Perhaps the first big splash of E3 was Kojima getting up on stage at the Xbox 360 conference and announcing Metal Gear Solid: Rising for the console. Some gamers were surprised, although most had seen it coming. Sony, however, was in shock. It was completely blind-sided by the announcement, finding out about it at the exact moment that the rest of us did: when Kojima walked on stage.
My understanding is that a seven hour internal meeting occurred in the higher echelons of Sony soon afterwards. It rewrote a significant portion of the following day’s Sony conference which was to make a big splash about Metal Gear Solid: Rising. I heard a whisper that a ‘favour’ was called in and Square Enix agreed to air the FFXIV trailer where initially it was to be held off to a Wednesday morning Square Enix showing.
“You can’t have a rally game without snow” is what I told Codemasters as I got stuck into a far better handling DiRT sequel. ”We’re working on getting that in there” was the answer.
Resident Evil 5’s DLC was very close to becoming an Xbox 360 exclusive. This had nothing to do with Microsoft spending money, and everything to do with Sony charging developers a hefty fee for each piece of DLC downloaded. As it was told to me; there is a cut off point where a game’s popularity makes it not worth putting on PSN – the more something is downloaded, the more it costs. An eleventh hour agreement from Sony to allow Capcom free downloads saved the day.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 is most certainly on the cards. While chatting to some of the lads from LucasArts I spoke about how spin-offs like Clone Wars and LEGO seemed to be the primary focus now. Not so. I was told that these games are completely different tangents and do not affect the team working on The Force Unleashed SKU. The original sold a mighty five million units, and when I pushed on whether they were happy with its use of DMM and Euphoria they agreed it was a 1st-generation attempt and it has really come along since then
Modern Warfare 2 runs on the IW4.0 game engine. The engine’s key improvements are in the detail to the character models and weapons, and in the handline of lighting. The co-op mode does not follow the campaign, but actually just gives you random missions to fulfil as a team, some of which are inspired by the single-player and some of which are not. Unfortunately the World at War style of black boxes around the split-screen is in effect. I asked during the co-op demo why they do this and was told it was simply so the user could determine where their screen started and ended – it has nothing to do with improving performance as I had assumed. I went on to beg that they give the option to the user as to whether they want the black box or not and idea, it seemed, had not occurred to them. Fingers-crossed.
Final Fantasy XIII does not look like being released at the resolution its awesome graphics demand. At the Sony Press Conference, the company made a big deal about the size of the screen they were using and how no other game console could display its products at such a size. It then went on to only show a handful of games at the full screen size (such as the Game of the Show, Uncharted 2) to prove it.
FFXIII was not one of those games though, and operated in a picture within a picture mode suggesting a lower resolution.
Secrets of E3
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Originally Posted by pezz
