There weren’t any surprises, but the games looked good.
As a result of no E3 this year, Ubisoft opted to deliver a more concentrated presentation of their upcoming games. Rather than giving us a barrage of games, we got a deeper look at Ubisoft’s bigger titles and I liked what I saw.
Watch Dogs: Legion looks like it could be a wildly interesting game. The third entry in the Watch Dogs series is introducing a unique mechanic in being able to recruit any NPC in the world to your team. Each character within the game has their own strengths and abilities and you can seemingly recruit any one of them to your side, allowing for you to play the game in quite a variety of ways. I’ve never played the Watch Dogs series but it’s one that I’ve always had an interest in, so it might be something I take a look at soon with Legion releasing on October 29.
Ubisoft also offered some details on their new battle royale game, Hyper Scape, which is now in open beta on PC. I guess it looks ok but look, if you’re into it then I hope you have fun with it. But the industry feels oversaturated with battle royale games at this point and I personally don’t have much of an appetite for more. And the heavy reliance on Twitch integration makes this game feel like it was designed for big streaming numbers and that rubs me the wrong way. If it gains some momentum then I’ll probably check it out, but I’m all set for the time being.
Setting aside recent leaks, we finally got our first official look at Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s gameplay. The combat looks heavy and vicious, which makes sense considering it’s, you know, a viking game. I think at this point the gameplay formula here is pretty well understood so you know what you’re getting with this game. But the raids and massive battles look really cool and I’m super excited by the prospect of building up my own viking village on the coast of England. Valhalla looks great but unfortunately, it’s releasing on November 17th, two days before Cyberpunk 2077.
The biggest thing of note coming from Valhalla is that it’s officially being released on Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 at launch, which gives us an idea of when those consoles are coming. Given Cyberpunk 2077’s delay and this release date, I have to imagine that next gen consoles will be releasing within the first couple weeks of November. Hopefully we’ll get that information soon.
Ubisoft closed their presentation with Far Cry 6. This wasn’t exactly a surprise (considering the trailer leaked yesterday) and we didn’t get any gameplay, but the cinematic we got was really cool. Giancarlo Esposito is starring as the villain this time around and he’s exceptional, so the game’s got my attention for that reason alone. That releases on February 28th, so it’s something to keep an eye on moving into 2021.
Overall, it was a solid presentation from Ubisoft. It wasn’t anything special and there weren’t any surprises, but what we did see was pretty good. Ubisoft also tacked on bits about Rainbow Six: Siege, Brawlhalla and a couple mobile games but this presentation was clearly about their big IPs and they didn’t disappoint. It was also announced that Ubisoft will have another presentation like this coming down the road, so we’ll see what they’ve got whenever that happens.
Projekt Six 