As in past years, this will be a recap of my day with some quick impressions of what I saw and did with a more detailed preview of individual titles and devices after the dust settles and some amount of sanity has returned to me. Day One is usually pretty hectic as I am trying to get my bearings but this year I decided to take a more mellow, measured approach which led me to stand in line for Battleborn for 45 minutes to no avail. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

I gave myself two hours of free time before my first appointment so after my blunder I walked the show floor to see what there was to see. After winning an Atari keychain at a prize wheel sponsored by the film Pixels at the Video Game History Museum booth I made my way to Capcom and was stopped in my tracks by playable Street Fighter V. Being who and what I am, I had to get in line for this and my waiting paid off with hands on time with the newest installment of one of my favorite game series ever. I picked the line with the PS4 controller as opposed to an arcade stick so I could see how the controller felt with a fighting game. It handled pretty well although the button configuration contributed to my match loss. It was a great fight though and my opponent was very good. All the rounds were close and the third round came down to the last hit. I am not fond of losing at Street Fighter but it was a great fight with a fairly even match and it was well fought.

One match wasn’t a lot to really judge the game in terms of improvements over SF4 but what I can say is that the fighting system felt right on and they have not changed things around too much. The fighters available were Ryu, Chun Li, Cammy, Birdie, Nash, M Bison and a cyborg Charlie. I went with Ryu because he is my spirit animal and my opponent went with Birdie. I managed to keep Birdie at bay as far as throws are concerned but he snatched me a couple of times and it hurt pretty bad. The fighting was fast paced and combo building was intuitive which is all as it should be. I am going to try to make it back around tomorrow or Thursday to take a crack at it with an arcade stick but I had a great time and it was the best way to kick off Day One of E3.

After a bit more wandering I made my way to Ubisoft for my booth appointment. Ubisoft’s appointments are usually pretty cool as you are given someone to take you around to different things. I have yet to ever get everything in one appointment without scheduling more time to come back but that speaks more to the volume of games people are interested in than any failing on their part. I am happy to come back as well as the offerings are worth it. Today I was paired up with Alyssa who was both helpful and friendly and she made sure I got into to my top two priorities today and set me up with appointments for the rest tomorrow. The system for booth appointments is pretty cool and I wish more companies would do things this way.

The first thing I saw was Assassin’s Creed Syndicate which involved a quick theater experience followed by a 15-minute hands on game play session. Getting hands on was very cool and I was able to try out the new grappling hook as well as chase a target in a horse drawn carriage. The carriage was the thing I was most concerned about given that shoehorned in driving sequences are a personal pet peeve but the controls and physics involved were solid and I kind of dug trying to ram other carriages into buildings or other carriages.

The stealth button from Unity is back and makes takedowns much easier. The combat is hand to hand by and large because you couldn’t really just walk around with swords on during the Industrial Revolution. This gave the combat a new sort of flavor that offsets the normal Assassin’s Creed conventions.

The grappling hook was a nice addition as well and made traversal much easier on both vertical and horizontal planes. This gave the game more of an Arkham feel which is not a bad thing at all and I appreciate being able to scale buildings more quickly. The drop button from Unity also makes an appearance so you can descend buildings more quickly and easily as well. So far it looks like things have been largely optimized based off of feedback from players but we will need to see when the game releases how all that pans out.

Next up I got hands on For Honor and while it is a game that is going to require some practice to get the hang of it was a lot of fun. We played a full four on four match in which the first to reach 1000 points wins. In order to do that we had to seize territory, kill other players and kill the fodder troops. It was pretty back and forth but we were ultimately out maneuvered and lost. It was a shit load of fun though and I think it is going to be the sort of game that will be fun to master especially with friends as everyone coordinates their attacks and work out strategy. Definitely more on this later.

After the Ubisoft booth I went to my appointment to check out Deus Ex Mankind Divided. The demo looked pretty sweet and it looks as if combat and stealth have improved from last game but the game crashed halfway through the demo, which is not so uncommon with alpha builds, and we didn’t make it all the way to the end. I rescheduled for tomorrow so I can see the whole thing but initial impressions were pretty good. The ‘social boss fights’ were demonstrated and it was intriguing. I like the idea of your actions affecting the outcomes of negotiations in a less binary way than good or bad. The game remembers the things that you’ve done previously and takes that into account when NPCs are dealing with you. That means that while you can play how you want without overt penalty you are still going to have to answer for your choices eventually.

After this I moved over to the West Hall to check out what was going on over there. I ended up jumping in line a the Playstation booth since I had a couple of hours and they had a single line to see Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last Guardian and Uncharted 4. I am one of those weirdos in gaming that isn’t super excited for the Last Guardian but Horizon looked cool and I am an enormous Uncharted fan so I decided what the hell. It was worth the wait.

Not having been invited to the Sony press conference I didn’t know much about Horizon and I really still don’t out side of it being a post apocalyptic world thousands of years into the future in which humans are grouped into tribes of hunters and for some reason machines have become animals of various types. The player character hunts the robots for the resources that can be scavenged. It looked pretty interesting from a game play standpoint and I will give it a shot when it comes out.

I don’t realy get the appeal of the Last Guardian really. The creature looks cool but the kid just kind of annoys me. The visuals are great and the lighting and feather effects are very nice but I am not sure I am up for a full game of listening to an annoying kid be impatient at a dog bird thing. It is just a little taste though so maybe my opinion will change when I see more.

Uncharted 4 on the other hand looks fantastic. I am not sure if the sequence we saw was on rails as Drake takes part in a jeep chase that ultimately leads to a nasty car wreck and gun fight but the visuals were terrific and the banter between Drake and Sully was awesome and funny. I didn’t love the last installment as much as the first two but this looks like a return to form with a great deal of excitement involving some new game play mechanics mixed with the old. And it looks fantastic on PS4 hardware.

That took me to the end of the show and I walked out feeling pretty good about the day. I have a bunch of appointments tomorrow, which is the longest day of the show so I will have plenty more to talk about tomorrow. Until then!