Alright so E3 Day Two began in much the same way as Day One did if you omit the useless line waiting for 45 minutes and jump right to me playing Street Fighter V. Another difference is that I stomped my opponent hard enough that his ancestors will feel it so any day I can say that is a good one. After this life affirming all is right with the world moment I went to my first appointment of the day to see a new installment of a series I have loved from way back: King’s Quest.

Obviously I will go into more detail about this later but first impressions of what I saw were great. I really dig the cell shaded look, the fantastic voice talent and puzzles and game activities very reminiscent of the original series. The presentation was run by the founder of Odd Gentlemen Matt Korba and it was very apparent that he knows the series inside and out. I am very happy that it appears to be in good hands and I am looking forward to its late July release.

 

After that it was off to get hands on time with Rainbow Six Siege. I have been excited about this game since last E3 and hands on time with the game made me that much more excited about it. That is not to say that I did well or that I didn’t die very quickly but my teammates decided they wanted the hard Realistic mode and so we all realistically ate a shit ton of bullets. Terrohunt is a fun mode, however, and it made me even more convinced that the game is very much like Payday 2.

Looking at the loadouts and specializations I realize how important to success these aspects are and that if, say, four of your five man team picks the same specialization that is more general and lacks any discernible advantage things will likely go badly for you. Communication is key as evidenced by our lack of it aside from shouting profanity when things got real. Ah hubris. Death is a fitting reward.

After leaving Rainbow Six pretending I had any dignity left, I went to my next appointment for Sword Coast Legends, a D & D RPG currently for the PC but will eventually make its way to new gen consoles. I didn’t know much about the game going into it outside of it being Dungeons and Dragons but it was a pretty cool Baldur’s Gate style dungeon crawler that allows for a ridiculous amount of customization. RPGs are known for customization of characters and builds but with the Dungeon Master mode Sword Coast Legends takes it a step farther and allows a player to set up the quests and dungeons all the way down to dialogue that NPCs say. The level of customization available was staggering and I want to get my hands on this just for that mode alone.

Next up was a Wargaming appointment in which I checked out Master of Orion, a world building/RTS that includes everything from resource gathering, politics and diplomacy, exploration and combat. It looks super deep and gives the player a lot of choice in terms of who to play how and there is a ton of variety for as many playthroughs as you want.

I also got some details on the upcoming World of Tanks for Xbox One. World of Tanks has been hugely popular on 360 and this iteration is going to include cross play, dynamic weather and environment hazards as well as all the other features in the 360 version. This one is also the first to include PvE so if you want to go solo against AI, now you can. It sounds like a great time to jump into World of Tanks if you have not yet taken the plunge.

Speaking of plunges (ugh, sorry) World of Warships is going into open beta at the end of June and is eying a full release after that sometime in the nearish future. This is enormously detailed and they have added more and more since the last time I saw the game. They are focused on the PC with this one which is too bad given that my laptop is dogshit and I probably couldn’t run it. I will obviously get into more details later but it looks really good.

Next up it was a theater experience for Ghost Recon Wildlands and not only did the demo look cool but the two guys doing the commentary were fucking hilarious. This is the sort of thing that people don’t know about E3. It isn’t just demos and free T-shirts. Oftentimes the presentations are creative and funny which really helps make the experience memorable and is just a lot of fun.

The demo was a live gameplay demo with four player co-op showing an assault on a cartel base to capture a cartel snitch who has information you want. It was very interesting to see co-op like this given it is an open world and the players were often nowhere near each other but were all working on the same overall goal. This allowed the team to perform different tasks in order to set the assault up and the way they got it all set up and executed the plan was really cool. I am sure it helps that they knew the ins and outs as I imagine an assault I launched would be more like something out of Hogan’s Heroes but I dug the way that the players interact with a world full of people with their own lives and routines. That the overall mission is to disrupt cartel and government operations which gives the team a wide purview and the player free rain to wreak havoc. It looks and sounds pretty fun.

After Ghost Recon I went over to check out Disney Infinity and was treated to a booth tour. I got to check out the Inside Out play set and some of the new Star Wars sets and characters. I haven’t had a ton of experience with Infinity outside of a couple of short games in the original 1.0 game so seeing what they were up to with the Star Wars stuff was pretty cool. I have never really been tempted to get into any of these games in the past but Star Wars might have done it. The ability to mix characters from the series such that Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker can work together on a toybox mission is almost too good to be true.

My last act of the day was to hop in line for Call of Duty Black Ops III. I expected it to be a theater experience but it turned out to be a bit of a quick tutorial and then 15 minutes worth of hands on multi-player. This was a running theme for the week: lots and lots of hands on. This is really nice because last year was much more theater heavy. Part of this, I think, is just the flow of development cycles as a lot of games shown last year were playable this one but there were some newly announced games playable this year which was very cool.

Black Ops III puts heavy emphasis on constant movement and constant combat. You are able to aim and shoot while doing just about everything, even mantling over a barrier. This keeps the pace constant and fast. It also kept me dying at an alarming rate but I got better and there are a lot of options to cater to different play styles. I mean that in a broad sense as it is still going to always be Call of Duty but you have options within that framework.

That was my Day Two. Tomorrow will be filled with more appointments and probably more Street Fighter V. Check back in!