A week ago we reported on this E3 gameplay footage from The Crowesque stealthy-sim Thief (no longer called Thief 4), but since then there's been a full demonstration and interview with Eidos Montreal producer Stephane Roy released thanks to GamesHQMedia. Here's the video in full. Gothic.
Watch Dogs! Not a command, regrettably, though we could do that all day. Instead, Ubisoft Montreal’s topical, free-roaming Rorschach-’em-up. It tore up E3 last year, and looks set to do the same again with what appears to be a genuinely groundbreaking topsy-turvy multiplayer mode.
The brief star of this Watch Dogs trailer intended for E3 may looks like a Montreal game designer - just like those working on Ubisoft’s free-roaming commentary on contemporary connectedness - but turns out to be nothing of the sort. The doubt sets in when he tells his partner he’s stuck in the office (spoiler: he’s not in the office), and the lies gets exponentially more dramatic from there.
Time was being a pirate meant you could be the definition of sartorial cool from the ears up in exchange for the odd buckled swash. No longer. These days you’ll be lucky to have a weevil in your ship’s biscuit for company while you wait for Rainbow Six to roll in and shoot you in the head.
One thing’s for certain: the golden age of pirating is over. At least until Assassin’s Creed IV goes gold, that is. Corroborating evidence below decks.
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When Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag pre-orders were announced, one of the harder sells among its trove of trinkets was The Watch - a dedicated fan service that we didn’t know the first thing about. Well, now we do: it’s a hub for pirate-pertinent information and discussion designed to bypass us, Joe Blog.
“Hello! And welcome to, er, the video that, is you’re watching right now, and - I’m Dean Evans, the creative director for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon."
If you’ve read the premise for Blood Dragon, it’s likely your brain initiated automatic HAHAHAH protocol long before you reached the bit about a “rogue cyborg army". If not, and if one of your remaining questions about the game before its May 1 release is, “Precisely how does a cyborg army go rogue?", you’re in luck.
Somehow, someway, a release-state 15-minute intro sequence for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has been filched from an electro-drawer at Ubisoft Montreal and tranferred to the hive mind via a Flash Gordon drive. The video is precisely long enough to confirm that the summer belongs to openly parodic ‘80s-future cyborg commandoing.
Of all this year’s PC-related April Fools’ nonsense, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was surely the most elaborate and far-fetched. Quelle surprise, then, to discover it’s no fool at all, but rather a very real standalone shooter set in an immediately dated 2007 sci-fi world - an “‘80s VHS vision of the future".
So I’m listening back to my recording of the chat I had with Crytek’s Cevat Yerli, and there’s a bit that’s all creaking chairs and cleared throats. We’ve talked Warface, free to play and the saving of Vigil. I’ve been impressed by the clarity of vision of a man who talks about the future as if it’s already happened. Now there’s time for one more question, and I’m flipping through my notebook, looking for something I scribbled on the plane.
Is it time already to return to dullard Derek’s adventures through temporality and space? ‘When is it not?’, ask Ubisoft, hurling a crudely photoshopped mock-up of an assassin in a pirate’s hat into our laps. ‘That’s Assassin’s Creed 4’.
Watch Dogs, the forthcoming open-world game of grim techno-crime, hacking and changing traffic lights, will be a PlayStation 4 launch title, later receiving a cross-platform release that will bring it to the PC. As the PlayStation 4 is set to launch during the holiday season, this likely means PC gamers will get to try it in early 2014.
Assassin’s Creed 3’s Connor might not have the fire of an Ezio or a literally anybody else, but that charisma vacuum doubles as a handy cash-hoover. 12 million people bought the game during Ubisoft’s last financial quarter - nearly 70% more than did AC: Revelations.
What’s more, Far Cry 3 raised some eyebrows at the French publisher by performing better than they thought it capable of, to the tune of 4.5 million copies sold. You’ll hear a few ragged cheers from the PCGamesN camp for that one.
Nobody’s sure whether it’s because Ubisoft have seen Zero Dark Thirty, or because of the pursed lips that greeted Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s E3 demo. But an interactive torture scene demonstrated to the public last year - in which Sam Fisher pokes a man with a knife in an attempt to drain answers from his body - is now gone from the game.
Good afternoon, all. Would you like to watch Vaas Montenegro erratically drive favourite victim Jason Brody across the snowy wastes of Liberty City in a characteristically inventive form of torture?
I shouldn’t like him. He’s a lunatic. A psychopath. A deranged and dangerous force of nature that has no concept of right, or wrong. He rules Far Cry 3’s island chain through fear and torture. He kills for pleasure, for thrills and occasionally just because he can.
But he’s really fun, and I kind of love him.
Why?
Vaas is one of the games industry’s most interesting collaborations. He’s probably the first virtual performance since Alyx that I’ve actually believed in.
The colonialism in Far Cry 3 that has been condemned for in some corners of the internet is in fact an exaggeration and critique of the same in pop culture, the game’s writer has patiently explained. 
Pond-crossed patriots, cover your ears. The husky voiceover setup for Assassin’s Creed 3’s first morsel of DLC plays so easily into the hands of casual anti-American commentators you’re simply better off not knowing. 
Patch! Woh-oh! That’s just my little attempt to connect with you Generation X Flash Gordon fans, there. But the truth is I hated Ted and have little love for your wobbly spaceships and mercy-averse Mings. Let’s talk about something we can all enjoy instead - a more stable Far Cry with better support for friend-making.
If you want to succeed in the big, bad world of Far Cry 3 there’s something you need to take on board immediately: you need bigger bags. Bigger ammo bags. Bigger loot bags. Bigger pockets for fuel and rockets and guns and mines and things that go boom in the night. And syringes. Always syringes. And wallets. 
