E3 Games
RTS designed by Relic, the same team who did Homeworld. This game looked totally incredible. It is based on the Warhammer 40,000 series of tabletop strategy games. The movement of your troops looks so natural. They don't all move the same way, scrambling around the battlefield in a truly organic manner. You can play top down or rotate your camera to any perspective on the battlefield. Each unit has custom animations for how it fights with each other kind of unit, making the combat look incredibly realistic. I don't know if any other game has ever done that. Most infantry is at a squad level of control, with individual control being granted over vehicles and leader units. The leader units get some pretty unique abilities, from the chaos marine leader being able to sacrifice himself to summon a giant demon that can wreak havoc on the battlefield, to airstrikes and other area effect attacks. The resource management comes not in the form of mining but taking and holding strategic points on the map, making it basically integrated with the combat. There is also power as a resource that you need to generate for certain types of units and buildings. Make sure and check out the videos I took in the movies section, they are awesome. This was one of my top 3 favorite games of E3.
Half-Life 2
What can I say? This game is going to be awesome! I waited in line for about an hour to see a presentation and long movie from Gabe Newell, lead designer. The game looks absolutely incredible and will probably blow Doom 3 away. They showed us some more buggy driving footage, swamp hovercraft driving footage, physics stuff and also said that all existing Half Life mods will run under the new engine. They played a demo of Counter-strike being played in HL2 and it looked incredible. Another one of my top picks of E3.
This game looks very unique and funny. You play from an alien's perspective and its almost a sort of ET meets Grand Theft Auto theme. You have a wide variety of psychic powers and weapons, from being able to use your mind to throw things and people around to reading minds to disintegration rays. You can also project an image around yourself to imitate other humans and take control of weaker minds. Your overall goal is to collect human DNA that you need for your race to be able to breed. Some of the coolest stuff in this game was the jetpacks and the ability to fly around in your saucer and use its devastating weapons to lay waste to entire cities. I am not sure if I would buy it but it looks like light-hearted fun. The E3 presentation was very entertaining. They had us line up outside a mock up of an old movie theater with a spaceship crashed into it. Men in Black led us in and a guy that looked and sounded a lot like Agent Smith from the Matrix gave the voice over for the video. Well done.
While the game has been out for a while, the army is constantly adding on to it. They have come out with an expansion called Special Forces which adds a bunch of new features and character classes to the game. They were showing off their next expansion which will add vehicles and upgrade them to the newest version of the Unreal engine. It looks very nice and the vehicles and anti-vehicular weaponry were very realistic. As always, this game is free. They also showed off one of those bomb disposal robots in real life and in game! It was very cool to watch this robot drive around and mess with people with its big arm. They are also working on partnering with a laser gun company to add support for using plastic handguns and M-16s to control the game with. The M-16 even had some form of blowback that gave it kick and a realistic popping sound when fired at the screen. I would be interested to play this with a huge screen and fake weapons. Looked like fun!
City of Villains
This expansion for City of Heroes will not be out until early 2005. It will add PvP to the game in the form of player character villains. They will add a second city for the villains and areas in between the two cities where both sides can duke it out. Apparently they are going to make it so you can play as a villain or hero without PvP'ing at all if you don't want to. At E3 we were able to fight as 4 on 4 teams of level 6 heroes and villains. I won a T- Shirt. They also announced a huge new content update for City of Heroes scheduled in June. This will add new city zones (Rikti Crash Site and Peregrine Island), The Sewer Trial Room where you can "battle the massive beast that dwells in the depths of the city", instanced outdoor missions where you can fight rooftop to rooftop, enhanced indoor missions ("don't let your guard down" whatever that means...) 3 new super villain factions and the ability to modify your costume in game.
Everquest 2
EQ 2 looked good, however they were being total assholes at the booth. They only wanted to allow media to come in and check out the game. Lame, since after the first day they were never that busy. They had a couple game stations up over in Microsoft's weird section where they just had "games for Windows". It looked nice but they did not really have anything neat to show at E3. Disappointing, really.
The Sims 2
Don and I were totally taken off guard with this game. Anyone who liked the original Sims at all will absolutely love this one. It is completely 3D now and the detail is astounding. Sims now grow old and die and can die early if they are unhealthy. They have Life Goals, can get married and have kids and have incredibly advanced interaction and AI. They also tried to eliminate the annoying part of having to micromanage every aspect of your Sims' lives like eating and cleaning, so you can focus more on really creating an interesting life with story arcs. Keep an eye out for this one.
This is a massive auto combat game in the same vein as Autoduel and Car Wars. I heard Richard Garriot even helped work on it. You can PvE or PvP in it. The graphics are very nice and you can choose vehicle classes and customize your armaments. We played in a tournament and, of course, our team won, with me getting the highest score. Our prizes were T-shirts. The game is a lot of fun, I just am not sure about its longevity. I did not see enough of it to judge.
Tabula Rasa
The new MMO from Lord British. This one seemed like a lot of fun with some very unique design ideas. They had a quest to rescue the village's children who got kidnapped and when they accepted, 5 hunters from the village joined their party. So they had 5 NPC hunters with them that would attack whatever they were fighting. Then there were weird twists in the quest. Like they finally got to the camp where the children were being held and started fighting the camp's denizens. After a bit, the kidnapper guards went to kill the children and they had to stop fighting the mobs, go attack the guards to get them off the children then finish killing the other mobs. There were also stuff like secret sub-quests that crop up along the way in the main quest that give you bonus shizzle if you do them. Also, if all the village hunters survived the fight you got an XP bonus. Don played for a half hour and complained about it being a bit boring. Guess this will have to be "wait and see."
Ok, this is a Playstation 2 action game so I will probably never play it but man, it looked incredible! Don got addicted to it. The amount of detail as to what your character can do is just astounding. From ripping enemies heads off to all sorts of custom ways to kill each foe. The blood spewing all over the place is a nice touch too. If you have a PS2, check it out!
Playboy Mansion
I did not know of the existence of this game until I saw its booth at E3, complete with playboy bunnies and asshole bouncers! Apparently you can play as a Hef-like playboy. You get a mansion and fill it with playmates, giving them all kinds of jobs and throw parties and all sorts of craziness ensues. Looked good and interesting. Definitely unique.
This is sort of an RTS/Sim hybrid that felt a lot like Dungeon Keeper 2. You are an evil mastermind who has to build a lair, populate it with thugs and train your henchmen for various jobs and roles. You complete diabolical missions in the world which gain you infamy and notoriety and eventually this will cause heroes to attack your lair to try and beat you down. You can lay all sorts of traps for the do-gooders and evetually capture, torture, brainwash and kill them with all sorts of interesting side effects. I have to say that this game is incredibly detailed and well done. The AI and systems that interact with each other are a wonder to behold. Another of my E3 favorites.
Guild Wars
This is billed as a "competitive team-based pvp focused MMORPG". It is unique in that it will not require a monthly fee. We played in a tournament of 4 on 4, winning 32 MB USB memory sticks with the game client on them. The graphics are really nice and I like how all characters are dual-classed, giving the game a nice feel of variety. We had a lot of fun beating our enemies down and I look forward to probably buying this game.
This game is Xbox only but one of the producers says they may eventually put it out on PC and if they do, I will buy it. It had an incredible graphics engine, rivaling that of Doom 3 and maybe even Half Life 2. You play as Riddick from Pitch Black and the new movie of the same name as the game. The characters are VERY detailed and the lighting engine is cutting edge, giving it a totally realistic look.
Dark Age of Camelot: New Frontiers
I briefly watched people play this new add-on for DAOC. Looked neat, with new frontier zones and siege equipment. Still DAOC though so I won't play it.
Doom3
All they had at E3 was a big, space marine-looking kiosk with flat panel monitors showing gameplay and trailers. Lame.
World of Warcraft
Naturally this game looked and felt awesome. There were a TON of game stations all over where you could try this out, although they did monitor playtime, so I couldn't crack out on it all day. I briefly played as an Undead Mage. The graphics were awesome and the game was structured very nicely for the new player. I definitely still look forward to this one. Unfortunately I did not ask the detailed questions about PvP that I wanted to. I think I was still in overload mode and very forgetful of my underlying goals.
Starcraft Ghost
This game looked and played sweet. I love the idea of playing in a 3D Starcraft universe. Unfortunately this game will be console systems only!!! I played it on Xbox and it was nice, but I just can't get used to playing shooters with a gamepad. It's sad.
Praetor
This is the next MMORPG by Mythic Entertainment, the same guys who do Dark Age of Camelot. The setting is a parallel world far in the future in which the Roman Empire never fell. Mythic had a separate room where they gave showings of a trailer for it. Looked nice... sort of Blade Runner meets Ancient Rome. I don't trust Mythic though. They will prolly screw it up. PvP will be limited to consensual combat in a gladiatorial setting.
The Matrix Online
Looked lame.
That's pretty much it. There were a bunch of other games I saw and/or played but did not leave enough of an impression to write about. Also, someone asked me to see about new Star Trek games. Not gonna happen. Apparently Activision terminated their 10 year license agreement with Viacom after only 5 years. They cited poor performance of the franchise, with the latest movies and TV shows getting bad reviews. Not really surprising. We may be seeing the death of Star Trek finally. Also, there were a few games I did not get to see because I did not plan well enough: GTA: San Andreas, Star Wars Battlefront, Middle Earth Online and Vampire: Bloodlines which uses the Half Life 2 engine and is done by a different team than the first Vampire game, Troika games, who also did Dungeons and Dragons: The Temple of Elemental Evil, which was allegedly really good.