Microsoft introduced the new Halo, the new Gears of War and bragged about third party games such as Resident Evil and others. Sony showed a convincing demo of the new Naughty Dogs title, postponing The Last Guardian yet again. Nintendo had his "hybrid generation" device set up and running a few Mario and Pikmin sessions. Electronic Arts talked about the new features of Sim City (5), and Ubisoft tried to innovate with Watch Dogs, probably the biggest impact game of the show.
But, in 2012, this expo is nonetheless disappointing. It seems like everybody is exploiting the last resources AAA games have to offer, scratching on the bottom of digital entertainment as we are accustomed to know it.
Let's start from Nintendo. The big N was the most anticipated company, we were all expecting figures about WiiU, both technically and regarding games. What we came up with was the substantial absence of a lineup for the new console launch and a series of trailers shattered here and there. Pikmin looks good, as well as the Mario games, and the new tablet controller allows for a bunch of new behaviours like coordinating the co-op sessions or editing strategic approaches.
Come back to last year's WiiU trailer: do you remember the golf game which featured the rendering of the ball on the tablet, laying on the floor, and the player swinging standing above it, looking at the screen just for the outcome of the shot? When we saw that, we were excited. But this year conference lost momentum, lost that grapple on us. There was a social hub and social interaction in games. WiiU seemed new last year, seems already seen this year. Nothing made us think "OK, they know exactly how to make games match their control system", and that was exactly what we were looking for.
Widely regarded as the best producer of E3 2012, Ubisoft had quite an impressive outing, with Assassin's Creed related news and Watch Dogs, a sort of free-roaming adventure where the protagonist can hack "any" sort of device to achieve his missions. In the demo shown, he caused an accident to find and kill an enemy, and he distracted a security guard directing a call on his mobile. The dystopian Chicago in which the characters interact is believable and the overall feeling is that we are seeing a killer application in the making.
What is not clear is how this game is going to innovate the genre. Quite frankly, it's not so easy to state that such high level of interaction will translate to a good range of choice. That's what free roaming usually grants: go there, take on a mission, try and achieve it, on your way back do some secondary mission or subquests. That is where freedom has always been, not in the main quest. That's why GTA-like games are avid for subquests, and are able to follow a straight and rewarding plot; of course, leading to different endings, but not to different narrative twists. It remains to be seen whether Watch Dogs will be able (or just brave enough) to change that.
The Sims and Spore left Sim City in the background for ages. The last episode is dated 2003, and that game was a major disappointment because it lost any kind of gaming appeal after crossing every neighbour cities competition out of the feature list. The whole World was given to the player, forcing him/her to split resources amongst different cities. That created "monsters", like towns filled with power stations with not even one residential area. And, at the end of the day, no rewards for creating huge regions.
Sim City 5, called simply Sim City so far, made some heads turn these days in L.A. Aside from obvious curvy road construction or advanced animation, improvement largely due to nowadays technology, we'll have social neighbours, towns built by our friends creating a big net of cities interconnected. The most intriguing aspect is that agreements can be made between two different towns and they will be all regulated by players. There are going to be involuntary exchanges, such as crime spreading from one town to the other or disasters (a trademark of this franchise), likely unchained when both mayors are online.
Everything will be under control, not only on spreadsheets like in the previous instalments, but visually as well. That's where our worries rise: this feature will require the flow of the game to slow down a bit, since you have to identify which are the most troubled blocks or where the fastest growing areas are by looking at the screen.
It's been a sad cliche saying that videogames are moving very slowly. With the ever growing casual markets, AAA are left in a limbo where innovation doesn't necessarily mean better experiences for players. The new era has the looks of the previous one, with WiiU acting as Wii, PS4 as PS3, Xbox720 as Xbox360. Nintendo hopes WiiU does not turn in a new Dreamcast, Sony is in economical disarray and for them innovation necessarily means debts, Microsoft cannot count on a wide spectrum of creative talent.
Third parties seem to be burning the midnight oil working around concepts already seen and played a thousand times.
We are slowly approaching the end of the tunnel. The last gameplay resources are being currently used. For what concerns AAA projects, simply there is nothing left to invent. We are hitting the wall of innovation, hopefully we won't run out of fun.
