The question is whether they would have achived the same level of improvement if they had released the PC version by it's self. From the trailer it looks like they have made major asset changes especially in terrian detail. If they had the resources available to have all the content and engine updates ready by XMAS last year they would have had it ready for the console launches. Bottom line is if they launched the PC version before the current gen console versions they wouldn't have had the time and resources to add the visual polish they have. All three versions will come when they have added the next gen polish they wanted.

As for Assassin's I think Ubisoft know what they are doing. The co-op focus is Unity's Boat combat, if done right it could be a pretty different experiance. Especially if they tweak the AI and dificulty to push the teamwork aspect. And the current gen only focus with new tech is also a draw. The increased scale and veriaty of the crowds, enterable buildings etc are pretty nice additions. If they can also change things up a bit in terms of mission veriaty it could be a compelling package.

Rockstar launched GTA V in September. Launching the PS4/X1 version by Christmas would have been a slap in teh face to those who bought it less than 3 months before for the current gen consoles.

But that wouldn't have happened with the PC version. In any case, they've done it this way, so that's it. 

The enterable buildings... we'll see. I doubt it goes beyond a few and obvious buildings. More people in the streets and biger cities is good, but not groundbreaking.

And co-op... well, it's good for those who like it, but useless for those (me) that don't.

Assassin's Creed Unity's Paris will be the largest city in the series

Despite Ubisoft’s intermittent fondness for historical accuracy, we’re informed that they've occasionally strayed from 1:1 geographical recreation of in-game locations. Port Royal wasn’t a small town opposite Kingston, but the centre of shipping commerce in the Caribbean sea. Constantinople law in the thirteenth century, it turns out, didn’t require every house to have its own hay bale.

But Assassin’s Creed Unity’s Paris will be closest in scale to its namesake than any other city in the series - bigger than all of Black Flag’s islands combined.

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Dying Light – E3 2014 Screenshots

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=115959425#post115959425

That's sooner than I thought!

Fly through a letterbox in space in the Elite: Dangerous E3 trailer

It’s a relief to discover that despite their affair with the people’s publisher, Kickstarter, Frontier Developments aren’t too cool for E3. Braben and friends have made the transatlantic trip to LA - and then taken the mammoth walk from the hotel to the show floor - to demo the game in person.

And they’ve released a new trailer. We’ve seen plenty of astounding footage from the already-released Elite: Dangerous premium beta, but in this video a spaceship zooms directly into the heart of a gigantic cube, as if to upset Peter Molyneux. You can’t get that anywhere else.

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Civilization: Beyond Earth E3 footage: "We're fans of science as much as science fiction"

I’m trying to listen to the things Firaxis’ developers are saying about Beyond Earth, but really I can’t get over how young they look. They look like Carmack and Romero making Doom in the ‘90s. They look like the stars of the next Hollywood college comedy you’ll yawn through the trailer of.

But co-lead designers David McDonough and Will Miller are classic Firaxis designer-programmers who’ve been around long enough to form some very strong opinions about what Civ is - and apply them to Beyond Earth.

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A Realm in Peril: villainy has an oddly-masked new face in Final Fantasy XIV

This trailer for A Realm Reborn’s next big plot twist ticks off plenty of JRPG stereotypes - a stellar soundtrack; unparalleled boss fights; unbearable cuteness; dialogue so unnatural as to be irritating, if the voice acting weren’t so entertaining.

But MMOs are the sphere where Eastern genre conventions meet West - storytelling standards are low, all battles are real-time, and a game like Final Fantasy XIV can be the best place to quest on any continent.

So, er - go easy on it, yeah? It's actually very good.

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Challenge accepted: Bohemia Interactive teases Take On Mars' upcoming update

Bohemia Interactive has been teasing new content for its Early Access science and exploration game, Take On Mars at E3. It’s been on Steam Early Access for a while, giving players a taste of the scientific experiments and frontier exploration astronauts might get up to once humanity sets foot on the red planet. 

The upcoming update will expand Expedition One. The first part of Expedition One was released in the latest update, letting astronauts fiddle around with a space buggy, added the Cydonia Mensae area and chucked in a 3D printer to help with habitat construction. Part two is due out later this year. 

Take a gander below at some of what astronauts can expect from their expedition to Mars. 

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Dragon Age: Inquisition at E3 2014: stunning

Let’s get it out of the way: the E3 demo of Dragon Age: Inquisition is absolutely stunning. It is rolling blunderbuss of highlights, a demonstration of the game’s massive open world, a chance to understand how Dragon Age’s pause based combat has been refined and improved, and a first glimpse of the weight of the game’s story choices. 

The warm, rapturous applause the demo received was richly deserved. 

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Kerbal Space Program is getting close to "scope completion"

Kerbal Space Program’s 0.24 update, which was pushed back so that the budgets and contracts update would be put in the game at the same time, is nearing completion. 

“On the development side, we now have ahead of us what is unmistakably the last stretch for Contracts and Budgets on this update, so we shouldn’t be far now from a system which will obviously still need a lot of content added to it, sure, but should be able to handle just about any idea we can throw at it,” Squad said in a blog update.

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H1Z1: a sandbox where you can build a fortress and then set fire to brawling wolves and zombies

In the bowels of E3, we’re at the mercy of zombies. Not sleep-deprived, hungover journalists, but the rotting, walking cadavers that populate SOE’s new post-apocalyptic survival MMO, H1Z1. 

It’s a single server, no resets and 64 square kilometres (at the moment) of forests, deserts, towns and zombies. And at first, it sounds a lot like DayZ. That was always going to be the hurdle for SOE, that immediate comparison that everyone leaps to. 

But this isn’t DayZ, and ex-Counter Strike pro, now H1Z1 senior designer, Jimmy Whisenhunt offers plenty of reasons why the two games are different and can co-exist. 

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Guerrillas in the Mist: Homefront: The Revolution gets dirty at E3

Crytek has shown off a slice of rebellious gameplay from Homefront: The Revolution at E3, which was streamed on Twitch yesterday. It’s the same demo Jules wrote about a week ago, following a resistance member as he meets up with other players to stage a jail break in a police station. 

It’s enough to make you entirely forget about its predecessor. 

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Enemies at the Gates: Watch every man die in Sniper Elite 3's multiplayer

Gosh, Enemy at the Gates was a bit rubbish, wasn’t it? If you haven’t watch it - you lucky bugger - but rather like the idea of tense stand-offs between opposing snipers across massive distances, then you might want to play some Sniper Elite 3’s multiplayer instead of watching Jude Law pretending to be Russian. 

Anyway, Sniper Elite 3 looks like it might be a good time, as war goes, and the multiplayer might be one of the best bits. Large open environments where cheeky enemies could be hiding anyway, just waiting to introduce your skull to a bullet? Who wouldn’t love that. Take a gander at the multiplayer shenanigans below. 

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The Division – Snowdrop Described As The Most Efficient Engine, Fans Will Affect Game’s Development

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Slightly Mad Studios’ Free Racer, World of Speed, Gets E3 2014 Screenshots

June 11, 2014 John Papadopoulos 4 Comments

Slightly Mad Studios and My.com have released the E3 2014 screenshots for its upcoming free racer, World of Speed. World of Speed is described as a free racing game that will not be plagued by all the micro-transaction issues that have appeared in almost all free-to-play games. The game is scheduled for a 2014 release on the PC. Enjoy! Continue reading →

 

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Confirmed – Batman: Arkham Knight’s Demo During Sony’s Conference Was Running On PC

June 11, 2014 John Papadopoulos 232 Comments

Well, this is nothing new, right? We’ve seen in the past this kind of things but since both PS4 and Xbox One are out, you’d expect that their demos would be running on – you know – those consoles themselves. It appears this is not the case with Batman: Arkham Knight as Rocksteady confirmed that the demo that was shown during Sony’s conference was running on the PC. Continue reading →

 

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Capcom Dropping The Ball: You Can Unlock Dead Rising 3′s Framerate But There Might Be Glitchy Bugs

June 12, 2014 John Papadopoulos 20 Comments

It’s no secret that Capcom’s PC ports were among the best we’ve seen back in the ‘Lost Planet 2′ days. The Japanese company was among the first to support Microsoft’s DX11 but since then, its ports have been going downhill. Resident Evil 6 – for example – was only running via DX9.0c. Surely things could not get worse, right? Well, get ready for some laughable excuses about the overall ‘experience’ of the upcoming PC port of Dead Rising 3. Continue reading →

I played Shroud of the Avatar with Richard Garriott: the cult of Lord British is alive and well

 

Wes Fenlon at 13:02 on 12 June 2014

E3 dips into the surreal for me at least once a day. Usually it's because I see someone I recognize in a meeting or walking down the halls, but then I realize I don't actually know them, I just feel like I do because I follow them on Twitter. Today E3 was surreal because I played Shroud of the Avatar with Richard Garriott and Starr Long, the father of Ultima and the director of Ultima Online. We played online, from the E3 show floor, and when Garriott said hi in-game to a Kickstarter backer, I got a glimpse at the cult of Lord British that still exists to this day.

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Oculus Rift interview with Nate Mitchell at E3 2014

PC Gamer at 12:19 on 12 June 2014

The Oculus Rift was one of our favorite things about last year's E3, so we were even more excited to see it at E3 2014. While both Evan and Wes got to try the new Rift DK2 unit and a trio of demos, they also spoke with Oculus vice president Nate Mitchell about the company's big hires—such as Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin—and big plans for first-party content.

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Razer expands into PC cases with custom-designed NZXT H440

Wes Fenlon at 12:03 on 12 June 2014

First Razer built mice and headsets and PC accessories. Then Razer built its own computers—the Razer Blade laptop and the modular Project Christine. Now the inevitable has happened: Razer's built a PC case. The company's big product reveal for E3 2014 is a custom Razer-designed NZXT H440 case, a sleek black obelisk with the usual neon green highlighting.

The NZXT H440 is part of Razer's "Designed by Razer" initiative, which means they didn't actually manufacture the case. Instead, they took a mid-tower case design from NZXT and ran it through Razer's design team in San Francisco, tweaking the materials and aesthetics to meet Razer's specifications.

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Shroud of the Avatar E3 interview: Lord British speaks to his people

Wes Fenlon at 11:46 on 12 June 2014

E3 2014 is the first time that many in the press have been able to see Shroud of the Avatar, the new crowdfunded role-playing game from Ultima creator Richard Garriott. But that doesn't mean its backers are in the dark. Garriott, aka Lord British, says the people who have backed his game are included in every step of the process—some have even created art or music that will be used in the game.

PC Gamer spoke with Garriott and executive producer Starr Long on the E3 floor about the game, and how transparency—and the Unity engine—has changed the game development process for the better.

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt unleashes new screens for E3

 

Andy Chalk at 10:30 on 12 June 2014

CD Projekt released a pile of new screens from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt today, serving up some very fine-looking action and cinematic stills taken from the game. The conclusion of Geralt's trilogy comes at a dark time for the Northern Kingdoms, as they struggle to fend off the Nilfgaardian invasion while the Wild Hunt rampages across the land. The studio claims The Witcher 3 will be even bigger than Bethesda's sprawling, open-world Skyrim, and going by these screens it'll be prettier, too.

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Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris producer talks engine improvements, new scope

Ian Birnbaum at 08:35 on 12 June 2014

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris was one of the most unexpected announcements of this week’s E3, but already we’ve gotten to see a lot of gameplay. Scot Amos, executive producer for the new game, brought a four-player gameplay video with him to the Twitch E3 livestream on Wednesday and talked for a bit about the follow-up to the well-regarded Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.

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Sheltered looks like a cross between FTL and Fallout, and is scavenging for Kickstarter cash

 

Phil Savage at 03:23 on 12 June 2014

Time to take a break from hyper-expensive, lavish games, and come back down to earth. No, further than that. We're going down under the earth, deep into a seemingly impenetrable nuclear bunker. Okay, we should be safe here. Except, do we have enough food? Are those air filtration systems on the blink? Oh gods, there's someone outside! Do we shoot them in the face?

These questions and more form the basis of Sheltered, a new project that combines FTL-like disaster management with a post-apocalyptic twist. It's on Kickstarter now.

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The Witcher 3 preview: on combat and why we can "expect the game to look way better" on release

 

Wes Fenlon at 02:57 on 12 June 2014

I sat in a dark room at E3 on Tuesday while CD Projekt Red cheerfully played through 45 minutes of The Witcher 3, showing off a very small part of the new open world that series hero Geralt will be able to explore. That was hours ago, and I still can't fully come to grips with the idea of a game as rich and challenging and complex as The Witcher 2 blown out into a massive world. While CD Projekt Red made sure to point out just how big the world was, their hands-off demo mostly focused on the more intricate details of combat and questing.

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Steam starts dropping Mysterious Cards, likely pointing to incoming Summer Sale

Steam cares not for your E3, mortals. Steam cares only for financial supplication. Like a vengeful, twisted god, it can only be sated by the monetary sacrifice of PC gamers. This fervent display is none more evident than during their sale events—in which we cheer, shriek, and commit terrible acts of economic undoing, all in the name of placating an indifferent grey distribution network. It's a pretty good time.

So when's the next one happening? All signs point to 'soon'. The latest hint comes in the form of set of Mysterious Cards that have appeared on the Steam Marketplace. No, really. In addition to being mysterious cards, they're also called Mysterious Cards. Given Steam's predilection for running strange events during their biggest sales, it's a strong sign that the discounts will soon be flowing.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare preview: can laser rifles and stealth mines refresh the CoD formula?

 

Evan Lahti at 21:46 on 11 June 2014

Call of Duty has a laser gun. And a jetpack (okay, okay: jump-pack. Semantics.). And grenades that you don’t have to throw. And a cloaking device. And a landmine that cancels sound? Activision toured me through this new futuretech after inviting me to watch more than 30 minutes of Advanced Warfare that wasn’t shown at Microsoft’s E3 press conference earlier this week.

First: a recap on Advanced Warfare if you haven’t been following along. It’s developed by Sledgehammer Games, a relatively new Activision studio that contributed to Modern Warfare 3. It has the distinction, among Call of Duty games, of being developed over a three-year period. It’s set in 2085 in America and other parts of the world, with a focus on (you guessed it) warfare with hovertanks, drones, and high-technology based on Sledgehammer’s real-world research and imagination. Its campaign has a single protagonist, it’ll be out in November, and Activision is saying absolutely nothing about multiplayer yet.

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Tales from the Borderlands preview: Telltale's storytelling is worth a return trip to Pandora

 

Wes Fenlon at 01:41 on 12 June 2014

Borderlands' Pandora is a weird place, filled with slag-spewing skags, cyborg ninjas, sarcastic robots and psychotic midgets. After watching the first 30 minutes of Telltale Games' next series Tales from the Borderlands in an E3 demo, I think Pandora's about to get even weirder. But not because Telltale is introducing an alien zoo of new creatures—rather, because the combination of Telltale storytelling and Gearbox insanity is 100% as bizarre as everyone thought it would be.

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There will never be a League of Legends 2; "I want my great grandchildren playing LoL"

League of Legends was released in 2009 - the year of Mirror’s Edge and Braid on the PC.

But its genre-defining style doesn’t date, and Riot Games have refused to let it age, applying rolling updates to its graphics and 100+ roster of champions.

The developers consider that a process with no end - they’ll continue to update LoL forever rather than build a sequel.

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Take in the alternately sun-ripened and rainslick beauty of Project CARS in this trailer

Beyond The Crew, E3 hasn’t been big on brum-brums - especially as it’s the solemn duty of PC gamers to stick our fingers in our ears and pretend the Xbox-only sequel to the excellent Forza Horizon doesn’t exist.

But Project CARS does exist. And it’s impossible not to admire a game which takes all of motorsports as its remit and still comes out of it looking minimalist and focused.

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You Can Never Go Home: Night In The Woods

By Adam Smith on June 11th, 2014 at 8:00 pm.

I’ve already spotted two examples of a new golden age of 2d animation during E3, which is precisely the sort of thing I didn’t expect to write before E3 actually began. Silly not to expect all kinds of sights really, particularly considering the number of imaginative indies setting out their stalls on the consoles in the digital download age. Night in the Woods, which was Kickstarted toward the end of last year, is the third. It’s coming to PS4 but it’ll be gracing the PC with its presence as well. It’s an adventure with light platforming about monsters hiding between tree trunks and about returning to a much-changed childhood home.

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After The Storm…. London’s Radius Festival

By Alec Meer on June 12th, 2014 at 9:00 am.

Last year it was Etoo, this year it’s Radius and the bulk of it is no longer happening at the same time as the LA monster that is E3, but the purpose is the same – interesting games and nice people at a fairly relaxed, and free, event in That London.
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Not All Men: Daedalic’s Steampunk Adventure

By Alice O'Connor on June 12th, 2014 at 10:00 am.

The way to solve an adventure game puzzle is, any glib git will tell you, to give a bit of a think, try a few ideas, then tell everyone everything and use every item you’ve stolen together in random combinations until you get it. A little more thought might be sensible in Daedelic’s new adventure game, announced by the Whispered World and Deponia devs at E3. The Devil’s Men (which actually stars two ladies) can have multiple solutions to puzzles, see, and supposedly they might each alter the direction of its spooky steampunk story a little.

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The framerate and other graphic problems of The Witcher 3 have me a little worried. Not that I think they won't fix it, but because I'm affraid that they have used a beast of a PC to show it, and if even that beast can't cope with it ...

But CD Projekt Red still has more than six months to polish it.

Also, Project Cars looks fabulous. I'm keeping an eye on it (even if I may end not getting it on PC). But I wonder how it plays. Anyone has a link to a hand-on impression of the game?