Ubisoft held an entirely too long press briefing in the early evening Monday and I was in attendance. They had some big name titles coming this year, so it’s one I didn’t want to miss. What I got was a drawn out, somewhat boring event. Read on for all my thoughts on how it went down.
The conference started off strong with a light comedic routine from host Joel McHale (of The Soup fame). He had some pretty funny one liners all night, even making fun of all the French people backstage. Once it was on to Ubisoft team members, the focus started on UPlay, a new online initiative aimed at sharing content. It looks like it could work well for PC games and is launching the end of this year. The company also announced partnerships with many film studios and major players in that industry, including Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron. Speaking of James Cameron, they announced that over 100 shots for the upcoming Avatar film were developed by Ubisoft… impressive. Continuing on the film route, they announced that a few short films based on the Assassin’s Creed 2 universe would be released this Fall.
James Cameron then took the stage to begin a very long winded exploration of Avatar, his thoughts on the movie, and how he worked along with Ubisoft to make a solid game. He acknowledged that most licensed games suck, and by developing the movie and game in parallel, they hope to avoid that situation. He also announced that Avatar will be the first game released in stereoscopic 3D (I’m very skeptical here).
Moving on to more games, Red Steel 2 was shown off, which looked visually impressive. Based on the short gameplay demo, I could it becoming fairly repetitive though. The game will ship bundled with Wii Motion Plus, which is a good way to get the peripheral into gamers’ hands. A trailer for Shaun White Snowboarding World Stage was shown, but that’s about it. Next, Ubisoft brought out Pele to show off Academy of Champions Football. After a delay with no trailer ready and a long translated diatribe from Pele, the trailer was finally revealed. The game is Harry Potter, but using soccer instead of magic. You live in a huge castle that looks like Hogwarts that has “living” pictures on the walls. The stadium looks exactly like the Quidditch field from Harry Potter. Who thought this was a good idea?
Splinter Cell Conviction got the exact same treatment as it did at the Microsoft press conference, which was a bit disappointing. For a game that looks so great, I figured Ubisoft would go a bit more in depth at their own press event. Lots of casual game information was shown off, which put most of the audience to sleep. At this point, a very large number of people could be seen leaving as the press conference was already past the 1 hour 40 minute mark. Other smaller trailers were shown for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash Up and Ruse, and a trailer and quick demo for Rabbids Go Home, but no huge deals there. Finally, the press conference ended with a new trailer for Assassin’s Creed 2. It was all CG, but damn was it awesome! Your hidden blade also doubles as a gun this time around, so you’ll certainly wreck shop on fools.
After sitting there for a little over 2 hours and not being shown all that much, I was pretty disappointed in the media briefing. Sure, Assassin’s Creed 2 looked fantastic, but that was 5 minutes out of the entire show that didn’t give me too much info. With the strong lineup Ubisoft has coming, I expected a lot more.
