Even I, with my limited knowledge of growing a community and increasing page views, know that you don’t tuck trailers from E3 into another post when you can make a separate post for extra page views. Granted, I’m not doing the standard one trailer per post to flood your various social media feeds and RSS readers with our posts.
Anyway, having just wrapped up our recap of the Xbox One press conference, it’s time to actually watch some of what Microsoft and friends had on offer at their big E3 keynote. We have the announcement trailer for Halo’s Master Chief Collection. Sunset Overdrive headlines the gameplay videos along with The Witcher III and Assassin’s Creed: Unity. As an added bonus, I’ve thrown in the Tomb Raider sequel teaser trailer.
When the Xbox One was unveiled last year and presented again at E3 last June, the focus wasn’t really on the games. Microsoft was more interested in pitching the Xbox One as an all-in-one entertainment unit for the living room by touting the entertainment apps and Kinect integration. Between not worrying about the games, the lingering DRM controversy and a price point $100 higher than the PlayStation 4, Microsoft has been in catch up mode for the last twelve months.
It’s amazing what a difference a year makes. With new Xbox division boss Phil Spencer at the helm, this year’s Microsoft E3 press conference was all about the games. The Kinect was hardly mentioned. Entertainment apps may as well not have existed.
Just because you’re the top MOBA in the world and the most watched game on Twitch, that doesn’t mean that you should rest on your laurels. Last week, Riot Games took the covers off an upcoming update to their game’s main map, Summoner’s Rift.
With E3 starting right now, news coverage is going to get a lot busier around here. We’ll have the usual keynote roundups, breaking news items and all the trailers that the devs and publishers have. For today, we’ve got some reveal and teaser trailer released over the last seven days ahead of the big trade expo. I figured that it would be a good idea to move this post up to avoid the rest of the E3 news crunch.
If you’re a fan of either Crytek or WB Games, this is a good roundup for you. WB Games has new trailers out for Batman: Arkham Knight and Mortal Kombat X. Crytek has two of their new properties on exhibit this week. The Homefront sequel gets its first public exhibition and so does their new IP Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded age.
GOG.com has a new addition to their current lineup of DRM-free offerings. This time, it isn’t a new DRM-game on the store but a new way to access your GOG purposes with the new platform GOG Galaxy.
I’m not so sure that it’s everyone wants to get into MOBAs but everyone feels as though they have to get into MOBAs. While Riot Games is on their own and on top of the pile, all the other big players are trying to get in with their own MOBAs. Blizzard/Activision is trying something a bit more fan service and team objective based with Heroes of the Storm. Deep Silver is doing the Dead Island zombie MOBA. WB Interactive is onboard with Infinite Crisis. And, of course, Valve has Dota 2.
Now, Electronic Arts is the last one to jump into the MOBA fray by publishing someone else’s MOBA under their banner. Dawngate might seem to have a lot more in common with League of Legends than the other competitors but it also has some unique ways to differentiate itself from the king of MOBAs. Does it find its way to a solid third in the pack?
If you follow me on Twitter (@TheSteveMurray), you probably saw me mention that I wasn’t disappointed that I was turned down for a review copy of a recent release. The game came out to pretty poor reviews by big release standards so not spending 10 hours of my life playing and a couple more writing and editing a review was probably to my benefit. Instead, I’ll spend a couple of hours reading and condensing reviews of Murdered: Soul Suspect for a Critics Corner post.
Murdered: Soul Suspect sounds like a fairly intriguing concept at first but it sounds like the execution was a little lacking. Just about everyone found some aspect of the game a bit “meh” but most found more than one aspect to be lacking in polish.
So enough of my little preamble. What did the critics think of Murdered: Soul Suspect?
Just because Irrational Games has effective shut down as it restructures to become the world’s highest-profile indie-sized game developer, that doesn’t mean that their epic BioShock franchise is gone with them.
2K Marin, the studio that helped Irrational with BioShock and developed BioShock 2, has been tapped by Take-Two Interactive, 2K Games’ parent company, to once again take over BioShock and make the next game in the series.
It seems as though this week’s game trailers roundup has less to do with trailers that were released over the last seven days but more to do with trailers that were leaked.
Publishers are so beholden to major events like E3, Gamescom and PAX that they don’t bother trying to break free from the busy convention news cycle to their own waves and get a ton of buzz as the only major headline at a point of time. This week, the cops and robbers edition of Battlefield and PS4’s Project Beast both had trailers leaked. If they let these run during E3, they might have gotten lost in the shuffle. Getting out ahead of the conventions got them headlines.
Elsewhere, we have teaser trailers for BattleCry, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Quantum Break.
If there are two passions of mine that I write about far too frequently, it’s motorsports and video games. Naturally, I love writing about and playing motorsport video games, especially proper racing sims.
Today, I have an infographic that combines both of my passions into one. Our friends at Team Sport have a look back at the history and evolution of racing video games. It even includes two games from Papyrus Racing Games who are my favourite racing sim devs of all time.
et geekera 