Mar 16, 2008

Editorial: Play.com Live!

Categories: Features

The UK’s first gaming convention in quite a few years took place over the weekend and the Level Select team went to Wembley stadium to see what Play.com and the gaming industry had put on show for us.

The event was spread over multiple floors of two of Wembley’s conference rooms, with the majority of the action taking place in the Corinthian suite. Being the larger of the two suites the Corinthian was jam packed with developers such as Activision Ubisoft, Codemasters and Sega all vying for our attention with bright lights and loud music. Just above on the mezzanine more developers were showing their wares, with the likes of Capcom Sony, Square Enix and THQ show casing games.

The Corinthian and its mezzanine were situated on the second floor, and the other half of the show was on the third floor in the Atrium. It was more of a intimate affair in the Atrium and only had a few stands on display, along with an over 18′s section, a sneak peek at Far Cry 2 and access to the Unreal Tournament final.

There were lots of gaming booths dotted around all floors with notable titles including Lego Indiana Jones, Haze, GT 5 Prologue, Bourne Conspiracy, Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 and Soul Calibur IV. The rest of the gaming booths were taken up by games that had already been released with Halo3 Guitar Hero III Unreal Tournament 3 hogging the lime light.

Aside from the playable demos on offer there were also videos of upcoming games, Square Enix’s stand comprised entirely of just video footage of popular series Final Fantasy (and it many upcoming iterations), Dragon Quest and The World Ends With You. Capcom repeated the Street Fighter IV teaser that has been seen by everyone who has an internet connection, while Sierra showed video footage of both Prototype and Ghostbusters which was experiencing technical issues and was rarely seen to be working.

As you’d expect from any convention the highlight comes from interaction, this can be in the form of playing games, talking to representatives or listening to a speaker. While there was lots to interact with at Play.com Live the reaction from a lot of attendees was that of disappointment at the lack of new software on show and a lot of the people I spoke to had noticed that most of the games on show were already available and indeed most had already purchased themselves.

Taking the opportunity to speak with many of the representatives was easily the most beneficial part of Play.com Live, some I found out to be members of the Q & A teams and were more than happy to answer questions although nothing too specific. Others were simply people hired to help people and look nice, and weren’t very good at answering questions outside of their prescribed roles.

The show highlight was undoubtedly the Far Cry 2 demonstration by Ubisoft in the Atrium. It was the only developer demonstration at play.com Live and was worth the 30 min wait. Once seated we were treated to a projection screen sized play test along with a commentary.

Far Cry 2 features a brand new the game engine, known as the Dunia Engine which delivers more realistic and destructible environments, which now includes destructible trees as well as a night and day cycle and non scripted enemy AI. The game’s story on takes place in a fictional war torn African country in an “Apocalypse Now” style Scenario, where you must hunt down and kill a local war lord known at the Jackal. The boasts a 60 km square radius of open ended gameplay, with no restrictions and no loading screens within any part of the game, approaching any aspect of the game as you see fit.

Also discussed was weapon durability and vehicle maintenance, basic upkeep is required from prolonged usage of weapons is required and was succinctly demonstrated when in the middle of a fire fight the gun jammed and saw the avatar smashing the barrel of the gun with his fist.