Ubisoft Makes A Day Of It

Yesterday was Ubiday, where Ubisoft took the opportunity to showcase some of its upcoming work, make some announcements and voice its very gallic opinion about the state of the games industry today. I wasn’t invited, but have manged to glean some interesting titbits from various sources (Well Kotaku really) who were.

Splinter Cell Conviction video and preview. In a departure from what has been the standard for Splinter Cell, Conviction has Sam Fisher on the run from the law in North America. Instead of having you hide in shadows, Ubisoft have added something they call ‘active stealth’. Basically this boils down to the player having to hide in plain sight, blending in with crowds of people and not having all the gadgets that he usually carries around with him. According to Ubisoft the way the player reads and uses his environment will be a major factor in the way the game plays, encouraging improvisation and thinking on the fly instead of planning your way through a mission according to where the best hiding places are. Video.

Haze is an FPS being developed by Timesplitters coders, Free Radical, and promises to be a more involved take on the traditional “Shoot anything that moves” ethos traditionally associated with the genre. With what looks to be a strong single-player (or four player co-op) campaign and multiplayer maps strung together by their own storyline, Rob Yescombe made much of the seamless nature of the SP campaign with no loading or mission select screens. The player spends three days as a Mantel sergeant in a skirmish with guerrillas in South America with high tech weapons and a ‘nutritional supplement’ called Nectar, which improves your combat abilities but has side effects. I get the feeling from the trailer that the player’s use (or not) of Nectar will be playing a large role in the plot.

Tom Clancy’s EndWar, as I posted yesterday, is to have a voice command system. In an effort to deal with the old conundrum of RTS games on consoles. Using a series of simple commands, which have been tested in a variety of languages and accents without problems, you can issue orders to your units on the fly, “Strategy at the speed of thought” as the developer put it. Another interesting peice of news about the game is that Ubisoft wants more of a Madden feel to it with what I’m assuming is the ability to view the battlefield from the over-the-shoulder cameras carried by infantry and any vehicle mounted camera system. Whether you can zoom out to get a bigger picture of the fight is not made clear, but I personally would find the lack of a traditional RTS view (even if it was just an option) quite hard to get used to. No gamplay footage was available at Ubiday but there was this trailer:
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Other news from the event was about a variety of existing properties;

Ubisoft’s new casual games project called Games for Everyone which aims to bring their games to a wider audience, concentrating mainly on the DS and Wii.
An interesting little DS title called Jam Sessions, which allows you to play a virtual guitar with a plectrum (or the stylus) on the touchscreen.
Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 was unveiled with a trailer and promises more minigame madness with those insane rabbids.
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the seriously under appreciated hack em up built on Valves source engine will be making its way to the 360 under the title Dark Messiah of might and Magic: Elements, but not date as yet.
Another Limited Edition is on the way, this time for Assassin’s Creed with the obligatory tin box, figurine, mini strategy guide, making-of documentaries, and some Penny Arcade comics. It’ll cost you another $10.

Ubisoft CEO was stirring things up by saying that E3 is just for Americans, demonstrated by the success and attendance at Ubiday in Paris. Around 600 journalists and industry types were in Paris for the event and from what I’ve been reading alot of them tended to agree with Mr. Guillemot’s assertion.

This was just a taster of what was on show at Ubiday, for more in depth reporting from someone who was actually there go check out Kotaku’s coverage.

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