STACK #141 Jul 2016

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favourite game of the show, featured a 64-player multiplayer mode. The St. Quentin Scar in France during the First World War was the battle setting, with combat spread across trenches and through ruined farmhouses. Players could fight as infantrymen and embark on bayonet charges, pilot aircraft and zeppelins, or drive and man the guns in tanks. It’s all we’ve seen of Battlefield 1 so far, but boy does it look good. Hands-on with Titanfall 2 was also a highlight. New classes have been added as well as a grappling hook mechanic that allows players to latch onto just about anything in the gameplay area. While we didn’t get to see the single-player, we’re more excited about this now than we were before we left Australia. FIFA 17 has undergone a significant change, implementing the powerhouse Frostbite engine. Aside from a visual upgrade, the focus here was on the implementation of new mode The Journey – a single-player campaign that charts the rise of young, hopeful Premier League player Alex Hunter. Producer Matt Prior told STACK that although the game had been in the planning stages for years, it would not have been possible without Frostbite.

That's an E3 fact... The terrible public Wi-Fi at E3 is still better than anything found in Australia.

At midday, a heaving crowd forced its way through the doors as E3 kicked into life at the LACC. On the show floor, attendees shouldered oversized loot bags; a redolence of body odour and the sight of journalists running frantically (us included) from appointment to appointment ever present. Sony was first up. After ducking and weaving through the crowd like a quarterback, we settled into theatre presentations (always dangerous with the omnipresent jetlag lurking) – essentially expanded versions of the trailers from the press conference – for Detroit: Become Human , Horizon: Zero Dawn, and new

apocalyptic zombie- thriller, Days Gone. At the conclusion of the God of War

presentation, the devs were assailed with a barrage of questions surrounding the choice of a Norse setting. We were told the studio wanted a totally new beginning – a game where exploration and crafting were at the forefront. In the Sony lounge, we managed to get PSVR time with Battlezone , a fast and furious take on the arcade classic featuring excellent levels of immersion. The same can be said of Farpoint , a sci-fi first-person-shooter where a gun peripheral was employed for the demo. The other PSVR experience we secured was Resident Evil VII: Biohazard . Using the same engine as the Kitchen demo that terrorised everybody at last year’s E3, the horror began in earnest with audio cues like creaking floorboards, dripping taps and mysterious scratching sounds keeping us on our toes. At Activision, with no access to interviews or presentations for the forthcoming expansion Destiny: Rise of Iron , we booked time with Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare in a behind-closed-doors session. The publisher pulled out of its regular booth appearance, instead opting for a meeting room presence upstairs, away from the chaos of the show floor. Two levels from Infinite Warfare were shown in the theatre, one of them the same superb gameplay clip shown at the PlayStation press conference. Here, art director Brian Horton reiterated that the spaceship battles, reminiscent of Ace Combat on steroids, are all completely off-rails. There’s been a lot of negativity surrounding the game since ‘that’ trailer was released

GAMES

After ducking and weaving through the crowd like a quarterback, we settled into theatre presentations

God ofWar

That's an E3 fact... More than 1600 products were on display.

back in early May. The haters are always going to hate, but from what we saw at E3, it

JULY 2016

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