From the LA Theater in downtown Los Angeles, California, comes the Ubisoft press conference livestream. We’ll be starting the livestream at 2:30pm PST. Stay tuned and refresh this page for updates.
2:36PM:
Ubisoft overbooked the LA theater. Icrontic reporter Nathan Andrews made it inside, but Binh and I were turned away. Therefore, we got onto a Sony shuttle bus with about three dozen other journalists that got turned away and we’re heading over the Sony press conference.
If you missed the massive stream of tweets, here’s a recap from the event.
To kick off Ubisoft’s 25th anniversary, we got a lot of updates to old franchises, starting with Rayman. Rayman Origins is a full update to the original franchise. Huge updates in graphics and mechanics while still maintaining the original aesthetic that got us all hooked on it in the first place. They also added in 4-player co-op to further broaden the experience. A bit of the updated game:
Video to be inserted later.
Next up was Driver: San Fransisco. Open-world racing. Offroading. Big updates to graphics and mechanics. Crashing is looking more real than ever. Not much on if/what kind of story it will have. Ubisoft also didn’t offer any release date details as of yet.
FarCry3 will be launching in 2012. Graphically not much different from the previous installments (hardware hasn’t really changed since the first FarCry), but it looks like they’ve done a lot of work on the storyline and plot. The video shown was entirely gameplay footage. Rough, tough, and even a bit brutal in some spots. Updates to the fighting mechanics (sneak up behind an enemy, grab his knife, stab him in the heart with it, then throw it at the next enemy’s head) look fantastic.
Gearbox brings us an update to the Brothers in Arms franchise with Furious 4. Think of this as Inglorious Basterds, the video game. The (unfortunately short) trailer opens with a Nazi catching a flying hatchet to the forehead. This is my kind of game. A lot of the tropes demonstrated in Basterds are shown in one form or another in the characters of the game. Great stuff all around.
We also got a preview for a new Tintin movie tie-in game. Looks like fun, but the movie bears no real interest for me, so went the game. It looks like a nice mix between a 3D platformer and a third-person adventure, however. I’d like to see more games like this, just with content I’m actually interested in.
An update to the Ghost Recon franchise is coming soon. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Fully customizable weapons, adaptive camouflage (think Predator), 3D adaptive HUD, great updates to the FPS genre. One mechanic I absolutely loved, the remote incendiary airburst missile – rain down hell from above.
Additionally to the new Future Soldier, Ubisoft is also launching Ghost Recon online. The best part: It will be a free-to-play title. The beta launches soon. If you want to sign-up, click here (18+ only, please).
Taking a turn to the slightly more casual side, an update to TrackMania is coming soon. Online multiplayer, including fully custom-built tracks. Online multiplayer racing is nothing new, but being able to have a bunch of people racing on the track YOU created is a huge deal.
After taking a quick minute to set up a living room on the stage, a new Raving Rabbids Kinect title gets a demo. Raving Rabbids: Alive & Kicking is an AR party game. You can play a whack-a-mole equivalent (stomp the rabbid in this case), and a really cool looking “Everyone pose together to make a shadow shape” game. Looks like loads of fun, and a great update to the party game genre. Alive & Kicking will be available in November ’11.
Just Dance 3 gets a quick demo video with some famous people (I caught Katy Perry and Harry Shum Jr. specifically, there may have been more). Not a huge update, since there’s really not much to update for the dance game genre overall. Just Dance 3 will be available on all major platforms (Wii, Kinect, and Move).
The final Kinect title is Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012. Not a whole lot to see that hasn’t already been seen in the “We do WiiFit too!” arena. I’m still not sure why fitness games continue to insist on having running. Unless you have a treadmill, running in place is not exactly what I’d call an enjoyable fitness activity.
Finally, we got to the good stuff. The next installment in the Assassins Creed franchise, Revelations. Amazing cinematic trailer footage (not gameplay). Extremely well produced, and expertly rendered. After that, we get some actual gameplay. The story looks great, the gameplay mechanics look fantastic, and the overall destructibility of the environment is a nice touch. I did notice, with this demo, that we’re starting to approach the limits of current-gen consoles. The graphics, although still really nice, are starting to look dated.
So that’s a wrap from Ubisoft. Maybe some day, Ubi will learn from its mistakes and stop overbooking theaters. To require an invite, and then not have enough seats is a real bummer.
Here is G4TV’s livestream as well:
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