My Thoughts On E3

I watched a fair amount of E3 coverage this week, taking in some of the 3rd party developer coverage and all of the Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo press conferences.
This was my second year of watching G4's E3 coverage and although parts of it I really enjoyed, a good chunk of it I only a gave a little attention to. I'm primarily an RPG gamer. I like playing other games, but I'm laughably terrible at anything requiring hand-eye coordination and so usually only play non-RPGs if I have cheat codes. Since none of the current gen platforms have cheat devices (that I know of), my interest is very limited. Here are some of the highlights of the coverage I enjoyed or found interesting.

The most memorable items of the convention were the motion control innovations that the "big three" introduced.

Microsoft, as I blogged about earlier this week, introduced project Natal, a motion control add-on that captures the movements of players without the involvement of any controller.(Which they hyped as a major, competitive selling point.) The technical demonstration was impressive, involving a female participant who controlled an onscreen shadow of herself, batting and deflecting an onslaught of balls into a wall with the goal of destroying it. With very little delay (almost imperceptible) the screen version of the player responded and simulated the movements of her arms and legs and made it look like alot of fun. Natal also has face recognition capability and can log in players "on sight". From the get go, players navigate through the Xbox dashboard using hand movements. Neat stuff. Microsoft also demonstrated interaction with a virtual character named "Milo" using Natal, but it seemed a little too good to be real. I got the sense that there were a lot of holes they weren't telling us about and the interaction with "Milo" was staged to make us think he was a more complex bit of programming than he actually was. At the end of the day, however, if Microsoft can pull off even 80% of all they demonstrated with Natal, they'll be far enough along to make Nintendo very nervous. They may not catch up to the motion control quality that Nintendo has, but Natal may be good enough to keep future customers from thinking the Wii is their only option for immersive, motion-controlled gameplay.

Sony demonstrated a new motion control device that virtually "catches them up" to Nintendo, even given Nintendo's new device(more in a moment). Although clearly still in development, the Sony controller looked like a short rod(sound familiar?) that enabled players to control objects and events onscreen at a perfect, simultaneous, one-to-one ratio. At least I couldn't perceive any delay, though I was a casual viewer.

This toy looked like a ton of fun, especially when it was used in connection with an "eye-toy" like camera to put the player on screen and place weapons and objects directly into his hand, in place of the controller. Swords, guns... if only they could have demonstrated a lightsaber! I'd imagine looking at myself onscreen, live, waving around a lightsaber would involve a major amount of geeking out. As it was, the technology was very impressive and clearly takes motion control to the next level. Whether or not it works when grabbed off of the store shelf, however, will be another matter.

Lastly, Nintendo unveiled an add-on called the Wii-motion plus. Basically, it converts the current Wii controller into a more precise one-to-one controller like the one demoed by Sony. While I thought Nintendo's demonstration was the least interesting in this department, it also looked like theirs was nearly ready for store shelves and I would guess, at this point, that the quality wil be the most reliable if all three companies release their new toys at the same time.

I kept my eyes open for info on new games coming out. Although the fanfare was a little lame, and no gameplay footage was revealed, Bioware did premiere a trailer for their upcoming MMO, "Star Wars: The Old Republic". It was awesome. It looks like this is just planned for PC at the moment, which is a shame, since I'm sure my computer won't run it when it comes out. But if it gets a release on the 360, it may just finally be the MMO for me. Not that I'm a die-hard Star Wars fan, but I really enjoyed Bioware's "Knights Of The Old Republic" Xbox game and I'm STILL playing and geeking out over "Neverwinter Nights" going on almost two years now.

Bioware also showed some gameplay footage for their dark fantasy RPG coming this fall entitled "Dragon Age: Origins". This game has been on my radar for a few months now, and I liked what I saw. They described it as their darkest and most violent RPG to date, which is always nice if accompanied by a gratifying story. Luckily, these guys have a history of delivering in that department as well. October cannot possibly get here soon enough.

The trailer for Final Fantasy 13 looked very cool and between the press conference and G4's VERY brief and unrevealing "hands-on" coverage, we did get a sense of the battle system, which is described as "command-based". The developers seemed to avoid the term "turn-based" at every opportunity, but the game still had a more turn-based look than Final Fantasy 12. Something I'm very grateful for. It also looks like the story, while grand and somewhat political, will focus more on a small group of characters. Although I was surprised by and loved alot about Final Fantasy 12, the story never pulled me in because I couldn't keep track of the characters or their titles. "Vice Archbishop This" and "Confederate Delegator That" all just becomes noise to me after a little while. Final Fantasy 13 looks like it will be a tighter group focus, like most Final Fantasy games have been, and less of a politically driven story. Summons, spells and the other goodies you expect from Final Fantasy all seem to be intact and the graphics and world design were beautiful and dark at the same time. Sounds great to me!

All in all, I'm excited for what's coming, but hope I'll have a few more options aside from the two RPGs mentioned. Meantime, I may have to start saving up for a small, reasonably priced high-def TV for my upstairs office/gameroom!