E3 2007 - Final Word

By Vermouth

Now that E3 is no longer with us it’s time to take a look at the winners and losers from the game industry’s big event. This was a newly crafted E3 which had a very different flavor than in previous years. No longer was this a gigantic sensory orgy in the way of years past, but rather a big huge level industry event with a laundry list of games on display. This had an upside and a downside. The upside was it was much more focused on promoting games than in years past. In the press conferences there were only a handful of games that were not ostensibly 2007 games. Of course, the show had a handful of big winners who improved themselves considerably and some that were not as impressive.

The big winners were:

Electronic Arts. These guys go straight to the head of the line; furthermore they’re the only publisher to hit the nail on the head. EA had a tremendous showing of games which far outstripped the collection of awesome I saw from any other publisher. They had Burnout Paradise which is just looking and sounding crazy. You can tell instantly looking at it that this is a game that was really next-gen with big open cities that are dozens of square kilometers in size. In addition they’re going to have a really amazing online feature set that will let you have your friends racing with you without ever seeing a lobby or extensive menu system. They’re keeping a lot of the features from the prior games but one of the additions that’s really cool is that as long as the vehicle keeps 4 wheels there isn’t a reset on your car and it gets bumpier as you’ve broken it up.

Crysis is also a Game of the Show contender. The graphics are of course as beautiful as you can imagine. It totally laps Gears of War in terms of the bar for graphical fidelity. But this game is more than just a pretty face. In addition to the standard accoutrement of guns in a wide open world ala Far Cry, it also has a great range of new emergent possibilities with super powers such as speed and strength which will allow you to do things to jump atop a helicopter, turn strength on and toss the pilot out of the chopper and then commandeer it yourself.

Finally Rockband made me look and go Wow Guitar Hero is fucked. Between the added depth of having three different gameplay types and what they’re promising for downloadable content, it just excites me incredibly. Perhaps the most exciting element to me is that you’ll be able to grab entire albums through the partnership of MTV.

Moving away from Electronic Arts, a couple of great shooters and a fabulous role-playing games showed up at the show. Activision’s Call of Duty 4 and Ubisoft’s Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway. Call of Duty 4 is an amazing looking game. Watching the game, it’s clear that we have a really next-generation rollercoaster ride of a shooter. Seeing some of the battles they seem as intense as anything. Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway comes at a shooter from a different angle and approaches it in a more tactical and realistic way. It does a great job of making you feel a more realistic representation of being a GI in the Second World War.

Finally Mass Effect is possibly my favorite game coming in 2007. The graphics look really good but the new approaches to the choices in this game really elevate it. Hearing about how the choices you make will shut doors in the plot really excites me. In other words if you hurt someone early in the game, that’s going to come back to haunt you later on. Furthermore the dialogue is not going to be just a script you can read, but rather it will focus on the emotional response and it will play what part of the script you are on. Toss this into a shooter based action-role playing game I’m ready to bite.

This being the first year for the new E3 it had some real downsides. It is no longer the big, giant orgy of lights, sound and booth babes that it had been in years past and didn’t have as much forward looking content. However as a guy sitting at home I feel like I’ve had more access to game developers through the press about games that are coming up in the next few months. There were so many games coming this year that I know I’ve neglected a few.