubisoft extended the fiction into an iPad app, which shows the city that Pearce controls. The iPad app indicates where your friends who are playing the game are and all sorts of details about the city, depicted in a cool 3D interface.

7. OnLive’s MultiView (OnLive)

OnLive found a new way to use its innovative cloud gaming service by creating a way for a player to watch the screens of three other players in a multiplayer session — without exiting the player’s own game session. Called MultiView, the technology builds on OnLive’s existing spectator mode, which allows a player to watch a streamed real-time video of another player’s live game session.

The cloud technology works by running a game in a web-connected high-end server in a data center. The server computes the graphics and other game code and then sends only a video via a stream to the player’s machine, which merely displays the video on the screen. In this case, the server simply takes four different videos and puts them into a single video stream. Then it streams the images to the player, who can effectively see the exact views that other players have in a multiplayer session. This could be extremely useful in a pro-gaming environment.

8. Activision’s gigantic booth display (Activision Blizzard)

We want this screen. Activision’s booth featured a gigantic 140-feet-long screen that played trailers from Call of Duty: Black Ops II and other titles from the company. The resolution was an astounding 6,336 pixels by 720 pixels. It was a little wide for most of the images, but the effect was tremendous when the videos occupied the entire screen. A lot of people stood by with their jaws hanging open.

9. Samsung’s SmartTV with Gaikai and Nvidia’s GeForce Grid.

Samsung just found a cheap and easy way to become the fourth major first-party company in the video game business. It is doing so using cloud gaming technology from Gaikai and cloud graphics technology, dubbed the GeForce Grid, from graphics chip maker Nvidia.

Samsung will use the cloud gaming technology to stream games to new models of TVs that are being sold this year. This will allow it to move quickly into the market, since Gaikai is prepared to start a beta test in the coming weeks. With a game controller and a TV, there is no need for a game console at all.

As noted with OnLive, the game isn’t processed on a user’s computer or TV. It is only displayed there. The processing takes place in a web-connected data center, or cloud. The game graphics and logic are computed on high-powered servers with good graphics technology. Then the visual result is streamed to a user’s PC over a broadband connection. The game can be played in 720p resolution (or for a higher cost at 1080p), which is similar to the experience that many users have with game consoles.

For Samsung, this means it doesn’t have to sell a game console to consumers. Those consumers simply need a universal game controller (USB compatible) and then they play the game on a broadband-connected TV. They can also play it on low-budget computers if they want, as long as they have the broadband connection. Samsung will create its own game network in deals with 37 game publishers.

10. Sony’s Book of Spells Wonderbook (Sony and J.K. Rowling).

With the Sony PlayStation 3, a Move controller, and a digital-friendly paper book, Sony will be able to delight kids using its new Wonderbook technology. The PlayStation Eye camera recognizes the patterns in the book and displays the appropriate imagery to go with them on the screen. As an “augmented reality” application, the Wonderbook blends your own image with images from the book, so you can look at your TV screen and see goblins dancing next to your head. It’s a magical application that happens in real-time, and its first app will be The Book of Spells from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. With the Book of Spells, you can wave your Move controller like a wand and make a dragon appear on your TV. It is a wonderful blending of the physical and digital worlds.

Please vote for your favorite in our poll.

[Photo credits: Dean Takahashi, Sony Online Entertainment, Rich Prugh]

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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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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Ubisoft, stop your search now. Aisha Tyler is your one true conference host, the presenter to rule them all. She presided over your 2012 E3 press briefing like a meme-spouting executioner, verbally pimp-slapping all pretenders and dropping not-safe-for-anyone quotes without pause or apology. It was glorious.

Here’s a few of the awesome — and way, way off-script — gems Aisha graced us with.

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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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If your head is spinning with all the breaking E3 news, GamesBeat wants to help. At the end of each day, we’ll compile a handy roundup of the day’s best content in one convenient post. If you want to keep track of them all, just type “E3 roundup” in the search bar.

Four out of the five major press conferences happened today, and that means GamesBeat is nearly overflowing with breaking news, previews, and commentary. Below you’ll find coverage from Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Sony.

Sony brings down the house with The Last of Us demo

Sony announces Assassin’s Creed III Vita and PS3 bundles with exclusive content

J.K. Rowling is writing PlayStation’s Wonderbook

Nathan Drake and the Big Daddy Bouncer join PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale

Experimental developer Quantic Dream reveals the haunted life of Jodie Holmes in Beyond

THQ confirms that it has laid off employees of WWE developer THQ San Diego

E3 2012: You are the network in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs

Here’s where that Watch Dogs cube-head QR code goes

Rayman Legends rhythmically runs to the Wii U

Ubisoft shows strong commitment to the Wii U (videos)

Far Cry 3 demo leads you deeper into drug-induced insanity (preview)

Turn the snow crimson with redcoat blood in Assassin’s Creed III (preview)

Why Ubisoft is pouring a lot of resources into Wii U games (interview)

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot embraces disruption, new business models and new platforms (interview)

Ubisoft will make eight games for the Nintendo Wii U

Ubisoft’s creative director on why hooded assassins still fit in the American Revolution (interview)

EA shows off Need for Speed: Most Wanted at E3 2012

E3 2012: Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s beautiful carnage

EA nabs UFC from THQ

Star Wars: The Old Republic gets new planet, new species, and free trial

EA reveals Battlefield 3 Premium and fields “15 million players worldwide”

Madden NFL 13 is now even more of a contact sport

SimCity Social: If this free-to-play game is too good, will you pay $60 for the full PC version?

NCAA Football 13’s Heisman Challenge mode puts the “I” in team (hands-on preview)

EA reveals Dead Space 3, coming with drop-in cooperative play (hands-on preview)

Crysis 3 brings the jungle, gun hacking, and silent stealth kills to Manhattan (hands-on preview)

Hitman: Absolution trailer is indicative of gaming’s broken culture

New Xbox 360 games coming from Signal Studios, Twisted Pixel, and…Gore Verbinski?

South Park creators introduce their game and playfully mock Microsoft

E3 2012: Nike+ Kinect Training brings in-depth fitness measuring to Xbox 360

Forza Horizon brings street racing to the franchise

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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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Fugitive Aiden Pearce knows the truth. He knows how you think. He sees the digital shadow you cast. You lie to everyone else, but you can’t lie to him. He has access to all your information, and in Ubisoft Montreal’s new open-world action-shooter, Watch Dogs, he’s going to use it. And as you’ll see below, he’s not alone.

Ubisoft unveiled its latest game with a 10-minute demo that showed off stunning graphics and hinted at a seamless, drop-in/drop-out online co-op, set in a city where everything can be hacked, and you control every digital key that exists.

Pearce’s current target: media mogul and wrongly acquitted criminal Joseph Demarco. Just walking down a stunningly realistic street, Pearce can access data points on the many passersby. But his attention is focused on the digital art gallery where Pearce’s latest vanity project is on display. Waiters in QR-code masks serve drinks. A contact hands Pearce a gun.

Blowing out every cell phone in the line creates a nice distraction so he can get inside without a hassle; but he’s not unnoticed. He wants to be seen. Pearce has cast himself as bait to draw Demarco out, and Demarco bites. Pearce breaks into a cell call ratting him out, so now — after taking out a security guard who tries to box him in — it’s time to spring the trap.

Pearce heads back out onto the streets. It’s raining out, hard, gusty. It’s convincing; lights reflect off wet car metal in real time, bringing this world to brilliant life. Civilians move with independent life. The city feels fully realized. Soda cans kick down the street, umbrellas blow in the breeze. You can feel bad weather coming on, even above the hum of people and machines.

An open-world setting suggests multiple ways to solve your problems. In the demo, Pearce deals with an inbound homicidal maniac and his cadre of hired killers by hacking traffic lights to cause a 12-car pileup, neatly wrecking the car Demarco and his thugs are in. The gunfight that ensues feels deliberately paced and cover-based. Pearce spares a moment to drag a civilian passenger out of a car and out of the line of fire. The driver looks dead.

Watch Dogs allows for more aggressive tactics as well. Pearce dives over a car hood to take out another goon, stealing his machine gun and lighting up a car, killing the last of his opposition in the explosion. By comparison, Demarco himself proves easy. After dragging him out of a broken window, Pearce sends a message to Demarco’s masters via a bullet to Demarco’s head.

As police sirens close in from every direction, the action shifts to a second player on a nearby rooftop, “Bixxel_44.” Bixxel catches a message — and a mission — via the network: Protect Pearce…for now. Bixxel, controlled on Ubisoft’s stage by a second player, runs off to intercept the incoming police and provide cover for the fugitive as the demo closes.

Ubisoft has yet to confirm a release window, but Watch Dogs will release on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

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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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We were blown away by the reveal of Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs during its Electronic Entertainment Expo press briefing. The open-world game looks like it could be a massively multiplayer online Grand Theft Auto that focuses on hacking the environment.

One thing that jumped out us during the demonstration was the cube-headed QR-code waiter who offered the protagonist a drink. We’ve scanned the code and discovered that it leads to dotconnexion.com.

DotConnexion appears to be the name of an art collection in the Watch Dogs world. The webpage features interviews, press releases, and a link to request more info from this email address: dotconnexion@gmail.com.

“[DotConnexion] is interested in how technology, humans, and connectivity are all related,” an interview with Simon Mitchell (who is likely fictional) on the site reads. “Being a bunch of artists, I think we all have different feelings about what it all means, but we have common ground in the fact that we’re all thinking about it and exploring those ideas through our art.

We’ll have more information on Watch Dogs as it becomes 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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