Microsoft E3 2014 Media Briefing

Dragon Age Inquisition

Electronic Arts has released the ‘Lead Them or Fall’ trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third major game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series. Dragon Age: Inquisition is due for release on October 7.

A cataclysmic event which plunges the land of Thedas into turmoil forms the backdrop to the game. It then falls to you and your party of legendary heroes to restore order as you lead the ‘Inquisition’, hunting down the agents of chaos. I thought all the Dragon Age: Inquisition footage would be showing up at the EA press event, but I was incorrect. Microsoft managed to wrangle a teaser-ish trailer for the game for their show as well.

Halo Master Chief Collection

Let’s start with what’s important here: you get four Halo games in one – Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 4, each with their full single-player campaigns and multiplayer offerings intact. Plus, various new prologue and epilogue cinematics will be used to bridge the narrative between each game, as well as set up the events of Halo 5: Guardians, coming in 2015. Those cinematics will come courtesy of video production firm Blur Studio, which previously provided the massively impressive CGI cutscenes seen in the RTS spin-off Halo Wars.

The game will be released on November 11th exclusively for Xbox One and will come packed with access to the Halo 5: Guardians beta. What is unknown are the plans for digital distribution, resolution and frame-rate, or if the games will surface on other platforms as well. Personally I’m hoping for a PC release.

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a story-driven, next-generation open world role-playing game, set in a fantasy universe full of meaningful choices and impactful consequences. In The Witcher 3, you play as Geralt of Rivia, one of a dying caste of monster hunters, and embark on an epic journey in a war-ravaged world that will inevitably lead you to confront a foe darker than anything humanity has faced so far—the Wild Hunt. Seeing an extended gameplay demo on Microsoft’s stage came as a happy surprise despite knowing how unhappy the developers were that Microsoft had decided to delay the release.

The Divison

Microsoft had shown a laundry list of games during the hour and a half event. Of all the games previewed, three titles stood out the most.  The first two were adventure based games Assassin’s Creed Unity and The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. But one shooter that stood out as undeniably the most next-gen was Tom Clancy’s The Division. The new gameplay footage is entirely composed of multiplayer gameplay, with plenty of teamwork and coordination involved.

The Division is a third-person tactical shooter based around an online world. This trailer does a great job of describing what the game will be like to play, instead of the more teaser oriented trailers of the past. Ubisoft is investing a lot into the idea that open-world games are the future. Both Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs have paid off, so this isn’t all that surprising. So this is set to be one of their more ambitious upcoming open-world games that was unfortunately recently announced to be delayed to 2015. But that’s ok as long as they only improve the game and not tear it apart like we’ve seen done to many games in the past.

Thanks to IGN and Gamespot for providing the included videos.