The best of E3 2013: this is the future of gaming

If you remember one thing from E3 2012, it’s probably the neck stabbing.

Over three days, attendees watched game after game showcase increasingly creative methods of murder. Press events were so bloody that Gameological began publishing an “E3 Murder Report,” detailing the body count of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo’s events. “Between Microsoft, Sony, EA and Ubisoft’s shows on Monday,” wrote Fred Dutton of Eurogamer, “we counted roughly 78 throatstabs, 63 snapped vertebrae, 57 exploded heads, 27 shattered knee caps, a brace of disembowelings and, courtesy of Far Cry 3, a couple of immolated jungle cats.” Even fans of shooters or other combat games found themselves unsettled by the relentless catalog of killing. Our own “Neck Stabs of E3 2012” is tough to watch a year later.

E3 is loud. Whether you’re in a press conference or on the show floor, the audiovisual spectacle is overwhelming. You can barely hear the games you’re playing, let alone enjoy them. Announcements at press conferences are drowned out in noise — music, laughter, cheers, and oh so many hoots and hollers.

Horizon was different. Billed as “an alternative press conference showcasing a lineup of incredibly beautiful games,” the event was tucked away in the basement of the Museum of Contemporary Art, far away from the bright lights and booming bass of the Los Angeles Convention Center. There, a number of developers spent about an hour talking about their games, and what it was about them that made them so excited. It was a chance for smaller studios — and in some cases one-man teams — to step into the spotlight. And it was incredibly refreshing.

This November, the Xbox 360 will be eight years old. The PlayStation 3 will be seven. At the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo, we finally got acquainted with their successors. The new Xbox One and PlayStation 4 represent a new generation of consoles, the fabled “next generation,” and with them comes the tantalizing possibility of “next-gen” games. Why else would we spend upwards of $399 on a new game console?

What does a next-gen game look like, though? What does “next-gen” even mean? Going into E3 2013, we had no idea what to expect. So on Monday morning, we made it our mission to answer this question. We tracked down the most advanced games, watched dozens of demonstrations, interviewed their developers, and occasionally even got to play. Slowly, over the course of the week, patterns began to emerge.

There are plenty of big shooters coming to the PlayStation 4, from Destiny to Killzone: Shadow Fall. These games emphasize massive, open worlds, social connectivity, and incredibly detailed high-definition graphics. Mercenary Kings, an upcoming PS4 and Steam title from Tribute Games, goes a different route. It’s a title that feels like the Metal Slug game that time forgot — a 2D shooter for a next-gen console.

Mercenary Kings is a run-and-gun shooter in the vein of Contra and Metal Slug. You play as a soldier of some sort, and you take on missions that mainly involving killing lots of dudes with really big guns. The gameplay is reminiscent of the classics, with simple platforming and an emphasis on action. But it also feels relatively open, letting you explore levels instead of simply moving from left to right. In the demo I played, the controls felt tight and the weapons satisfyingly powerful.

I played a hundred new huge-budget video games this week, but the only one that really made sense to me was a cellphone and Vita game called Rymdkapsel.

Like many tower-defense games the primary objective of Rymdkapsel is to grow and defend your population. But when designer Martin Jonasson set out to make a viable StarCraft for mobile, he discovered that StarCraft probably isn’t something you’d want to play on your phone, and its most memorable component would probably be how much it crashed your OS. So he boiled it down, reducing and reducing until he came up with the most efficiently brilliant game I’ve ever played on mobile.

Nintendo’s booth at E3 contained nothing unexpected. There was a new Donkey Kong Country, Mario Kart, and 3D Super Mario, and a version of Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS that we weren’t allowed to play. Meanwhile, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is getting a sequel, and Wind Waker is getting a remake. The lack of surprises is in no way surprising; people buy Nintendo consoles and handhelds to play Nintendo games.

But with each successive generation, the company is losing any semblance of a supporting cast. The NES and SNES each had a huge range of amazing third-party games to complement the likes of Mario and Metroid, but since the Nintendo 64 those games have slowly been disappearing. With the Wii U, they’re practically nonexistent. As huge publishers like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft pull back support for Nintendo’s latest home console, the question is whether Mario alone is enough to keep the platform alive.

Nothing says “welcome to the most important trade show in the world” like a horde of zombies screaming and attacking you from behind a chain-link fence only to get bored and go back to gnawing on a blown-apart torso. If you survive this living diorama from Dead Rising 3 at the foyer of the South Hall, you’re left to explore the fantastic shitshow that is E3: It’s got all the giddy neon chaos of Blade Runner wrapped in the human density of a Martian Coachella, and navigating the floor requires a fundamental shift in experiential awareness.

All senses redline as you’re assaulted by interactive sculptures from some of the most creative and profitable minds at work today, and it is quite literally a war zone where mindshare is the ultimate bounty among competitors. It’s crucial that publishers get into the brains of these notoriously ADHD users, so production budgets are suitably astronomical and regularly run into the millions of dollars. These meta-consumers (representatives of Walmart, Gamestop, and Best Buy) need to be impressed enough by the towering exhibitions to buy and distribute the games to the masses in 2014.

Even as the Oculus Rift has gotten tremendous attention from the gaming world (among other things, Epic announced a partnership with it for Unreal Engine 4), designing a good game for it has proved difficult. Virtual reality throws a wrench in well-established genres like the first-person shooter, turning something as simple as aiming into a conundrum. Oculus itself has suggested things like exploration games, but EVE Online studio CCP thinks it’s found another answer: send everyone to space.

At E3, I got a chance to try EVR, a dogfighting game built to take advantage of the Rift’s capabilities. After strapping on the headset, you’ll find yourself inside a tiny spacecraft’s cockpit, virtual body manning the controls. The game pits two teams of three against each other in roughly five-minute battles, using a combination of gamepad and head controls. You’ll move with a stick and fire fixed lasers with the right trigger, but it’s the left trigger that’s really fun: hold it down and look at another ship, and a missile will lock onto it and fire when you release.

With titles like Quantum Break and the upcoming Halo series, the convergence of gaming and narrative storytelling has become an intense focal point — but the men behind Indiana Jones and Star Wars think gaming will never be able to provide the same type of rich experience traditional storytelling does.

Speaking Wednesday at a panel at the University of Southern California — joined by Microsoft’s Don Mattrick — George Lucas and Steven Spielberg argued that introducing the concept of interactivity fundamentally changes the experience. “They’re always going to be different,” Lucas said when asked if movies and games were going to become more similar. “They’re never going to be the same.”

In the upcoming video game Watch Dogs, you play Aiden Pierce, a rogue hacker in a seemingly dystopian future Chicago — a city where every piece of technology is controlled by a supercomputer, where every citizen is monitored by a citywide operating system. It’s a surveillance state which wormed its way into place by providing Wi-Fi as a basic human right, and where the government claims it can use surveillance to stop crime before it happens.

Ubisoft announced the game nearly a year ago, when its ideas seemed plausible but perhaps slightly far-fetched. But in light of PRISM, the US government’s alleged internet surveillance program, Ubisoft developers are starting to look practically prescient. “It’s like reality is catching up to the game,” Watch Dogs lead game designer Danny Belanger tells The Verge.

“Do you have any ‘PlayStation Eye’ games upstairs?”

“PlayStation what?”

“Absolutely nothing compares to the sheer scale and scope of Battlefield 4,” touts the game’s official website. “Your actions physically change the battlefield in real-time, providing interactive game environments that react to your every move.” If only that were the case.

At E3 2013, Electronic Arts made me a believer, with a stunning gameplay demo that had 64 players duking it out over downtown Shanghai at 60 frames per second. The soldiers moved as a cohesive unit, by land, air, and sea, blasting their way through foes, barricades, and buildings alike with rifles, boats, helicopters, and tanks. With little cover out in the open, a squad made its way through an underground mall, and took down a support pillar to send part of the building — and an enemy tank — crashing down. It looked as compelling as a single-player story experience, but with real people making it happen.

Most AAA games try to be like movies to some extent, but Finnish studio Remedy has done it better than most. Max Payne was a masterful John Woo-styled noir title, and Alan Wake drew from the tradition of Stephen King horror, each incorporating fragments of novels, comic books, TV shows, or radio dramas. Now, the team is taking on science fiction with Quantum Break, an ambitious cross-media project. As the first details are revealed, the game promises a lot — but every answer raises a new question.

The first hints of Quantum Break were enigmatic and intriguing: a live-action TV series and a high-production video game that would somehow influence each other. In essence, that’s exactly what Remedy is trying to do. Quantum Break will come bundled with a corresponding “season” of television. As you watch the show, you’ll find clues and information that will help you play the game. As you play the game, the choices you make will create a personalized “director’s cut” of the show, and so on. It’s not a completely new idea: Defiance, another TV series, tied certain plot points to a corresponding game, but everyone ended up seeing the same show. That apparently won’t be the case in Quantum Break.

The first version of Kinect promised to completely change how we play games. Instead of sitting on our couch with a controller, we’d be running, dancing, throwing, and shouting our way through level after level. The new version of Kinect, the one that will ship with every Xbox One console in November, initially seemed like more of the same: more data, more accuracy, to the same end. But as we talk to game developers at E3 2013, it’s quickly becoming clear that the next generation of motion gaming isn’t about making us stand in front of our TVs and play. It’s about watching us play, as we’ve always played, and reacting in kind.

Take Ryse: Son of Rome, for instance. The game is played with your controller — you don’t use your arm to swing your sword, or pull an arrow out of your eye. Instead, you shout “archers!” to summon some medieval aerial support, and beckon your men forward with your arm. You do all this from your couch: every part of Ryse works with your controller, parts of it are just better with Kinect.

First you put on the shoes. They’re Converse knockoffs, and you don’t even like Converse to begin with, but you don’t care because they’re special shoes. There’s a plastic plate on the bottom, which lets you skid across the floor like a bowler. You walk across the floor carefully to the harness. It’s demeaning, with a strap that threads under your groin and gives you the full-on diaper feel / look. The harness has structure to it. It all means something. And then you swing open the hatch, and step onto the Virtuix Omni. Try not to slip.

The Omni’s platform is like a grooved, friction-free, plastic crater. At waist level a ring that surrounds you, which makes you feel like you’re commanding a starship, or about to be teleported somewhere. Using the harness, you rest your weight on the ring without falling through, which frees your feet to slide across the crater’s surface. Can you let yourself go and start pretending to walk, or do you cling to your old concepts of locomotion and reality?

Before yesterday’s E3 keynotes from Sony and Microsoft, opinion was split on the very different paths each company is taking. Some found the PlayStation 4 the more appealing proposal on paper — a more powerful, developer-friendly box that seemed to have been created with gamers’ best interests in mind. Others, however, were more impressed with the Xbox One’s expansive entertainment options and Microsoft’s audacious plan to take over the living room. Now that both companies have played their hands at the biggest gaming show of the year, where do they stand?

If a quick poll around the Verge newsroom is any indication, things are looking up for Sony. The PlayStation 4, while perhaps a more conventional product, appears to beat the Xbox One in just about every area that counts.

Sony’s E3 press conference started a full six hours after Microsoft’s ended, plenty of time for everyone to digest the Xbox One’s $499 pricetag, glut of AAA games, and sparse utilization of Kinect and SmartGlass. Now Sony gets the last word, a chance to explain why the PlayStation 4 won’t repeat the mistakes of the PlayStation 3, a chance to explain why this time it has figured it out. It’s a full on console war from here on out, and this was Sony’s best chance to prove it can win it.

Of course, first it had to show what the PlayStation 4 actually is. At Sony’s initial PS4 announcement in February, the games, capabilities, and controllers for the system were heavily emphasized, but we didn’t see the box itself.

Microsoft’s Xbox One announcement last month left something off the list: video games. Yes, Microsoft was very clear that the Xbox One would dominate and absorb every facet of your living room and your entire entertainment lifestyle. But it wasn’t clear about “Halos.” Well, there’s a Halo TV show, but in our prior experience Halo was a video game, and based on unconfirmed reports, the Xbox One was a video game console.

E3 was Microsoft’s chance to correct that oversight, and boy oh boy did they ever. Outside of a few quick respites to talk about some new overall Xbox functionality, the press conference today in Los Angeles was a nonstop onslaught of games, games, games.