E3 2012 Thoughts

Yes, my body was ready. But were my expectations? Let's find out.

Frankly, I watched Microsoft and Electronic Art's conferences for about a third,Ubisoft about halfway through, Nintendo fully and missed out on Sony because of the time zones. All of the companies had an average towards pretty good running times, but each of them had their shares of weaknesses as well. Except for one, really.

And by that, I mean Ubisoft. They were seriously strong this time, as not only do they have strong multiplatform titles coming up such as Assassin's Creed III and Rayman Legends, they bombarded especially the Wii U with great looking games, Zombi U being the obvious reason.

But their real surprise was Watch Dogs, a new IP that delivered on completely impressing us with it's insane graphics(such as the rain), it's mechanics of collecting information and hacking your way through, combined with qualified looking controls that seems to be a mix between Grand Theft Auto and your average third person shooter.

They had so much to show that it rivaled Nintendo's developers on the scale of the amount of titles being in development. Speaking of which, my favorite company had a solid delivery message for their products, and surprisingly, they divided their message between a pre-E3 Nintendo Direct, the actual conference for it's new console and another one dedicated for the 3DS. Yes, there was also a developer discussion going on, but that has been traditional for years.

Wii U's potential was arguably shown the best with Nintendo Land, a sort of mini game collection representing various Nintendo franchises, and reminded me the most of Wii Play vaguely. The concept of the GamePad user(which is the new controller) having a different screen for the same game while others do not have this advantage creates a ton of opportunities regarding innovating and conveniently using fluent gameplay.

Although both the Wii U and 3DS are strongly presented as we look at the future, the biggest problem, for many of us, is that a killer app was missing. You know, the ones that overwhelm us so much as we discover them, that our excitement almost instantly turns into hyping it up towards others. Such as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess from E3 2004, or Super Smash Bros. Brawl from E3 2006.

It doesn't mean that I expected a new title for these two franchises, but I use them as an example for delivering happy crowds. Nintendo's E3 2012 almost nailed it, but in the end, they played it too safe regarding software titles and instead, took a different approach towards scheduling more third party support, presenting a philosophical explanation for their products and explaining why Wii U will make together, better.

So, in a nutshell, this year's E3 was pretty good, for all of the companies, but there was a huge lack of original titles or even surprises. I guess our expectations were too high. It's my favorite moment during E3's when good surprises are revealed. Aside from Watch Dogs, this did not happen this year.

Perhaps the Big Three kept their trump cards and relaxed instead. 2013 should prove to be interesting once again anyhow when speaking of the next generation.