And that is Day 2 done of E3 2015. We got to explore more of the expo halls as well as check out a few more games. Compared to yesterday, we had a pretty busy schedule planned for what was on offer today.
Thanks to Bandai Namco, we were able to have a tour of the Square Enix and Bandai Namco booths. This allowed us to check out various games like F1 2015, Sword Art Online – Hollow Fragment, Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 and many more. All these games are scheduled to release by the end of 2015 so our wallets may be looking a little empty due to the release of some of these great titles.
While at the Square Enix booth, I attended a closed-door gameplay viewing of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. For those who are after their Deus Ex fix, the game is slated to release next year. The story is set two years after the events of Human Revolution, and the culture within society is now segregated between augmented and non-augmented people. Adam Jensen returns as the protagonist and now works as an agent for an Interpol-style organisation. He is also tasked as a double agent to see if the Illuminati exists within the organisation’s confines.
The gameplay footage shown was from the start of the game where Adam is tasked to investigate a terrorist attack. During the mission, a variety of features new to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided were revealed, such as selecting different types of ammunition and firing rates to overcome challenges, performing stealth takedowns, and remote hacking to name a few. All these new features certainly make the gameplay more interesting from a stealth perspective, especially if you want to give yourself a challenge.
We made our way over to the West Hall afterwards where all the larger companies had their booths set up. We were simply overwhelmed by the size and space of their booths – Nintendo had the largest, along with Xbox and PlayStation. With thanks to Surprise Attack, we were able to have a tour of the SMITE section of the Xbox booth, check out a new mobile MOBA called Ace of Arenas and have a look at what new things Razer have to reveal. We also had the chance to watch a brief moment of gameplay of Yooka-Laylee.
Although I’m not a MOBA person, there have been a lot of improvements to SMITE since I last played it during alpha. These include much sharper gameplay and a refined user interface suitable for console gameplay. The idea of a MOBA on mobile sounds rather convoluted, but Ace of Arenas proved us wrong with its simplicity of user controls and functionality. Razer showcased their newest Mamba mouse with adjustable sensitivity on the left and right mouse buttons, along with the Forge TV unit which runs Google TV and effectively has a Chromecast built into it.
Our opportunity to see the latest build of Yooka-Laylee was short, but it was more than enough to win us over. We got to see five minutes of gameplay, along with one of the developers from Team17 discussing their development goals and intentions for the game. Effectively, the game is still in very early days and we should expect to see some solid details on it in the next year.
Disney took us on a tour of their booth where we checked out the latest Disney Infinity 3.0 titles, being Star Wars: Twilight of the Republic, Star Wars: Rise Against the Empire and Inside Out. All these titles were highly entertaining and user-friendly for all ages, and integrated seamlessly to the Disney Infinity system with loading and switching character figurines.
Stick around for our final wrap-up of E3 2015 tomorrow, where we hope to check out PlayStation’s Project Morpheus, Dark Souls III, Nintendo titles and more.