E3 2019 - Ubisoft

I wake up in a cold sweat, my eyes instinctively darting to the nearest exit. I slowly draw myself from my bed and cross off another date from the calendar. It will be here soon. It's coming.

Of course the nightmares never left. Every morning is a gasping escape from the clutches of that traumatic time. Everywhere I go I see its face staring back at me but then perhaps it's my fault for frequenting the zoo so much. I am a haunted man, haunted by the spectre of a creepy dancing panda in a circus ringleader's costume.

I know its coming for me and I am utterly, pitifully powerless to stop it. My life has been devoured by this monster and its unknowable dark desires. My name is all that remains from day to day untarnished by the ravages of time. My name is Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft.

I breathe a sigh, I mean-Yves breathes a sigh of relief as the conference starts with a far classier orchestral performance, clearly a page copied from Sony's playbook. They play a kind of greatest hits of Assassin's Creed while the screen behind displays footage of a similar nature.

Turns out in the end, they were literally just a video game soundtrack orchestra promoting a tour. There's no actual game announcement behind this opening. Oh well.

Our first proper look at something comes in the form of Watchdogs 3 or "Legion" as it's being subtitled. Set in a dystopian London with some rather direct commentary on Brexit, It actually looks very promising, polished, entertaining and ambitious.

The biggest question is whether it can actually pull off its "everyone as a playable character" and permadeath premise. On top of this whether said formula will manage to give the characters any depth, individuality, story and interaction with each other. From a realistic point of view you would expect to see some pretty shallow templates and lots of duplicates to make the idea work but this initial look seems to suggest otherwise.

It's got Real-time Granny Assassin gameplay. I didn't know how much I wanted that until now.

Cautious optimism for Legion then but full marks for Ubisoft showing actual gameplay, at length and it proving genuinely impressive. So far none of the other shows have managed that.

Next we're told that Mythic Quest is a TV show from the Always Sunny In Philadelphia people parodying World Of Warcraft. So it's a TV show about making a video game which I guess qualifies it to be here but I can't say anything really jumped out at me. I might have been too distracted by the presenter closing on "without further adieu" which I'm going to hope is an in-joke from something.

Adventure Time is crossing over with Brawlhalla which barely means anything to me but maybe it does to you. Jon Bernthal is crossing over with Ghost Recon which barely means anything to anyone since we see more of Jon's dog on stage than actual gameplay.

Both games seem entirely reliant on star power and aren't offering a great deal beyond "hey look recognisable character/actor." In the latter's case, Jon sure gets plenty of time to act I guess but I'm starting to forget if this a video game conference or an actors award ceremony.

That said "E3 But With Dogs" is something I 100% support.

A quickly revolving conveyor belt of hosts and speakers keep on about Ghost Recon with ever more cringe and ever less tact. Ghost Recon Breakpoint also has a Terminator tie in because the producers need to buy favour at this point and everyone's apparently forgotten the actual films are shit now.

Poor Sam Fisher has been reduced to a character in a Ghost Recon mobile game and the conference's rapid shift reaches terminal velocity. Lulled into a false sense of security the Just Dance nightmare and its demonic panda overlord return and I'm told by hospital staff I went into a near-fatal anaphylactic shock at this point.

JustDon't2019

Once I was discharged and returned to the conference stream there were a host of underwhelming announcements awaiting me. For Honor's got a ghost lady, Rainbow Six has got zombies and The Division 2 has got a whole lot of nothing. Three separate episodes of nothing but still basically nothing. Of course they have to plug their upcoming Netflix movie as well.

A lady sounding as if she's taken tranquillisers to try and subdue the insufferable glee bursting from everyone's grinning eyes reveals Uplay Plus. Why anyone would want to pay for more of Ubisoft's digital beartrap clamped around their game library is a mystery to me but I appreciate this lady's attempt to be less punchable and cheese chuffing than every other theatritwat in this production.

Ubisoft's big closing title is from the creators of the last Assassin's Creed and is called "Gods and Monsters" Going full on into the mythology they've skirted around in AC for a while now. What does it play like? No idea. We're shown a frankly laughably brief trailer where all I could glean is that it's got the unappealing rubbery cartoon artstyle also shared by about fifty other games across E3 this year.

You could probably fit the entire trailer into a gif so I've elected to display this instead.

What a catastrophic decline into shit this conference was. It's nice to have had such a clear trajectory to observe for once but Watchdogs Legion was basically all they had. Their annual hour plus conference had essentially one game worth seeing. Given the grievances Bethesda had to overcome and EA being EA, this should've been a cakewalk for Ubisoft. Instead it was just cake...a urinal cake.

Please leave me alone.