So without further ado, here is my list of the top five worst things at E3.

5. Microsoft closes their stellar show with…Crackdown?

Crackdown? Really? The last thing you show should be a killer app, a jaw dropping moment taking everyone by surprise in a good way. Sure, the original game sold incredibly well—it came with the Halo 3  beta. But does nobody remember that Crackdown  was really just a slightly better than average game with some good ideas, an utterly forgettable story, and useless driving? Why on earth is anyone even remotely excited about a third (!) game in this series?

4. Sony messes up a good thing with 10 minutes of Powers

For me, Sony absolutely destroyed at E3 2013. As someone who was vehemently against the policies being implemented by Microsoft for the Xbox One, Sony’s verbal smackdown was a thing of beauty. Last year was less about the games—those were always coming—and more about whether or not I would even bother gaming. Being able to buy, sell, trade, rent, and loan games was incredibly important and Sony nailed it.

So this year, what does Sony do to follow up? They let Brian Michael Bendis come out and talk about the show Powers. For 10 minutes. And what’s worse is that they had nothing to show beyond some incredibly uninspired concept art for the show. Yep, that whole momentum killing segment was for nothing except to say Powers  was greenlit and a couple of drawings.

3. The Director of Nintendo’s Treehouse

The only reason why I caught this is because a friend who likes Nintendo was crashing at my house during E3 and wanted to watch it. I can’t speak to the rest of the feed, but that first 30 minutes was a train wreck. So many times the host would intro a segment only to have the camera linger on him for way more time than was comfortable; for him or the viewer. This is probably one of the very good reasons why Nintendo stopped doing press conferences.

No game coming out has me nearly as excited as Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Too bad it, like many of my other most anticipated titles, aren’t coming out until 2015 (at the earliest).

2. 2015 is going to be awesome!

The Order: 1886, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Batman: Arkham Knight, Quantum Break, Dying Light, Mad Max, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End; yep, next year is looking like a great time to own both consoles. I’ll just be over here playing Titanfall  for the next year.

1. EA’s press conference.

Yes, I’ve written about this already, and anyone that knows me personally knows how I felt about EA’s show, but man, it was really, really terrible. Like the worst. It was so ill conceived and so pointless that it made Mr. Caffeine look brilliant in retrospect.

First of all, they showed up with half a show. Microsoft had already shown off Dragon Age: Inquisition  so all EA really had was their sports games. As the antithesis of a “sports fan,” this long, tedious part of their shows is always my least favorite portion, but I can expect it because they usually have fun games that I am interested in to showcase.

Not this year. Nope.

Instead, we get 30 or so minutes of “Please be excited.” Target footage for Star Wars: Battlefront, a confirmation that Bioware is working on a new Mass Effect. Which, EA, is like confirming that water is still wet. Then we received an even bigger tease with Bioware saying “We’re working on something new, but we can’t tell you about it.”

Wait, what? Why are you even here?

And THEN, we got a look at “prototype gameplay” for Mirror’s Edge. But don’t worry fans, we are keeping Faith’s colors. Awesome.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Peter Moore would have come out and said “The dog ate all of our gameplay.”

Go home, EA, you’re not even drunk.

The post The Top Five Worst Things of E3 2014 appeared first on SpawnFirst.

The first demo I saw was Assassin’s Creed: Unity which was the very same scenario we saw during Ubisoft’s press conference. I say “scenario” because while the set up, path and beats were the same, it was most certainly a live demo because the developer playing the game made mistakes; it definitely had those live demo moments where something didn’t go as well as planned. I make this clarification in order to eliminate any thoughts of “bullshots” and so forth. It was live and it was incredibly stunning.

Look at the detail in the fabric and the way light reflects off its every curve. Yummy.

Lighting works wonders in this game and it goes a long way to show how amazing this game looks. No longer having that sheen that seems to come with video games of last gen, fabric looks fantastic. Incredibly detailed down to the texture and movement, light reacts realistically depending on the source. Sunlight washes the colors out a bit and lower light tends to give a deeper hue.

Movement looks much more fluid as well, and climbing and landing animations look to have a realistic heft to them. Also, it seems that the character no longer has to be perfectly lined up for parkour runs up walls. You can approach from an angle and realistically reach the next foot or handhold.

Then there are the crowds. Oh man, those crowds. According to Ubisoft, up to 5,000 AI-driven characters can and will appear on screen. Walking through them shows all of those aforementioned, amazing lighting effects on each and every one of them.

The details in the world are stunning as well. Every wall, every rock, every item has a grain and grit to it. Streets looked damp from rain, puddles reflected the open city skies. It’s just jaw dropping to witness.

So many sources of light and details to soak up in this picture. The broken glass behind the player’s head wasn’t cracked like that until a bullet punctured it.

Next up was Massive Entertainment’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, which looked so good it made everything from Assassin’s Creed look unfinished.

I won’t waste time reiterating what we have all seen, but I will say that nothing does this game the justice of seeing on an enormous, full HD screen. Once again, the use of light is staggering here; coupled with textures and animations it makes The Division the absolute most photo-realistic game I’ve ever seen.

For anyone who thinks these new consoles aren’t leaps and bounds better than what we just came off of, all I can say is: just wait. The future is coming and it’s going to be here sooner than you think.

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