Videogame BS I wanted to talk about.
E3 Things (canceled)
Ubisoft officially backed out of E3 March 28th leaving well um…. yeah while many publishers (Take-2, Blizzard, Epic, etc) haven’t confirmed they’ll be their or not. the mains of the event Microsoft, Sony, EA-ish, and now Ubisoft. have all confirmed they wont be attending E3 this year. I say EA just out of they haven’t had a presence for awhile now holding their own event down the street. which has for awhile been slowly becoming the new norm. E3 becoming this was in the tea leave long before Covid started with Nintendo leaving focusing solely on their Directs. EA and Devolver Digital having their event separate from the main show. Covid just expedited this process, going to a solely digital event. that said Ubisoft is going to host their own online live event dubbed Ubisoft Forward event at the same time as E3 on June 12th.
“While we initially intended to have an official E3 presence, we’ve made the subsequent decision to move in a different direction, and will be holding a Ubisoft Forward Live event on 12th June in Los Angeles. We look forward to sharing more details with our players very soon.”
Ubisoft
That all said I’m going to miss the old E3 I liked having watch parties. all the press conferences the same-ish day. while i recognize its just really entertaining marketing it was fun and a good laugh at time. I cant be the only one that remembers when Microsoft had a super car lowered from the heavens for Forza motorsports. the awkward/cringe moments of live events being replaced with this while still awkward and or cringe pre-recorded sanitized versions.
E3 has been just completely canceled now I’m sad
D&D Direct
I didn’t know this shit was happen this flew under the radar I only saw this because of a PlayStation trailer. for one of the announcements which I will get to later here. I’m only going to go over a couple of things that was announced.
First being the Minecraft Dungeon and Dragons game which looks kinda awesome we didn’t see much. but the trailer shows of a number of iconic creatures from D&D ranging from a large Golden Dragon to a beholder. their was snippets of the menu where one could see a stats page and a abilities page. along with a weapon and armor upgrades system it looks like a full RPG just with the signature Minecraft 16-bit style. I’m kinda excited for this it just looks like it will be good old fun to play.
We finally got a look at their Virtual Table Top experience (VTT) running in Unreal Engine 5 they had some DnD personalities playing a game. that they cut up to show highlights from. two things really stood out to me the first being the integration of DnD beyond and importing characters from that into the VTT and at least from what they showed seemed super easy which is dope. Second being a comment Kale Stutzman the DM for this group and principal Game Designer, D&D Digital made.
What I want to do is connect all my friends and play with them They’re on their computer, they’re on their phones, Theyre on their game consoles, but we’re all together playing through the same virtual table top. So that’s the dream right there
Kale Stutzman principal Game Designer, D&D Digital.
He does that “that’s the dream” at the end their but I think this coming to consoles and phone is dope. I really like that idea. the VTT will have models for all the monsters in the monster manual. Which again is super cool, they didn’t go into DM tools in this snippet. But i hope their robust and like character I know you can create encounters in DnD beyond. i hope its just as easy to import that stuff and implement community made thing into this VTT. While this was the first time we’ve seen their own VTT theirs still a ton of question yet to be answered on what exactly this thing can do.
