E3 2011 Message Board older than one year ago

It sounds like the relatively austere Brothers In Arms series is moving away from its more realistic beginnings into a realm of CRAZY ACTION, with today’s announcement from Ubisoft: “Set in World War II, Brothers in Arms Furious 4 is a brutal first person shooter that offers an exciting campaign mode playable with up to four players in co-op, as well as an extensive competitive multiplayer mode. The story follows four fierce and fearless warriors tracking the Führer himself. As one of the Furious 4, players will use special weaponry and unexpected combat abilities to fight the greatest threat the world has ever faced: an experimental Nazi army conceived in secret by the Third Reich.” Experimental Nazi army? Could it have a… Robo-Hitler? Quite possibly, judging by the zany mutilation-happy bar-brawl in this CG trailer.

The game is being developed by Gearbox and released in the “first half” of 2012.(more…)

Far Cry 3 has been confirmed for release in 2012. The game returns to the original Far Cry’s jungle island setting, but nevertheless producer Dan Hay promises “something new and unexpected” for the game. Ubisoft says: “With Far Cry 3, players step into the shoes of Jason Brody, a man alone at the edge of the world, stranded on a mysterious tropical island. In this savage paradise, where lawlessness and violence are the only sure thing, players dictate how the story unfolds, from the battles they choose to fight to the allies or enemies they make along the way. As Jason Brody, players will slash, sneak and shoot their way across the island in a world that has lost all sense of morality.”

JASON BRODY. He sounds like a man with nothing to lose. Or maybe someone I went to school with. Either way, there should be more on the Far Cry website any time now.

#e32011 Kotaku is ears-deep in French accents at the Los Angeles Theater, where publisher Ubisoft will be talking about its upcoming slate, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Driver: San Francisco, Assassin's Creed: Revelations and much much more. What else can we expect from Ubisoft at E3 2011? More »

The new Need For Speed, The Run, game looks quite unusual: a mix of the expected chase-driven races with some scripted stuff, and some getting out of the car and running about. Hmm! Pretty intense, though, it might actually be worth keeping an eye on. (Says me, who pretty much gets bored of NFS games after a few minutes these days.) That seems like it something that should have happened earlier – dragging more traditional action events into racing games. And we’re overdue a truly linear kinda racing game in the manner that FPS games are linear, right? Trailer below, there.(more…)

It’s below, in case you missed it. It shows off one of the dungeons, some of the scale of the environments, mammoths, and of course the dragon vs giant bit.

It’s worth watching this one.(more…)

Electronic Arts announced today that upcoming shooter Battlefield 3 will be released on October 25. Those who can't wait that long, know that a "multiplatform beta" will kick off a little sooner, in September. More »

This ludicrously high-gloss CGI intro cinematic for Bioware’s Star Wars MMO goes to great lengths to stress that is very much a Star Wars game, despite the an even longer, long time ago era it’s set in. It’s like a Greatest Hits of Star Wars, but starring dudes you don’t recognise. It’s also a chance to admire the essential archetypes in the game, with the Han Solo type throwing all metaphor to the wind and actually being a bloody cowboy here. Jolly impressive stuff, but obviously it tells us Wookie-squat about what the game actually plays like. Forunately, we have a video for that too…

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Anxious to see how your Xbox 360's UI will transform this fall? We've got some new images for you to flip through -- you can't gesture through our gallery, but you can click through. That's kinda the same thing, right? Right?

Anxious to see how your Xbox 360's UI will transform this fall? We've got some new images for you to flip through -- you can't gesture through our gallery, but you can click through. That's kinda the same thing, right? Right?

#e32011 Console makers aren't the only ones giving presentations during the week of E3. Publishers are, too, and Electronic Arts fires first with its news conference, and RPGs should figure prominently, with Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic all coming in the next year. Oh yeah, and there's a game called Battlefield 3 which may interest some of you. More »

#e32011 Set to debut any minute now at EA's E3 2011 press conference, the developer of Ratchet & Clank and the Resistance games is taking their next big thing multiplatform, and this is it. This is Overstrike. More »

Battlefield 3 will open hostilities on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on October 25. EA also announced today that the game's beta will launch in September, remember that you get a VIP pass into that if you picked up last year's Medal of Honor.

Xbox Live will allow gamers to save their game saves to the cloud, so they can download them and resume playing their games on other online-connected Xboxes, Microsoft announced today. That feature will match the cloud-save option already offered on the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Plus service. More »

The trailers just keep on coming. The footage from E3 showed some awesome cutscene-to-action moments. Bioware are getting good at that stuff.

Go watch as Mass Effect 3 rocks out a bit. \m/(more…)

Rather than taking a queue from Hothead Games and going with a bacon-themed title, Microsoft instead chose to name its new Xbox Live notification tool "Beacons." So close! General manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten detailed the new service in a post-E3 conference letter to the gaming press, explaining that the service will act as an alert system, pinging users with information about friends playing/watching a specific piece of content.

Confused? We are too. From what we can decipher in the brief blurb provided, it's essentially a more direct way of knowing who's playing what and being able to tell when they're playing it. A more serious way of stalking your XBL friends list, if you will. We'll be sure to grill Microsoft about Beacons at our first chance.

Were you underwhelmed by Microsoft's Kinect-heavy press conference and the notable absence of any long-overdue Xbox Live infrastructure improvements? So were we!

Which is why the legitimately exciting post-conference announcement of "Cloud Storage for Game Saves and Live Profiles" is all the more confusing. Instead of a splashy stage presentation, the reveal was buried in a recap email from Xbox's Marc Whitten. "We are making it easier for you to sign into your Xbox Live account from any console at any time to access your game saves and full profile, including items such as Microsoft Points to make purchases, Achievements and friends," the email reads. "C loud storage will allow you to enjoy the same great Xbox Live gaming experience even when you're not in your own living room by giving you the option to store your 'game saves' securely in the Xbox Live cloud instead of on a portable memory unit or your console's hard drive."

That means no more clumsy "gamertag recovery" which we're pretty excited about. We have all sorts of other questions about this service - Is it for Gold members only? Does it save revisions of your save files or just one? Is there a limited number of console activations? Can multiple consoles be signed in at once? Is there a size limit? - and we'll try to get them answered as quickly as we can.
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Right, so it looks like we have some sort of live blogging success. If you’d like to follow the events taking place at the EA conference – or at least the things I’m being distracted by – click below. If the page doesn’t load first time, hit refresh. That tends to get it working. And if you’re running Ad Block, turn it off you bastard.

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If only our Microsoft press conference Bingo card could have been written this morning! The games list leaked earlier this morning was right on the money, revealing all of the presentation's potentially huge surprises.

• Halo 4
• Kinect Sports Season Two
• Dance Central 2
• Kinect Fun Labs
• Kinect Disneyland Adventures
• Forza Motorsports 4 coming out October 11
• Minecraft coming to Xbox 360
• Fable: The Journey
• Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
• UFC Fights
• Ryse
• Xbox Live to add streaming television
• New Kinect-based dashboard
• Ghost Recon, EA Sports titles and Mass Effect 3 getting Kinect support

Thoughts about the first of the Big Three's press conferences? Sound off in the comments!

Man, I guess some of you lot saw that on the E3 livestream, but that was fairly awesome. The player fighting with a giant, which was then carried off and dropped to Earth by a Dragon. Spectacular. Other stuff: factions/guild returning, “three hundred hours” of game.

Also: mammoths! Sorry, I am nerding pretty heavily over here. Also scheduling some announcements for later. One of them is bananas (about 11:30 tonight UK time.)

#e32011 A teaser trailer for Halo 4 concluded Microsoft's E3 news conference today. In it, the series' longtime hero, Master Chief, awakens from cryonic sleep to the voice of Cortana, calling him by his name. He then grabs Cortana and flees the wreckage a ship hurtling toward some sort of portal. More »

At Microsoft's E3 2011 keynote today at the Galen Center, Halo 4 was officially announced -- surprise! Master Chief and Cortana are back (kicking off a new trilogy, apparently), the brief teaser trailer showed. 343 Industries is at the reigns with a Holiday 2012 launch date proposed.

We hope you've been brushing up on your flyest dance moves, because you are about to bust them out once again. Harmonix announced Dance Central 2 during Microsoft's E3 press conference, giving you a new catalog of tunes to flail to. There's new features, including voice recognition, a campaign mode, a renovated Break it Down mode and -- best of all -- two-player simultaneous dancing.

At Microsoft's E3 2011 keynote today at the Galen Center, Halo 4 was officially announced -- surprise!

#watchthis As was rumored, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will support Kinect, as publisher Ubisoft demonstrated today at the Xbox 360's E3 news conference. More »

#kinect Do you like gladiators? Do you want to fight through the fall of Rome? Ryse may be your game. The Kinect-controlled game from the makers of the Crysis first-person games revealed Ryse today at Microsoft's big Xbox press conference. More »

Widely expected, Microsoft will publish an HD remake of the original Halo on Nov. 15. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary will feature "seven of the greatest multiplayer maps of all time," in addition to "the campaign of the decade remade and remastered. More »

The next episode of Fable will support Kinect when it releases in 2012. A demonstration of Fable: The Journey at Microsoft's E3 news conference showed players in a first-person mode, driving a carriage and attacking foes with magic, using different gestures for each spell. More »

During it's E3 press conference, Microsoft confirmed Disneyland Adventures. The Kinect-powered experience allows players to virtually tour the theme park and participate several mini-games. An onstage demo showed off games in which children flew through several Disney worlds, including Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. All of the mini-games appear essentially the same, with players collecting coins, similar to many of the games in Kinect Adventures.

We should note that none of the mini-games presented don't actually recreate any of the real Disneyland rides, which seems ... kind of weird. The game is set to release this holiday.

Crytek has formally announced Ryse, a first-person action game that's currently under development at Crytek. The trailer, which aired during Microsoft's E3 press conference, showed a massive Roman battle in which the player duels an invading soldier using gesture-based attacks. Swing (or throw!) a sword with one hand, block attacks with the other, and kick with -- you know, your foot. The traditional kicking appendage.

As expected, Microsoft has announced a remake for Halo: Combat Evolved to celebrate the series' 10th anniversary. The revamped version of the original Xbox launch title will deploy on November 15, 2011, boasting assassinations, online co-op and a fully remastered campaign.