Part Two of our top picks from the array of new games shown at E3 2014:

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt  (PC, PS4, Xbox One)

There has not been a shortage of competitors to Skyrim as of late. While Bethesda did not create the first open-world RPG, the immense success of Skyrim helped cultivate what could be a reconnaissance of the genre. While BioWare responded with its third Dragon Age, CD Projekt RED responded with the final instalment in its trilogy starring the white-haired Geralt of Rivia.

Building on the large, expansive environments of the first two Witcher games, Wild Hunt elects to feature a full, seamless open world, said to be thirty-five times the size of The Witcher 2, 20% bigger than Skyrim, and comprising of multiple regions that make up the Northern Kingdoms, each with their distinct flavours and customs. The developers have also promised that this world is also player-driven. Your decisions and actions can shape the world, its politics, and how its denizens will behave towards you. All the while, ambience and the presentation as demonstrated in the trailer could be one of the best ever seen in a videogame, at least on a PC, most certainly.

Skyrim’s combat may have been little to brag about, with reports from many players that technical hitches were often exploited, but Wild Hunt’s Polish developers are doubling down to ensure that combat is as integral to the overall package as the sense of scale, exploration and roleplaying. Dodging and parrying are necessities, and rather than simply swing away with a silver sword, or idly fire with a crossbow, the player can draw upon the Sign system to utilise abilities and spells in varied combinations when the heat of the battle demands it. On top of that, underwater combat and traversal make their debut, and players will need to be on their feet and keep eyes peeled for menageries of different monster types from Drowners to harpies that require different strategies and an adaptive playstyle.

RPG fans must keep an eye on this one, even if they are not too familiar with the Witcher series. If they nail it, we may soon be looking at the new defining pinnacle of the western RPG genre.

Out: 24 February 2015

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain  (PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One)

To continue our theme of everything being open-world, MGS V will officially take the beloved series into the realm of vast, open environments, without tossing out the renowned signature stealth mechanics of the franchise. The legendarily long cutscenes are now overhauled, and have become intertwined with the gameplay to create a seamless experience. Protagonist Big Boss can navigate the landscape on horseback, passing crevices, canyons and livestock of Afghanistan, and for some reason or another (perhaps to convey realism, or perhaps Kojima simply felt like it), the horse will occasionally stop to defecate.

While the trailer shown in E3 does not show anything too new, outside of storyline snippets as seen in cutscenes, it is the information we do know that makes this one of the games to look out for. A dynamic weather system can block out clear skies in almost an instant with an unceremonious sandstorm, forcing a radical change in the player’s strategy. Guards will still have patrol patterns, and veterans of the franchise need not fear the sacrificing of good old stealth and the need to be slow, calculating and precise, in favour of an open-world. To my delight, the cardboard box is in. This time, Big Boss “Venom Snake” can dive out of the box, shoot down an unsuspecting target with a silenced tranquiliser, and dive back in as though nothing had happened.

All eyes are on Kojima to see if the promises can be met with reality. To fans of the series that have been irked by the business practice of selling Ground Zeroes as a standalone prologue for the price it was marked with for such a short game, The Phantom Pain can easily assuage such concerns.

Out: TBA 2015

Sunset Overdrive (Xbox One)

It was during Microsoft’s conference when yet another gritty, grey shooter appeared. A beleaguered US marine ducked behind the cover of crates as veiled terrorists furiously continued to shoot at him. I rolled my eyes, expecting yet another game seeking to cash in on the saturated duck-and-shoot military FPS space already well familiar to Xbox gamers, when Sunset Overdrive’s player character unceremoniously bursts into the scene to instantly belittle the same old grey military cover shooters. Though perhaps not the most creative method to launch digs at other shooters, Insomniac succeeded nonetheless, and extracted the very reaction of which the trailer was designed to do.

An ocean of colour supplants the serious grey, and everything is vibrant, lively, and just pure, unadulterated action. Sunset Overdrive is an open-world third-person shooter that completely dispenses with the formulaic cover-based shooting for a game that mixes parkour with action, and plenty of velocity. The player can hop around the environment and glide across railings, all the while wielding an arsenal of weapons from the sensible to the downright frivolous, to dispatch zombies around them. Yes, I said zombies, except they’re infected by a contaminated energy drink brand going around.

The trailer may be cheesy, but most importantly, it looks like absolute, fast-paced fun, and a far cry from what Insomniac’s most recent games have been (I’m chiefly looking at you, Fuse!). The game’s tagline is straight to the point. “It’s a f**king videogame”.

Out: 28 October 2014

Rainbow Six: Siege (PC, PS4, Xbox One)

Rainbow Six: Patriots is no more. To replace it, Ubisoft have stepped up this E3 to carve its own space in the multiplayer first-person shooter arena. The FPS front is not without its dominating players, and is often said to be very much saturated, and chiefly ruled the duumvirate of Call of Duty and Battlefield. Realising this, Ubisoft have elected to dispense with the competitors’ delicacies of large-scale Michael Bay bombasts of countless troops and vehicles storming ruined metropolis streets and tearing down skyscrapers. Instead, Rainbow Six: Siege seeks to be something much more condensed, focused, and arguably, much more tense and adrenaline-filled.

The debut gameplay showed five players working together as a spec ops unit to infiltrate a house in an affluent neighbourhood to rescue a female hostage from the throes of heavily armed criminals, who are also controlled other players, rather than AI. There is a much greater emphasis on the need to play tactically, as simply running and gunning serves as a disservice to yourself, as given the smaller focus, every man alive is a precious resource to have on your team. Thus, there is an ever-greater need than before to communicate with teammates, to plan procedures, and to tightly cooperate in order to flush out the enemy and successfully extract the hostage unharmed.

Ubisoft have lately garnered an ill reputation for dishonesty (Watch Dogs’ actual retail version is graphically and technically said to be inferior to the misleading 2012 E3 debut), so some pause and salt should be taken in regards to this game’s debut footage. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that this time, as Rainbow Six is unbounded by the previous consoles, there are good grounds to be optimistic that the final game can look like what was shown. If so, expect to see damage physics in the most incredibly realistic way yet. Bullet holes saturate the walls, blasting huge holes and chunks out, as both sides gradually level the house down. One segment features the spec ops team working out how to breach one of the rooms. While four players worked on bringing the door down, the fifth player went up the stairs into another room, blew up the floor and infiltrated the room by surprise from above.

This electric combination of tight cooperation, razor sharp tension, and an astonishing destructive environment may certainly set this game apart from its shooter contemporaries. This will not be a game for every player, but for aficionados of the FPS, and those excited for something after SWAT 4, they should not ignore this new challenger.

Out: TBA 2015

Assassin’s Creed Unity (PC, PS4, Xbox One)

The Assassin’s Creed series as a whole has generated mounting apathy, despite the positive reception for its individual games, the most recent of which being the highly acclaimed Black Flag. Unity, due for late October this year, does little to assuage the stigma of an annualised franchise, but this first instalment in the series for new console hardware may just offer the radical overhaul that this annualised series most desperately needs.

Gone are some of the series’ staples. No longer are incongruent haystacks dotted conveniently around the city, meaning leap of faiths as we know it are now history. Protagonist assassin Arno will instead perform controlled descents, using the environment around him, along with a series of fluid and complex animations, to quickly drop down from a viewpoint, and allowing the player to control the descent, which presumably opens up new tactical arrangements for air assassinations. Gone is the multiplayer seen in recent games in favour of 4-player co-op featuring Arno and three other customisable assassins as you work together with your hooded allies to sack the nearest food-hoarding marquis and feed him to the nearest mob. Combat receives a facelift, and though the exact new mechanics of which are yet to be fully explained, producers have assured players that it will be harder, and no longer can one simply serenely wait to counter and kill with a single button.

While most previous Assassin’s Creed games featured several packed cities, with Black Flag commanding a whole stretch of an open-world Caribbean to explore, Unity focuses all of the action solely on revolutionary Paris. In exchange, Ubisoft have promised that interiors of buildings will become an integral part of the gameplay, to add a wholly new dimension to the core stealth experience, and a new dimension to the open world itself. For example, a marquis’s banquet in his manor can be infiltrated, while a dedicated stealth mode allows Arno to quietly circumnavigate through guarded rooms. Outside, crowds gather for noblemen’s heads, and uninhibited by old hardware, Unity is able to pack thousands of NPCs in one place, which would place considerable necessity on parkour to get around.

This could well be the shot in the arm the franchise needs. Let us hope they succeed.

Out: 28 October 2014 [divider_top]

What do you make of our favourites from E3? Which games are you excited to play? Tweet @BoarGames