Sometimes I’m a little slow to realize things. Maybe it’s an inappropriate joke I told, food in my teeth, the pungent smell emanating from my armpits, or realizing that this past 2013 E3 showed us a peek into the direction games are being pushed by developers.
I wasn’t at E3, but I watched the presentations that Monday from the major companies (Sony, EA, Microsoft, and Ubisoft) from the comfort of my domicile. By the end of all four presentations, I was on stimulation overload. I witnessed new games for new consoles, new franchises from new developers, established developers presenting new games, horrible jokes, uncomfortable silences, and the hardware reveal of Sony’s PS4. I was overwhelmed but generally satisfied by what I saw.
Over the next few days the media flood gates opened and the overflow of information poured out. I was uninterested. The luxury of viewing such an event from the confines of my own home is that I can pick and choose what I want to see and read, however, there were quite a few games that had piqued my interest and knew little about. These games offered a fresh prospective on how we would play games in the future and presented possibilities that aren’t readily available to the current generation of consoles.
So, you might be asking yourself by now, “What is he getting at and what does this have to do with his introduction and the title?”
It hadn’t dawned on me until a few weeks after E3 that developers are pushing their own imagination of the MMO. Developers and publishers are now afforded the opportunity to go out on a limb and develop ambitious titles that allow for an experience seldom accomplished on a console, an experience usually reserved for the power of the PC.
The reveal of The Division came at the end of the Ubisoft presser and was well met by the audience. Instantly I noticed the game looked gorgeous. As the demo went on, my level of intrigue rose with each frame. The player met up with two other players, seemingly, and together they trekked through the New York wasteland. The small nuances of the game caught the eyes of many and the internet was a buzz about the animation of the character closing the door of a car that he was hiding behind while being shot at. (You had to see it to realize its awesomeness.) After a run in with some enemies, we got a glimpse of another division of players and the demo ended. This was a game I must have.
But one question went unanswered, “Who were those other players and how will this all fit together in terms of multiplayer?” I searched the internet, turning up nothing. A day or two later after I had obsessively scoured the internet trying to drum up any information on this game, an interview arose from the E3 press tendrils. The Division was in fact an open-world game that would house multiple characters at the same time where players could also meet up and form divisions to complete quests and such.
Another game to position itself on my radar was Destiny. Destiny was announced a few months before E3 and not much was known about this mysterious title other than it was being developed by Bungie and published by Activision, it was going to be a persistent open-world FPS, it was to have a possible life span of up to 10 years, and the game world would contain multiple players at the same time.
Inquisition would be put to rest during the Sony E3 presser when Bungie took the stage to show off their new persistent shooter. Destiny looked gorgeous with its beautifully bleak backdrop and intricate character design. During the E3 demo, the player would meet up with a multitude of other players during the demo to complete a quest and then conclusively winding up at an instanced battle. Once again, my eyes were dilated and my mouth wet with interest. Here was another game I could not wait to get my sweaty mitts all over.
Another game that was previously announced before E3 was, Elder Scrolls Online. People scoffed at the prospect of another MMO. Why in the hell would Bethesda, a well-respected and very intelligent game development company be working on a game in a genre that is super hard to succeed in? Did they not get the memo? MMOs are dead.
Yes, this is a traditional MMO by base standards and by the looks of it, not adding anything new to the genre. But what makes this title so unique is that it will be fully playable on the upcoming next-gen consoles. Yeah, I know. PC is still better. But the diversity of both console and PC allows people access to a game that would otherwise be condemned to one platform. Now a full spectrum of gamers can have access to a style of game that maybe they previously couldn’t afford to play due to the high cost of gaming PCs. Also, consider that this franchise could re-spark a dying MMO genre.
MMOs are making a comeback, whether we like it or not. The examples shown at E3 by publishers prove this theory. It wouldn’t make sense for a major publisher like Ubisoft and Activison to sink a substantial amount of time, money, and resources into a genre that was dead. The traditional MMO model may be dead and we may never see the subscription model again, thankfully so. But what we will see are developers pushing a new style of game, a style of game that blankets the MMO architecture with a veneer of interesting gameplay that will appeal to the masses.
Digital Humanoid 