e3-2010 posts

So there's been a ton of coverage from E3 2010 concerning the games that were shown at the event earlier this month. But there are some things that 1Up.com discovered about some of the games at the show that have not been revealed before. We aren't taking big plot points or major new gameplay features. These are just some interesting bits of gameplay and trivia that were revealed during the show.

1Up.com's feature about those cool little bits include this one about the upcoming RTS game Company of Heroes Online, "Donkeys with rocket launchers." We can get behind that. Civilization V's producer hints that the strategy game has "a really, really awesome unit with an 'interesting' title to it. And you have to play a certain way to unlock it." And Crysis 2 will apparently have a small reward if you "use the tactical mode and scan the infected people whenever you can." Good advice.

The 2010 edition of E3 has been over for a week now but we are still recovering from checking out all of the titles that we saw at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There were also lots of games that were there we didn't get to see unfortunately. But most importantly of all were the games we know are being made but still didn't make it to the show.

E3 is unquestionably the single biggest event in the game industry but for a variety of reasons some highly anticipated PC titles were not even shown in trailer form at the event. So which games went missing? We just happened to have created a handy list of titles that we think could have made an appearance of some type at the show.

10 years ago this week, the first Deus Ex game was released by publisher Eidos. The game was by far the best title made by Ion Storm, the rock star-like Texas-based game developer that started in Dallas and then expanded to Austin. It was in the latter office that Deus Ex, under the supervision of Warren Spector, was made along with the less acclaimed sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War.

A couple of years ago, before Eidos was bought by Square Enix, the publisher announced plans for a third game in the Deus Ex series to be developed by their new Montreal-based studio. While the third game would have no direct input from Spector (who now works for Disney Interactive Studios) fans of the original have been hopeful that this third entry (which got it's official name Deus Ex Human Revolution earlier this year) would recall the good points of the first game in the series. At E3 2010 we got to see a hands-off but live gameplay demo of the title (the two trailers that have been released were both CGI pre-rendered movies and don't show actual gameplay).

The fact that Dungeon Siege 3 was announced just before E3 2010 started last week wasn't that much of a shock. Rumors of the fantasy action-RPG's third installment had been rumbling for some time. What was surprising what that the game would be getting both a new publisher in Square Enix and an all new developer in Obsidian Entertainment. Yep, the team that created the franchise, Gas Powered Games, is not in charge of the third installment (although Gas Powered's head man Chris Taylor is a consultant for Dungeon Siege III). Indeed Square Enix has bought the franchise outright from Gas Powered Games.

So what does this mean? Well for one thing that means Dungeon Siege III will be released for consoles as well as the PC for the first time in the franchise. However that doesn't mean PC players should be worried. Indeed after seeing a hands-off but live gameplay demo of the title behind closed doors at E3 2010 last week we thing this new installment in the series has the potential to be the best in the series.

Developer Valve has a reputation of bringing in both people and games that it likes and turning the titles into full commercial games. It did so with the Counter-Strike mod and also bought both the team and the concept of the team's game Narbacular Drop that eventually formed the basis of the first Portal game. That title, a small two-hour game that was released in 2007 in Valve's Orange Box collection, combined innovative gameplay with humor. That was enough for Portal to become a cult hit and win a ton of :Game of the Year" awards.

So what do you do next with such a concept? If you are Valve you not only make a more fully fleshed out sequel in Portal 2 but you also bring in yet another amateur game team to expand on the original's portal-based gameplay. We got to see a presentation of Portal 2's gameplay at Valve's E3 2010 meeting room. It was the only game we saw at E3 that wasn't an example of live gameplay but we did get some commentary on what we were seeing from Valve's Erik Johnson.

id Software is known for taking its time on making their games. With the exception of their free-to-play shooter Quake Live the Dallas-based developer hasn't released a game made on their own since Doom III way back in 2004 (although they have helped with the making of games like Quake IV, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Wolfenstein that were primarily made at other developers). In 2007 id announced Rage, their first all-original game since the first Quake game in 1996. It's been a fairly slow development process for the post-apocalypse themed first person shooter since then; id only began to really give details on the game last August at QuakeCon.

Big Download got to see that live demo at QuakeCon last year but at E3 2010 last week the developer showed us some more live (but hands-off) gameplay at Bethesda Softworks' booth (running on an Xbox 360 dev kit but it's still coming out for the PC). Much of the demo was pretty similar to what we saw at QuakeCon but there were some new bits that were revealed.

When you get to the fourth game in a series, sometimes you have to do some reinvention to the franchise to keep things fresh for new players. At the same time you also want to keep enough of what made the first three games in the series work to keep fans of those titles interested as well. That's the situation that developer Volition and publisher THQ are encountering with Red Faction: Armageddon. The sci-fi shooter series had a good game with the last entry, Red Faction: Guerrilla, but for some reason it wasn't the big sales hit that either developer or publisher were expecting.

So for the fourth entry the development team decided to go back to basics, in a way, by setting the game underground on Mars as it was during the first Red Faction game. And yes the Geo Mod engine is also back again for lots of property destruction. But what new elements are in Red Faction: Armageddon? At E3 2010 we got to see a live but hands-off demo of the game to find out for ourselves.

If there's one big trend in the game line up shown at E3 2010 last week, it's in the shooter genre. There were a ton of games in the first person and third person shooter category at the show this year. Thankfully most of them have hooks that make them stand out from the typical mindless gameplay design crowd.

One of those games that most definitely is different is F.E.A.R. 3. The latest game in the shooter series is the only one we saw that is supposed to scare you out of your pants. The first two games in the series were developed by Monolith but this year's edition is being made by Day 1 Studios (MechAssault, Fracture) with some input from Monolith. At the show we got to see a hands-off but live demo of the game in action at the exhibit hall of the game's publisher Warner Bros. Interactive.

For some odd reason some game publishers like to have a financial analyst conference call during E3 2010. One of the companies that did so was THQ. During its conference call publisher execs managed to confirm a sequel to one of their best selling 2010 titles.

That title is Darksiders, the third person action game from THQ's Vigil Games division. The sequel, Darksiders 2, has already been greenlighted for production, according to a THQ exec, but that the game won't be showing up until 2012. PC owners will get their port of the original Darksiders this September.

One of the most anticipated adventure games in recent years has been Gray Matter, which features the promised return to the genre of Jane Jensen, the creator of the classic Gabriel Knight series. The game has suffered through many delays since it was first announced including switching developers in mid-stream.

Now our sister site Joystiq, in a report from last week's E3 2010, states that Gray Matter's publisher dtp Entertainment has now put its foot down and declared that Gray Matter is slated for a release sometime this October. Considering the number of times this game has had its release date pushed back, this goes under the "We will believe it when we see it" category.