Brad’s E3 2003 Report
© 2003 Brad Wardell (bwardell@stardock.com)
Introduction & Plugging
This was my 5th E3 report I’ve done. This year I went to E3 to announce our free expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations called “Galactic Civilizations: Expanded Universe”. GalCiv is a space based strategy game that starts near the dawn of the 23rd century. Home age at www.galciv.com and the expansion pack announcement can be found here: https://www.galciv.com/xuniverse.
E3 is a loud, neat, and usually exciting place. As a game developer, it conveys a sense of awe and depression at the same time. Awe in seeing how cool new technologies are transforming games. And depression because you know that most of these games will bomb in the market place. The youth of many a game maker spent in the vain quest of recognition and financial security in an immensely competitive market.
This year was the first time that the much talked about “consolidation” really made its presence felt. You see, E3 takes place in 3 main halls at the LA convention center. You have the South and West Halls where the “big guys” are of PC and consoles gaming. And then the Kentia hall where the up and comers are…or at least used to be. This year, the Kentia hall was half empty. The rows and rows of Asian developers seemed absent. And the other two halls were not fully sold either. It did not take nearly as much time to see what was to be seen.
Of course, there is also the stuff you can’t see. The most exciting stuff is often shown only behind closed doors or requires you to wait in line. Such was the case this year as well if you wanted to see titles like Halo 2, Half Life 2, Knights of the Old Republic and so forth.
South Hall
This is where the PC stuff was shown. Strategy First was showing their upcoming games over in the Encore booth. Of the titles, the one that seems most exciting is called Chrome. Its website can be found here (http://www.chromethegame.com/). It’s an action game where you take on the role of a mercenary.
Savage (http://www.s2games.com/)
For me, the most exciting new game I saw was a game called Savage. It was the one game I played for quite awhile at the show. Quite addicting. Whether it’s successful or not will depend on multiplayer though. It’s a quasi first person shooter and strategy game. One player acts as the strategy gamer, directing his units via an overhead screen to do their thing. The other players are the actual units playing in first person mode trying to do what they’re told (if they want). Imagine an RTS where the unit AI is really really good – i.e. the “AI” is HI (human intelligence) instead. I found the first person combat reasonably enjoyable and I really liked the team mechanics of it.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
GTA:VC is a big improvement over GTA3. The really big change is that the world is much more persistent than in GTA3. No more turning around and that car you just had disappearing. I had a blast playing this game.
Half Life 2
There was a huge line to see this game. I wasn’t willing to wait in line but from what I heard the big thing about it is that the world is much more…malleable than what is seen in most first person shooters. This means you can have much more in depth puzzles and such that are more intuitive to solve. Plus, the graphics are kick butt. I still think DOOM 3’s graphics are more impressive but HL2 comes out first.
UFO: Aftermath
Remember Xcom? Well essentially the original makers of the first one have gathered together to make this unofficial follow-up to it called UFO: Aftermath. This game looked very fun.
Knights of the Old Republic
Bioware is doing this one. Combine Baldur’s Gate with the Star Wars universe (set thousands of years before ANH so you don’t have to deal with continuity) and you have KofOR. This game looks very very fun. It comes out for the Xbox in June and for the PC in Octoberish. The story looks very cool and the cinematics are getting impressively close to the movies.
City of Heroes (http://www.cityofheroes.com/)
This game looks incredibly fun. I really liked Freedom Force. This game takes a different direction. Where Freedom Force tried to replicate the look and feel and spirit of a Silver Age comic book, this game has a more realistic look to it and exists in an on-line world. Everquest meets Marvel Comics?
Rise of Nations
This game is already out but was shown in force at E3. At first glance it seems a lot like Empire Earth – real time strategy game where you go from cavemen to modern times. But what sets this apart are a few very crucial features. First, you have borders which takes care of a ton of cheese tactics (you can only build in your territory). It’s hard to imagine a future serious RTS not making use of the concept of territory again. Secondly, tactics really matter here. It’s not the typical “build up for big battle” type thing. When you’re in enemy territory you take attrition damage. Stardock (where I work) is also working on a visual style for Rise of Nations so that you can make your entire Windows GUI look like the Rise of Nations GUI. (www.windowblinds.net). This game will be the RTS to beat this year.
So many MMRPGs
So there was Mythica, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy On-line and Everquest II. And there were probably others I missed. At the risk of making a prediction, I think there is a very limited number of MMRPGs that can be “big” in terms of having huge numbers of players. And I think that of those shown Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft will dominate. Then UO and Dark Age of Camalot a few others will be second tier. I didn’t really get to try out Mythica but I didn’t find the Final Fantasy on-line to be compelling. And the jury is out on the Star Wars MMRPG.
West Hall
This is where the consoles tend to be. Sega is still there making their sports games. Nintendo and Sony battled it out. Nintendo really had a strong line up.
Gamecube
Pikmin 2 looked pretty fun. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this I suspect. The most important thing is that the Nintendo “booth babes” were the best. J Seriously, Nintendo didn’t have half naked women running around like other vendors. Instead, they had incredibly beautiful women all over showing the games looking relatively professional. Seemed quite effective. The big news was Mario Cart for the Game Cube. The graphics were incredibly impressive.
It was pretty apparent what Nintendo’s strategy is though, they are trying to leverage the popularity of the Gameboy to help the Gamecube out. Many games got a lot of extra benefits if you had a Gameboy. It will be interesting to see if this strategy works out.
Sony
Lots of sports games for the Playstation 2. I was kind of hoping that there might be a preview of the Playstation 3 but no such luck. Playstation 2 seems to be going very strong still and I saw some really fun games for it.
My favorite game I saw for the Playstation 2 was Ratchet and Clank. It looked very fun.
Xbox
I haven’t followed the Xbox stuff as much as the other consoles. And I don’t follow console stuff that much either. The big news for Xbox was Halo 2. But for me, the other big thing coming out for it was the aforementioned Knights of the Old Republic. It comes out for Xbox first.
Misc
Stalker: Oblivion Lost (http://www.russobit-m.ru/eng/games/oblivion/) had some of the best first person graphics I’ve ever seen. The detail was very impressive.
I also did a live blog from the show on JoeUser.com if you want to check that out:
On The plane:
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/OntheplanetoE3...html
Day 1:
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AtE3day1.html
E3 Parties:
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AtE3night1.html
Day 2: Videos
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AtE3day2.html
Day 2: Pictures
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AtE3Pictures.html
Day 3: Videos
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AtE3day3.html
Day 3: Pictures & Coming Home
https://www.joeuser.com/Articles/AtE3Cominghome...html
So that’s it for this year. See ya next year!
