Apple Keynote - E3 2017
Apple's keynote begins with a teaser trailer for a brand new game (Author's Note: This teaser trailer was given to us by the reader jolou!).
*This trailer uses some of the lyrics and tune of "La Bohème" by Charles Aznavour, giving it a melancholic, old but still somewhat recent tone. It begins with a look at a fair, people are traveling in it, children are playing, parents are buying their children treats. We can see a young girl, in her early teens with her father and her elder brother navigating through the crowd.*
Let me tell of a time
The less than 20
can’t know about
*The father buys the young girl a toy dog, rubs her hair with his hand. Her brother notices something in the distance as suddenly an alarm goes off.*
Unaware in our youth of the sobering truth
Of the years that came after
*People are running away from an undetermined threat, we can some very unhuman noise, weapons firing everywhere. The girl lets her dog toy fall to the ground. The camera focuses on the toy, we can hear people fleeing with those unhuman noises stronger until we hear only them and no more people, no noise at all. Time passes, the toy is barely recognizable and his surroundings look more and more abandoned. And then we can see a real dog leg crushing the toy.
But as the camera goes back, we can see that this dog is visibly infected by some unknown disease and sounds like those unhuman noises earlier. A shadow is shown over the abandoned and destroyed by the elements fair. We can also see a lot of decomposed bodies and the ground is under 5 cm of water. The dog growls and then an arrow goes straight to its, heavily modified by the disease, head.*
Now and then I return and the memories burn
With a bittersweet aching
I climb the same old stairs
But no-one longer cares
*A very strong looking women (voiced by Jennifer Hale) in her late 40/early 50 with a French braid, tan skin, holding a bow and is walking to the dog, bends down to grab the toy, look at it fondly. She put it in her decrepit bag, looks behind her where a boy, who is smiling at her, arrives, and we can hear her say “Let's go find it”.*
And there’s no-one to greet in the streets where we walked
And the bars where we talked of a world we were making
I stand upon that hill until I drink my fill
Then leave it all behind
*We can see the two main characters of the game walking onto the streets of a long-abandoned city, with ruined buildings, abandoned cars, leaving the ruined fair behind.*
La boheme, La Boheme
Moments of joy, moments of pain
La boheme, La Boheme
Nothing can bring them back again
THE LAST GIFT
2019
Only on Apple Virtua
After the trailer ends, the crowd applauds wildly, and John Carmack is introduced, stepping out and speaking for a moment about the game we just saw. The Last Gift is a postapocalyptic adventure title taking place 40 years in the future. It's been in the works since before the Virtua's initial release, and though much of the game is done, there's still a lot of development time remaining. The game won't be playable at this year's E3, but more will be revealed in the coming months, and Apple hopes to have a full playable build ready for next year's E3. After this teaser trailer, Carmack briefly discusses Apple's accomplishments over the last year, and the success of the Virtua S, the first natively 4K home gaming console which has brought an unprecedented level of interactivity and control to the Virtua's library of games. Virtua titles are now more beautiful and immersive than ever, and perhaps no game exemplifies that more than Bayonetta 3. The next part of Apple's presentation was fully focused on this game, with Hideki Kamiya and his team presenting the game's new features. This includes the ability to control both Bayonetta and Jeanne in combat together via the new "Dual Dancing" system, in which the two can utilize slick combo moves and aid each other in battle. The two can also be controlled by two players, via local or online co-op. We also got to see more of the game's newest character, Lucrezia, an angel tasked with protecting Purgatory and killing Bayonetta. Lucrezia has a mix of sadism and nobility, much like Bayonetta herself, but unlike Bayonetta, Lucrezia doesn't revel in her sins, and instead, seeks to atone for the by shedding demonic blood. The dynamic between Bayonetta, Jeanne, and Lucrezia seems to lie at the core of this game, and while it's not revealed whether or not Lucrezia will join Bayonetta's fight, it seems likely that the two will find common ground somewhere. Bayonetta 3 is more beautiful than ever, a clear progression from the Virtua's launch title Bayonetta 2 in pretty much every way, though it has yet to be seen if the game itself will live up to all the pretty visuals and hype. We had a lot of fun when we got to play at Apple's booth on the show floor later in the week, and we got to see another of the game's major improvements: a skill tree system that allows the player to customize the way Bayonetta and Jeanne battle enemies as they progress through the game. Bayonetta 3 appears to be Apple's major holiday title this year, and it'll drop on November 20, 2017. Next up, Apple's other huge Virtua title of 2017: Sonic Ocean, the latest mainline game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series! As the title implies, Sonic Ocean sees the blue hedgehog and his friends take to the water, as they explore a series of undersea worlds on the mysterious planet of Blue Ocean. Once again, they'll be battling Eggman, who seeks to harvest the planet's ocean for its resources, while they also seek to stop Eggman from awakening an ancient undersea deity known as the Leviathan. While water levels in games have been maligned in the past, Sonic Ocean doesn't seem to fall into many of the same traps those games did. Sonic and friends move through the water with speed and swiftness, barely slowed down as they dive beneath the ocean depths... and of course, Sonic is fast enough to run on the surface of the water, meaning that some levels can be enjoyed without even breaking the sea surface. We got introduced to a pair of new characters, including an otter named Dorri and a somewhat nerdy mole named Mekkler, and both seem to have a crucial role in the game's storyline, which is sure to be an epic one. Sonic Ocean is set to be released on September 19th.
After the presentations for these two big games, we were treated to an appearance from Steve Jobs and some Apple designers and engineers, who discussed all the gaming features of the upcoming iPhone 8 line, including the iPhone 8G, an iPhone specifically tuned for mobile gaming. This isn't the rumored iPhone-like Gemini successor that's been making the rounds on various game news sites, but simply a model of the upcoming next-gen iPhone with gaming at its center, including a new gamepad accessory that's incredibly light and easy to bring with players wherever they go. The iPhone 8G's processor is also devoted to gaming, allowing it to pump out more processing power than the other iPhone models and to avoid overheating, while it's also capable of streaming both Virtua and Gemini games easier than any other iPhone model to date. We were then treated to a sizzle reel of upcoming mobile titles, with many of them exclusive to iOS, including Panzer Dragoon Gloria, a rail shooter/RPG with some gacha mechanics and a detailed storyline, Sonic Racing League, a new Sonic-based kart title, and Fallout: Silicon Valley, a spinoff Fallout title similar to the first two games in the series exclusive to iOS. Over a dozen iOS exclusive mobile titles were shown off here, and while some were clearly mobile games that can run on any old iPhone, others were console quality titles rivaling even what the Gemini can produce, many of which featured the "optimized for iPhone 8G" logo. While most E3 watchers aren't exactly thrilled about new mobile games, Jobs and his development team got plenty of people buzzing, with loud cheers numerous times during the presentation. The iPhone presentation was capped off with a pair of reveals for games coming to both iOS and Gemini: Herzog Zwei: Satellite War was the first of these games. It's a successor to the classic title Herzog Zwei, and the series' third revival, after the 2002 game and 2007's Herzog Tactics. Herzog Zwei: Satellite War is a futuristic title with vivid animations and detailed graphics, and captures the gameplay of the original perfectly, making it an excellent mobile game. The game will have a major online component, with players battling for control of a large world against the other players inhabiting it, though the game will feature a single player mode with dozens of levels. The second reveal was a teaser of a 3-D RPG, somewhat similar to Phantasy Star Online, but taking place in a fantasy world somewhat based on Feudal Japan. The world contains both samurai warriors and ancient ghosts and spirits, and the player becomes a part of that world along with millions of other players. The game's title was revealed as Spiritrealm, and the game's developer touted it as the "ultimate mobile MMORPG", promising a full console-style experience in the palm of your hand. After the reveal for these games, Jobs then promised that Apple would remain a leader in portable gaming for years to come, and took a few jabs at the Nexus and Android before leaving the stage.
The next featurette focused on Panzer Dragoon Aquarius, with the game's development team giving an update on the game's progress. The developers are still extremely hard at work, and we got to see some beautiful snapshots of the world the game takes place in, which is rife with underwater creatures and landscapes. Panzer Dragoon Aquarius will be more of a straight-up rail shooter than the previous two games in the series, taking the series back to its roots and having players fly their dragon in combat against some truly impressive creatures, with the centerpiece being a massive winged creature seemingly miles long. The visuals of Aquarius are utterly spectacular, and the game's protagonist, a young man named Pikon, seems to be the son of a sea goddess and a mortal man, who must reclaim his mother's proper place in the sea after his realm is overrun by a powerful corporation seeking to exploit the world's ocean for their own purposes. We noted some of the similarities between the plot of Sonic Ocean and Panzer Dragoon Aquarius, though the similarities between their stories seem to be coincidental. All worries of unoriginal plots aside, Panzer Dragoon Aquarius is an absolutely gorgeous game with the potential to make great use of the Virtua's motion controls while also pushing the visual limits of the Virtua-S and being a major reason to buy a 4K TV. Panzer Dragoon Aquarius is scheduled for release sometime in the first quarter of 2018. We next got a full gameplay and storyline trailer for the upcoming Angel May Cry, Capcom's Devil May Cry spinoff game featuring a female protagonist named Beatrix and a storyline featuring a vampire cult. While the game does draw some comparisons to Bayonetta, it looks to be less over the top, with a focus on shooting as opposed to melee. The game is coming to Virtua with some exclusive content, though it'll also be releasing simultaneously on the Reality and Nexus. It'll be coming out in November, a couple weeks before Bayonetta 3. John Carmack then began to speak, and launched into a short speech about how Apple wanted to close E3 with a look at the future of competitive online gaming. This game, still early in development, has been a project that Carmack feels a great kinship with, and that he assisted in the development of this next title. The game itself, which we only got to see about 30 seconds of, looks to combine a gritty, weapon-heavy Doom-esque FPS with MMORPG elements, and goes by the title of Bloodlust. Not since the Arbiter Of Sin series have we seen such an edgy looking IP from Apple or Sega, but the idea of a Doom-like MMORPG is incredibly intriguing, and we're hoping to get more news about this game soon.
-
Christina Grimmie: I'm here with Blizzard's Dustin Browder, lead developer on the upcoming New Orthodoxy, which is one of the hottest games at this year's E3. I've been playing this game for the last 20 minutes, and I'll be honest, I haven't been able to stop! It's a lot of fun, it's really intense, and Dustin, what should players know who are wondering if this game lives up to the hype?
Dustin Browder: I'm glad you asked, Christina. New Orthodoxy has been one of our big projects of the last five years, we've put a ton of time and effort into this game and now we're ready to see it get into the players' hands and we know they're gonna love it. New Orthodoxy blends elements of our great RTS titles like Warcraft and Starcraft with elements of modern shooter games, and it allows players to jump right into these huge battles that are taking place on screen. The Cloak rebellion battling it out with the Clear Mind and their army of Blank soldiers, and it all plays out in real time, there's a huge variety of weapons and things that you can place, and once the battle starts you can leap right down into the action.
Christina: I was getting serious Lyte and Darke vibes as I played. I feel like these Cloaks are a lot like the Shadow Witches, and the Blanks are like the Crusader Knights hunting them down.
Browder: Well, that wasn't quite what we were going for but some of us are fans of the show, so yeah, we did notice some of the similarities.
Christina: What I like most about the game is the heavy strategy involved. You can't just plunk down your guys, you have to really plan ahead, and if you don't and then you go into battle as one of the soldiers, you'll know you messed up. That said, it's also possible to fix things on the ground, which is really cool. Sometimes in the heat of battle, things get messed up, and you just have to take what the game throws at you and fight back, and it does a really good job instilling that bravery and resourcefulness into you. It's definitely not a full-on strategy game like Warcraft, but you can't neglect strategy.
Browder: We really want to encourage players to find different solutions. There's never just one right way to win a battle, and even during playtesting, we're finding things that we never expected people to do.
Christina: I know I loved messing around and experimenting with troop placement, trying to set traps for the enemy, it was a lot of fun. And then there's the RPG element, like XCOM, where you can raise individual soldiers and level them up and deck them out. Fire Emblem comes to mind too, especially with the permadeath in this game, how you can lose guys if you mess up and it's permanent.
Browder: Yeah, we absolutely wanted there to be real consequences to the players' choices. It autosaves too, so there's no going back if you mess up.
Christina: It's an always online game.
Browder: Exactly, even the single player is online, which we know some people will have a problem with but we thought it was best for the game to be constantly online and constantly saving, and it makes it so easy to jump into multiplayer as well.
Christina: I don't have a problem with it, but Austin and Avan were griping! *laughs*
Browder: Well, we understand why people might have a problem with it.
Christina: I'm a modern gamer, I love that these games are always online, bring it on!
(...)
Christina: Here's another strategy game for PC with a lot of hype behind it, it's called Hundred Years, and it's a game about the wars between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries. This is probably one of the deepest strategy games I've ever played, and I could see someone spending hours and hours with this. John Knudsen is a game director at Yodersoft, the developers of the game, and John, what makes this game more different than some of the other really complex strategy games on the market right now, specifically, why should an everyday casual player give this game a try?
John: Well, we've pushed to make all our strategy games as accessible as possible, but we know these games can be really complex, so we've been able to program some really subtle automizations that allow players to customize their experience to their liking. You can automize how your country is run, you can automize troop movements if you like...
Christina: So the game plays itself, at least if you want it to?
John: Not everything, but most aspects of the game can be fully automized, or you can play everything manually as the game was intended to be played, it's entirely up to you.
Christina: I have to be honest, I wasn't into these games so much at first, but once I gave a few of them a chance, I really was able to get into them and find things I really liked, and the thing I really like about Hundred Years is how you can influence the outcome of battles with diplomacy to the point where you can get through large chunks of the game without fighting a single battle. Diplomacy is really important in this game and you have lots of little speech trees and dialogue options to avoid fighting. You can pretty much win wars without going into battle if you want to, the dialogue is really well developed and you guys paid a lot of attention to detail when it came to negotiating and forming friendships.
John: And that's the one part of the game that you can't automize very much of, so if you just wanted Hundred Years to be a diplomacy simulator, that's a perfectly valid thing to do.
Christina: Joan of Arc is in this game, which is awesome. I didn't get to play any segments of the game with her, but you say there are all kinds of options for her?
John: Absolutely, you can assassinate her, you can save her, you can turn her into a villain, or if you just want to re-enact the events of real life, you can do that too.
Christina: How historically accurate is Hundred Years?
John: We try to keep as much accuracy as possible, but there are some fictional events and segments in the game as well. If you have a scholarly knowledge of the Hundred Years' War, you'll be pretty impressed with how much we managed to get right, but you'll probably still send off an angry e-mail or two.
Christina: Ooh, don't you hate those?
(...)
*Christina and Avan Jogia are battling it out in a thrilling deathmatch in a sci-fi FPS taking place largely atop skyscrapers and along high tension wires suspending between them.*
Christina: This is Highwire II: Electric Sky, sequel to 2014's Highwire, which was sort of a cult PC hit back when it was first released. Development studio Antesocial went back to the drawing board, and the result might just be the best PC exclusive of the year.
*Their characters are shooting at one another while leaping from wire to wire, with energy weapons as guns. It's a spectacularly beautiful game, giving off a sort of Tron meets Velvet Dark vibe as Avan racks up multiple kills on Christina and her teammates.*
Avan: The game's main attraction is going to be its online multiplayer mode, but don't sleep on the single player campaign, which had its trailer revealed at a presentation earlier today. You can check out the trailer on the GameTV website, or check out this brief clip.
*The clip shows a man and a woman speaking to one another about their mission, to kill a scientist who's been working with the cyborgs that have been taking over territory held by full humans. They're in some kind of argument, and it's revealed that the scientist is the woman's older brother. She doesn't want to kill him, but she knows he's a cyborg supremacist, and he even cured her paralysis when she was a teenager by developing custom artificial limbs for her. The man and woman are seen perched on a wire above the building where the scientist works, and the clip ends as they leap in through a window.*
Avan: In the Highwire series, humans and cyborgs battle for control of an increasingly crowded and polluted Earth, which becomes more and more inhospitable as resources are mined for cybernetic parts. Humans who refuse to get the parts or who can't afford them are treated with disdain by the cyborgs, and in Highwire II, a group of those cyborgs launch a campaign of enslavement against the remaining fully human people on Earth. Highwire II features stunning visuals and some truly rapidfire action, emphasizing movement like no other shooter game on the market.
Christina: And right now, I can't move fast enough to avoid getting my butt kicked!
Avan: Got you again!
Christina: Noooo!
*Avan's team wins the deathmatch by a considerable margin over Christina's team.*
Avan: The controls are really fluid, and once you get the hang of them, they're pretty much second nature.
Christina: Yeah, even though Avan kept killing me, I never got the sense that it was the game's fault, just Avan's for being a big jerk! *laughs* Highwire II comes out next month, and it'll be available on Steam for PCs only. No word on a console release, but considering that the original Highwire has yet to come to consoles, I doubt this game will make the jump... which is a real shame because the graphics would look amazing through some Reality VR goggles.
Avan: You know, actually, there are some killer new VR goggles coming to PC later this year.
Christina: Really?
Avan: That's right, and we'll send it over to Austin and Mari, who are at the Accelero booth to give our viewers an exclusive preview of their new Enthrall VR gaming headset.
Christina: That's not fair, I want to try it with this game.
Avan: Only Austin and Mari get to try it right now.
Christina: *looks disappointed*
-from GameTV's live E3 2017 streaming event on June 12, 2017
Apple's keynote begins with a teaser trailer for a brand new game (Author's Note: This teaser trailer was given to us by the reader jolou!).
*This trailer uses some of the lyrics and tune of "La Bohème" by Charles Aznavour, giving it a melancholic, old but still somewhat recent tone. It begins with a look at a fair, people are traveling in it, children are playing, parents are buying their children treats. We can see a young girl, in her early teens with her father and her elder brother navigating through the crowd.*
Let me tell of a time
The less than 20
can’t know about
*The father buys the young girl a toy dog, rubs her hair with his hand. Her brother notices something in the distance as suddenly an alarm goes off.*
Unaware in our youth of the sobering truth
Of the years that came after
*People are running away from an undetermined threat, we can some very unhuman noise, weapons firing everywhere. The girl lets her dog toy fall to the ground. The camera focuses on the toy, we can hear people fleeing with those unhuman noises stronger until we hear only them and no more people, no noise at all. Time passes, the toy is barely recognizable and his surroundings look more and more abandoned. And then we can see a real dog leg crushing the toy.
But as the camera goes back, we can see that this dog is visibly infected by some unknown disease and sounds like those unhuman noises earlier. A shadow is shown over the abandoned and destroyed by the elements fair. We can also see a lot of decomposed bodies and the ground is under 5 cm of water. The dog growls and then an arrow goes straight to its, heavily modified by the disease, head.*
Now and then I return and the memories burn
With a bittersweet aching
I climb the same old stairs
But no-one longer cares
*A very strong looking women (voiced by Jennifer Hale) in her late 40/early 50 with a French braid, tan skin, holding a bow and is walking to the dog, bends down to grab the toy, look at it fondly. She put it in her decrepit bag, looks behind her where a boy, who is smiling at her, arrives, and we can hear her say “Let's go find it”.*
And there’s no-one to greet in the streets where we walked
And the bars where we talked of a world we were making
I stand upon that hill until I drink my fill
Then leave it all behind
*We can see the two main characters of the game walking onto the streets of a long-abandoned city, with ruined buildings, abandoned cars, leaving the ruined fair behind.*
La boheme, La Boheme
Moments of joy, moments of pain
La boheme, La Boheme
Nothing can bring them back again
THE LAST GIFT
2019
Only on Apple Virtua
After the trailer ends, the crowd applauds wildly, and John Carmack is introduced, stepping out and speaking for a moment about the game we just saw. The Last Gift is a postapocalyptic adventure title taking place 40 years in the future. It's been in the works since before the Virtua's initial release, and though much of the game is done, there's still a lot of development time remaining. The game won't be playable at this year's E3, but more will be revealed in the coming months, and Apple hopes to have a full playable build ready for next year's E3. After this teaser trailer, Carmack briefly discusses Apple's accomplishments over the last year, and the success of the Virtua S, the first natively 4K home gaming console which has brought an unprecedented level of interactivity and control to the Virtua's library of games. Virtua titles are now more beautiful and immersive than ever, and perhaps no game exemplifies that more than Bayonetta 3. The next part of Apple's presentation was fully focused on this game, with Hideki Kamiya and his team presenting the game's new features. This includes the ability to control both Bayonetta and Jeanne in combat together via the new "Dual Dancing" system, in which the two can utilize slick combo moves and aid each other in battle. The two can also be controlled by two players, via local or online co-op. We also got to see more of the game's newest character, Lucrezia, an angel tasked with protecting Purgatory and killing Bayonetta. Lucrezia has a mix of sadism and nobility, much like Bayonetta herself, but unlike Bayonetta, Lucrezia doesn't revel in her sins, and instead, seeks to atone for the by shedding demonic blood. The dynamic between Bayonetta, Jeanne, and Lucrezia seems to lie at the core of this game, and while it's not revealed whether or not Lucrezia will join Bayonetta's fight, it seems likely that the two will find common ground somewhere. Bayonetta 3 is more beautiful than ever, a clear progression from the Virtua's launch title Bayonetta 2 in pretty much every way, though it has yet to be seen if the game itself will live up to all the pretty visuals and hype. We had a lot of fun when we got to play at Apple's booth on the show floor later in the week, and we got to see another of the game's major improvements: a skill tree system that allows the player to customize the way Bayonetta and Jeanne battle enemies as they progress through the game. Bayonetta 3 appears to be Apple's major holiday title this year, and it'll drop on November 20, 2017. Next up, Apple's other huge Virtua title of 2017: Sonic Ocean, the latest mainline game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series! As the title implies, Sonic Ocean sees the blue hedgehog and his friends take to the water, as they explore a series of undersea worlds on the mysterious planet of Blue Ocean. Once again, they'll be battling Eggman, who seeks to harvest the planet's ocean for its resources, while they also seek to stop Eggman from awakening an ancient undersea deity known as the Leviathan. While water levels in games have been maligned in the past, Sonic Ocean doesn't seem to fall into many of the same traps those games did. Sonic and friends move through the water with speed and swiftness, barely slowed down as they dive beneath the ocean depths... and of course, Sonic is fast enough to run on the surface of the water, meaning that some levels can be enjoyed without even breaking the sea surface. We got introduced to a pair of new characters, including an otter named Dorri and a somewhat nerdy mole named Mekkler, and both seem to have a crucial role in the game's storyline, which is sure to be an epic one. Sonic Ocean is set to be released on September 19th.
After the presentations for these two big games, we were treated to an appearance from Steve Jobs and some Apple designers and engineers, who discussed all the gaming features of the upcoming iPhone 8 line, including the iPhone 8G, an iPhone specifically tuned for mobile gaming. This isn't the rumored iPhone-like Gemini successor that's been making the rounds on various game news sites, but simply a model of the upcoming next-gen iPhone with gaming at its center, including a new gamepad accessory that's incredibly light and easy to bring with players wherever they go. The iPhone 8G's processor is also devoted to gaming, allowing it to pump out more processing power than the other iPhone models and to avoid overheating, while it's also capable of streaming both Virtua and Gemini games easier than any other iPhone model to date. We were then treated to a sizzle reel of upcoming mobile titles, with many of them exclusive to iOS, including Panzer Dragoon Gloria, a rail shooter/RPG with some gacha mechanics and a detailed storyline, Sonic Racing League, a new Sonic-based kart title, and Fallout: Silicon Valley, a spinoff Fallout title similar to the first two games in the series exclusive to iOS. Over a dozen iOS exclusive mobile titles were shown off here, and while some were clearly mobile games that can run on any old iPhone, others were console quality titles rivaling even what the Gemini can produce, many of which featured the "optimized for iPhone 8G" logo. While most E3 watchers aren't exactly thrilled about new mobile games, Jobs and his development team got plenty of people buzzing, with loud cheers numerous times during the presentation. The iPhone presentation was capped off with a pair of reveals for games coming to both iOS and Gemini: Herzog Zwei: Satellite War was the first of these games. It's a successor to the classic title Herzog Zwei, and the series' third revival, after the 2002 game and 2007's Herzog Tactics. Herzog Zwei: Satellite War is a futuristic title with vivid animations and detailed graphics, and captures the gameplay of the original perfectly, making it an excellent mobile game. The game will have a major online component, with players battling for control of a large world against the other players inhabiting it, though the game will feature a single player mode with dozens of levels. The second reveal was a teaser of a 3-D RPG, somewhat similar to Phantasy Star Online, but taking place in a fantasy world somewhat based on Feudal Japan. The world contains both samurai warriors and ancient ghosts and spirits, and the player becomes a part of that world along with millions of other players. The game's title was revealed as Spiritrealm, and the game's developer touted it as the "ultimate mobile MMORPG", promising a full console-style experience in the palm of your hand. After the reveal for these games, Jobs then promised that Apple would remain a leader in portable gaming for years to come, and took a few jabs at the Nexus and Android before leaving the stage.
The next featurette focused on Panzer Dragoon Aquarius, with the game's development team giving an update on the game's progress. The developers are still extremely hard at work, and we got to see some beautiful snapshots of the world the game takes place in, which is rife with underwater creatures and landscapes. Panzer Dragoon Aquarius will be more of a straight-up rail shooter than the previous two games in the series, taking the series back to its roots and having players fly their dragon in combat against some truly impressive creatures, with the centerpiece being a massive winged creature seemingly miles long. The visuals of Aquarius are utterly spectacular, and the game's protagonist, a young man named Pikon, seems to be the son of a sea goddess and a mortal man, who must reclaim his mother's proper place in the sea after his realm is overrun by a powerful corporation seeking to exploit the world's ocean for their own purposes. We noted some of the similarities between the plot of Sonic Ocean and Panzer Dragoon Aquarius, though the similarities between their stories seem to be coincidental. All worries of unoriginal plots aside, Panzer Dragoon Aquarius is an absolutely gorgeous game with the potential to make great use of the Virtua's motion controls while also pushing the visual limits of the Virtua-S and being a major reason to buy a 4K TV. Panzer Dragoon Aquarius is scheduled for release sometime in the first quarter of 2018. We next got a full gameplay and storyline trailer for the upcoming Angel May Cry, Capcom's Devil May Cry spinoff game featuring a female protagonist named Beatrix and a storyline featuring a vampire cult. While the game does draw some comparisons to Bayonetta, it looks to be less over the top, with a focus on shooting as opposed to melee. The game is coming to Virtua with some exclusive content, though it'll also be releasing simultaneously on the Reality and Nexus. It'll be coming out in November, a couple weeks before Bayonetta 3. John Carmack then began to speak, and launched into a short speech about how Apple wanted to close E3 with a look at the future of competitive online gaming. This game, still early in development, has been a project that Carmack feels a great kinship with, and that he assisted in the development of this next title. The game itself, which we only got to see about 30 seconds of, looks to combine a gritty, weapon-heavy Doom-esque FPS with MMORPG elements, and goes by the title of Bloodlust. Not since the Arbiter Of Sin series have we seen such an edgy looking IP from Apple or Sega, but the idea of a Doom-like MMORPG is incredibly intriguing, and we're hoping to get more news about this game soon.
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Christina Grimmie: I'm here with Blizzard's Dustin Browder, lead developer on the upcoming New Orthodoxy, which is one of the hottest games at this year's E3. I've been playing this game for the last 20 minutes, and I'll be honest, I haven't been able to stop! It's a lot of fun, it's really intense, and Dustin, what should players know who are wondering if this game lives up to the hype?
Dustin Browder: I'm glad you asked, Christina. New Orthodoxy has been one of our big projects of the last five years, we've put a ton of time and effort into this game and now we're ready to see it get into the players' hands and we know they're gonna love it. New Orthodoxy blends elements of our great RTS titles like Warcraft and Starcraft with elements of modern shooter games, and it allows players to jump right into these huge battles that are taking place on screen. The Cloak rebellion battling it out with the Clear Mind and their army of Blank soldiers, and it all plays out in real time, there's a huge variety of weapons and things that you can place, and once the battle starts you can leap right down into the action.
Christina: I was getting serious Lyte and Darke vibes as I played. I feel like these Cloaks are a lot like the Shadow Witches, and the Blanks are like the Crusader Knights hunting them down.
Browder: Well, that wasn't quite what we were going for but some of us are fans of the show, so yeah, we did notice some of the similarities.
Christina: What I like most about the game is the heavy strategy involved. You can't just plunk down your guys, you have to really plan ahead, and if you don't and then you go into battle as one of the soldiers, you'll know you messed up. That said, it's also possible to fix things on the ground, which is really cool. Sometimes in the heat of battle, things get messed up, and you just have to take what the game throws at you and fight back, and it does a really good job instilling that bravery and resourcefulness into you. It's definitely not a full-on strategy game like Warcraft, but you can't neglect strategy.
Browder: We really want to encourage players to find different solutions. There's never just one right way to win a battle, and even during playtesting, we're finding things that we never expected people to do.
Christina: I know I loved messing around and experimenting with troop placement, trying to set traps for the enemy, it was a lot of fun. And then there's the RPG element, like XCOM, where you can raise individual soldiers and level them up and deck them out. Fire Emblem comes to mind too, especially with the permadeath in this game, how you can lose guys if you mess up and it's permanent.
Browder: Yeah, we absolutely wanted there to be real consequences to the players' choices. It autosaves too, so there's no going back if you mess up.
Christina: It's an always online game.
Browder: Exactly, even the single player is online, which we know some people will have a problem with but we thought it was best for the game to be constantly online and constantly saving, and it makes it so easy to jump into multiplayer as well.
Christina: I don't have a problem with it, but Austin and Avan were griping! *laughs*
Browder: Well, we understand why people might have a problem with it.
Christina: I'm a modern gamer, I love that these games are always online, bring it on!
(...)
Christina: Here's another strategy game for PC with a lot of hype behind it, it's called Hundred Years, and it's a game about the wars between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries. This is probably one of the deepest strategy games I've ever played, and I could see someone spending hours and hours with this. John Knudsen is a game director at Yodersoft, the developers of the game, and John, what makes this game more different than some of the other really complex strategy games on the market right now, specifically, why should an everyday casual player give this game a try?
John: Well, we've pushed to make all our strategy games as accessible as possible, but we know these games can be really complex, so we've been able to program some really subtle automizations that allow players to customize their experience to their liking. You can automize how your country is run, you can automize troop movements if you like...
Christina: So the game plays itself, at least if you want it to?
John: Not everything, but most aspects of the game can be fully automized, or you can play everything manually as the game was intended to be played, it's entirely up to you.
Christina: I have to be honest, I wasn't into these games so much at first, but once I gave a few of them a chance, I really was able to get into them and find things I really liked, and the thing I really like about Hundred Years is how you can influence the outcome of battles with diplomacy to the point where you can get through large chunks of the game without fighting a single battle. Diplomacy is really important in this game and you have lots of little speech trees and dialogue options to avoid fighting. You can pretty much win wars without going into battle if you want to, the dialogue is really well developed and you guys paid a lot of attention to detail when it came to negotiating and forming friendships.
John: And that's the one part of the game that you can't automize very much of, so if you just wanted Hundred Years to be a diplomacy simulator, that's a perfectly valid thing to do.
Christina: Joan of Arc is in this game, which is awesome. I didn't get to play any segments of the game with her, but you say there are all kinds of options for her?
John: Absolutely, you can assassinate her, you can save her, you can turn her into a villain, or if you just want to re-enact the events of real life, you can do that too.
Christina: How historically accurate is Hundred Years?
John: We try to keep as much accuracy as possible, but there are some fictional events and segments in the game as well. If you have a scholarly knowledge of the Hundred Years' War, you'll be pretty impressed with how much we managed to get right, but you'll probably still send off an angry e-mail or two.
Christina: Ooh, don't you hate those?
(...)
*Christina and Avan Jogia are battling it out in a thrilling deathmatch in a sci-fi FPS taking place largely atop skyscrapers and along high tension wires suspending between them.*
Christina: This is Highwire II: Electric Sky, sequel to 2014's Highwire, which was sort of a cult PC hit back when it was first released. Development studio Antesocial went back to the drawing board, and the result might just be the best PC exclusive of the year.
*Their characters are shooting at one another while leaping from wire to wire, with energy weapons as guns. It's a spectacularly beautiful game, giving off a sort of Tron meets Velvet Dark vibe as Avan racks up multiple kills on Christina and her teammates.*
Avan: The game's main attraction is going to be its online multiplayer mode, but don't sleep on the single player campaign, which had its trailer revealed at a presentation earlier today. You can check out the trailer on the GameTV website, or check out this brief clip.
*The clip shows a man and a woman speaking to one another about their mission, to kill a scientist who's been working with the cyborgs that have been taking over territory held by full humans. They're in some kind of argument, and it's revealed that the scientist is the woman's older brother. She doesn't want to kill him, but she knows he's a cyborg supremacist, and he even cured her paralysis when she was a teenager by developing custom artificial limbs for her. The man and woman are seen perched on a wire above the building where the scientist works, and the clip ends as they leap in through a window.*
Avan: In the Highwire series, humans and cyborgs battle for control of an increasingly crowded and polluted Earth, which becomes more and more inhospitable as resources are mined for cybernetic parts. Humans who refuse to get the parts or who can't afford them are treated with disdain by the cyborgs, and in Highwire II, a group of those cyborgs launch a campaign of enslavement against the remaining fully human people on Earth. Highwire II features stunning visuals and some truly rapidfire action, emphasizing movement like no other shooter game on the market.
Christina: And right now, I can't move fast enough to avoid getting my butt kicked!
Avan: Got you again!
Christina: Noooo!
*Avan's team wins the deathmatch by a considerable margin over Christina's team.*
Avan: The controls are really fluid, and once you get the hang of them, they're pretty much second nature.
Christina: Yeah, even though Avan kept killing me, I never got the sense that it was the game's fault, just Avan's for being a big jerk! *laughs* Highwire II comes out next month, and it'll be available on Steam for PCs only. No word on a console release, but considering that the original Highwire has yet to come to consoles, I doubt this game will make the jump... which is a real shame because the graphics would look amazing through some Reality VR goggles.
Avan: You know, actually, there are some killer new VR goggles coming to PC later this year.
Christina: Really?
Avan: That's right, and we'll send it over to Austin and Mari, who are at the Accelero booth to give our viewers an exclusive preview of their new Enthrall VR gaming headset.
Christina: That's not fair, I want to try it with this game.
Avan: Only Austin and Mari get to try it right now.
Christina: *looks disappointed*
-from GameTV's live E3 2017 streaming event on June 12, 2017