Tokyo Game Show 2013 was shooter mania. Of the games I saw and played, at least three of them were big shooters that are coming to (or at least I hope will come to) PlayStation 4.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
The first FPS I played was Wolfenstein: The New Order, and I did so on PlayStation 4 hardware. We might be getting tired of World War II, but we’re not getting tired of space Nazis, according to this game. Yeah, this time around, Hitler’s army has quite a few technological advancements that not only were unavailable back in the 1940’s, they aren’t even available to us yet. With all the big robots and high-tech weapons in the screens and trailers I was shown, this game looks almost like a “WWII, if it happened in the year 2100” situation.
Whether the setting is in the future, the past, or somewhere in between, the point remains that the game looked very good. The details of the castle, the lights, boxes, ropes, guns, the enemies, my allies, the special effects, everything looked like it should for next-generation shooter.
Aiming was a little bit more difficult than in most shooters, as it seems this game either lacks quick scoping or the demo had it disabled. While I was thrown for a loop at first I actually got used to it quicker than I would have expected. Eventually I grew to welcome the extra difficulty. The demo wasn’t too long, but it did what it needed to do: it showed me a very nice looking environment, it gave me a fun play experience, and gave me just enough of a taste of what’s to come in the final version of Wolfenstein: The New Order . No release date has been specified, so it’ll probably be dropping some time in 2014. Watch for it on PlayStation 4 as well as PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and PC.
Battlefield 4
My copy of Battlefield 3 is still sitting in its shrinkwrap (I’m busy!), so I’m sorry if portions of my raving about BF4 can also be found in its predecessor. The PS4 version of Battlefield 4 was the main attraction at EA’s Tokyo Game Show booth, and it looked damn good. The first thing you notice in almost any game is of course its visuals. And when said visuals are as good as Battlefield 4‘s, that feeling sticks with you for a while. I’m not one of those guys who can spot whether something is 60 frames per second or not just by looking at it, but what I can tell you is that it looked and felt fast.
I loved parachuting into a place and whipping out a gun while I was falling. Again, I don’t know if that was already in BF3 or not, but either way, it looked good and felt good the whole time. The videos I saw suggested a ton of different stages, as well. The level variety (and visuals within them) was impressive.
The urban environment I played in was gigantic and ever-changing. In the trailers we were shown before play, DICE talked a lot about its new buzzword, “Levolution,” (shown above) which is how they describe the ever-changing stages. Damage to buildings, roads, and other parts of the surroundings came into play, and could have a big impact on how we viewed a situation.
Among the things I learned about Battlefield 4, I learned that I am a total noob. But if this TGS demo is any indication, I’ll have a blast getting better. Battlefield 4 will be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in North America and Japan in late October (Nov. 1 for Europe), and on the next-gen PlayStation 4 and Xbox One alongside the November launches. Or, in Japan, February. Sad face. The PC version comes at the same time as the PS3 and 360 versions, though Battlefield 4 will skip PC in Japan.
Titanfall
And then we come to Titanfall. Now, now, don’t kill me, I know what you’re thinking: Titanfall is only announced for Xbox One, 360, and PC. But rumors are thickening that it could move to PlayStation 4 sometime in the future, and even if it doesn’t, hell, it was interesting enough that I’d like to tell you about it, even on a website that’s only about PlayStation stuff. (Are we not all gamers, in the end?) I’ll stick it in an update with these instead of making it its own post, so that you guys don’t behead me. We good? OK.
The Titanfall demo put me in a 4-on-4 deathmatch. The objective was simple of course: kill the other team members and don’t get killed yourself. At the beginning of the match, a timer starts counting down towards the dropping of a mech suit. You start out on foot, of course, but when your mech suit — called a Titan — falls from the sky, you can get in and really start busting people up. There are, however, special guns and special soldier classes that can make even the smallest enemies dangerous to your robot, so don’t get cocky.
One of Titanfall‘s most heavily advertised features was the parkour type navigation of the battleground. Not only could our vertical leap be greatly increased with the double jump, but we were actively encouraged by people at the Microsoft booth to try running up the walls and then double jumping, and then catching another wall, and jumping off of that, doing all kinds of crazy acrobatics in the sky in order to reach crazy heights and take our opponents by surprise. But of course, since the 8 of us were playing Titanfall for the first time in our lives, we weren’t quite comfortable with these new mechanics. Apart from a few double jumps, I didn’t really see anyone doing the crazy stuff that the tutorial videos showed. I imagine with time and experience, that would of course change.
An interesting twist came at the end of the match. Instead of one team being declared the winner and the game ending, our team was revealed to have won… and then we were commanded to chase down fleeing enemies. The other team, meanwhile, had to run to an evacuation ship in the middle of the city. The result of the match would not change due to anything that happened after the whistle and the decision, but we could still fight and kill each other. My team kept laying bullets on our opponents even though the day was already ours, and we got some score bonuses for doing so. Like huge jerks, we centralized around the evac point and waited for our beaten foes to inevitably come to us. It felt dastardly, but awesome. Were our fortunes reversed, I would not begrudge a man for doing the same thing to me.
Like the other two shooters in this writeup, Titanfall looked stellar. It was running on a high-end PC, the specs of which were not made known to us, but the point is, it was pure eye candy. Moreover, it was fun as heck to play.
I played this game at the Microsoft Xbox One booth, but it was hooked up to a high end PC and we were all using 360 controllers. The Xbox One version was not available. Sometimes games skip PC versions in Japan, and for that reason I asked Microsoft is the PC version would be coming to Japan at all, and the representatives were unsure. What was sure, is that I saw no promoting of Titanfall for PC or 360 at all; it was being largely shown as an Xbox One exclusive. So if you’re like me and you’re living in Asia, but not sure if an Xbox One is worth a pile of cash, then perhaps importing the PC version of Titanfall might be the way you have to go. That is, of course, if it really doesn’t come to PlayStation 4.
