E3 2016: Ubisoft Wrap Up - Get Me Off This Wild Ride

Published June 14, 2016

Hosted once again by Aisha Tyler, Ubisoft’s E3 press conference held a couple of interesting surprises as well as some, now expected, naughty language. While it did unfortunately over stay its’ welcome, being about 2 hours long, it did the right things to get a lot of people cautiously optimistic for Ubisoft’s year ahead.

Just Dance 2017

There wasn’t really much to this announcement besides that its more Just Dance for the upcoming year. The most interesting part was that Just Dance 2017 was announced for “every platform” which includes the Nintendo NX. While it doesn’t tell us much, does this mean we now know of another NX launch title?

Just Dance 2017 will release in October 2016 .

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands

I’m pretty sure if a Ubisoft exec could have run onto the stage shouting “I love cocaine” they would have. Ditching the traditional military Ghost Recon we’ve come to expect, we’re now off to Bolivia to deliver some freedom from the Santa Blanca drug cartel. From what we saw in the awfully scripted gameplay, Wildlands is set to be an interesting co-op experience where players will have to complete various objectives in order to bring down the cartel.

Tom Calancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is set to release on the 7th of March 2017 .

South Park: The Fractured But Whole

Penned as the Civil War of the South Park kids’ superhero fantasy, The Fractured But Whole will pick up where The Stick of Truth left off. Done with high fantasy role-play, the next South Park will now deal with the current big thing in pop-culture, superheroes. Players will once again assume the role of The New Kid who will have to once again make a name for themselves among the cast of the South Park franchise. You’ll be able to choose from a variety of hero classes with different origin stories in order to prevent the town from being torn apart by playground antics. Not only will we be seeing a different theme, but we’ll also get a new battle system. Based on the tactics styled gameplay of games like Disgaea, The Fractured But Whole will ditch the old battle system which I was never really a fan of but will still keep farts as ultimate attacks (just in case you were worried that would change).

South Park: The Fractured But Whole is set to release on the 6th of December 2016

Tom Clancy’s The Division

What would this year’s Ubisoft press conference be without a little time being spent on their Destiny-killer The Division? While the game may currently be suffering from a plague of hackers and lack of any real endgame, Ubi are still dead set on providing new expansions to the game. The first that was shown off was the Underground expansion was revealed during Microsoft’s conference while the second, Survival, seemed a lot more promising. Survival looks to limit the resources available to Division agents and, to be brutally honest, this is something I expected to happen from the get go in The Division. In any case, These expansions will be coming soonTM, but are they enough to bring you back to The Dark Zone?

Eagle Flight

While at this point VR demos are pretty standard for these presentations, Ubisoft has decided to not shoehorn it into existing games but rather opt for some interestesting new concepts. The first of which, Eagle Flight, got a bit boring to watch after a while, but I can imagine that playing it would be a completely different story. The multiplayer demo saw a group of eagles duking it out for their prey which seems like a fun concept, even if VR seems far off for us locally.

Eagle Flight will be available on all major VR platforms in the US Autumn of 2016.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew

Ubisoft’s next VR demo, Star Trek: Bridge Crew looks quite promising, but could unfortunately be limited to fans of the Star trek series. Even if it was mostly being marketed by celebrities of the various Star Trek iterations, it still looks like it could be an enjoyable excursion into VR space.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew will be available on all major VR platforms in the US Autumn of 2016.

For Honor

It may have been a year since we got any real news of For Honor, but it’s now back in the limelight and my my does it look good. While the cinematic trailer looks great, the gameplay that was shown was where it was at. Getting our first look at the single player campaign, we saw how the Vikings did it as they initiated a raid on a Smaurai fortress. While the enemy AI may have seemed a little lacklustre, hopefully it’ll improve as we get closer to release.

For Honor is out next Valentine’s Day , which seems a little strange but I guess some intimate melee combat is as good a way as any to celebrate love.

Grow Up

Not to be outdone by EA’s stage fright devs, Ubisoft had their own fumbly indie who delivered the sequel to Grow Home, Grow Up. With no more mother offering guidence and literal planets to play around with, Grow Up looks like a fun little game.

Grow Up will be releasing on in August 2016

Trials of The Blood Dragon

So during the Ghost Recon Wildlands presentations they spoke about cocaine quite a bit. I feel like while doing their research they decided to take a little ride on the white pony and come to the next title they revealed. Trials of the Blood Dragon is the next entry in the Trials series that seems to have gotten a heavy dose of 80’s. Influenced heavily by the success of Far Cry: Blood Dragon, the latest Trials will see you riding ultimate dragon slayer cyber bikes to defeat communist aliens in order to protect America.

Trails of the Blood Dragon is available right now .

Assassin’s Creed Movie

Even if Ubi didn’t have an Assassin’s Creed game to show off at E3, they had to find a way to still have the franchise involved in their press conference. with a little bit of a behind the scenes look at the movie but nothing really of interest to be brutally honest.

Watch_Dogs 2

“But no one asked for this”, “The first one was trash”, “Everything looks so bad”. I’m so glad people are immediately airing their wrong opinions this early on. Though the first game had its’ flaws, it was definitely and interesting concept and I’m excited to see Ubisoft go ahead with a sequel that looks quite promising at the moment. The gameplay that we got to see looked like it would make for a rather enjoyable and and I’m quite interested to see where the game heads in the following months. We already know that a movie is in the works, but hopefully Watch_Dogs 2 will be able to do enough to win the naysayers over.

Watch_Dogs 2 will be available on the 15th of November 2016

Steep

To close it all off we got our first look at a new IP for Ubisoft, Steep. While I don’t anyone expected this or was even hoping for this, but after some demonstration I will admit that the game does seem pretty interesting. Could Steep possibly be the SSX we deserve? Who knows, but we’re getting the game quite soon so we’ll probably find out then. It was a little strange that they decided to close on this new title but maybe it’ll prove to be some sort of gem that we were never expecting.

Steep looks to release in December 2016

Thabo’s Take

Ubisoft’s conference was possibly the most boring of the bunch with them showing a game and then having some person on stage talking for way too long about near irrelevant stuff. Besides that, there were some fun moments and Aisha Tyler was actually a good host this time. As for the games, there was enough to satisfy my expectations with Watch Dogs 2 looking great and South Park being one of the more exciting games that were shown. For Honor also renewed some confidence in me now that we know there is a singleplayer mode. However, there was no wow factor and everything was pretty predictable with games we have known about for a long time already and them pushing their movie incentives even further.

It was run-of-the-mill and solid, but way too damn long and populated with endless filler.

BiPolarBear’s Take

The Ubisoft press conference was a bit of a strange one because, while I liked what I was seeing, I couldn’t wait for it to end. The way Ubi approach it made the whole thing far too dense and I feel like the sentiment towards the whole event was soured because of it. It’s E3 people, we want to see hype gameplay. We can talk to every member of the development team in our own time when we’re done.

Oh yes, but do put more wizards on the stage, that was pretty cool.

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BiPolarBear

Gaming Author at Geek Node

The best person to offer the worst opinion. Paul's interests include adding 100 hour JRPGs to his backlog and dark walks through dungeons. You'll probably find him rambling on about old man Nintendo or that crazy newfangled eSports thingy.