Game Tech: A glimpse of Far Cry 6 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
While most of us are living very firmly in the present, gaming companies are doing their best to get us excited about the future. With new consoles just around the corner, and gaming’s annual E3 conference cancelled, the giants of the industry have taken to streaming their events online.
While the lack of E3 could be seen as a step backwards, Ubisoft have taken exactly the opposite stance - by hosting Ubisoft Forwards. Here are the top four games they featured on their stream, and our thoughts on each.
- Watch Dogs Legion: They’re controlling you, man. The world has largely stood together this year, working as one against a pandemic, but Watch Dogs Legion isn’t about unity – it’s about manipulation. This time, the game takes place in London, with the player able to control virtually any NPC on the street, from construction workers, to a John Wick-style assassin, to unsuspecting grannies. The sense we get from the gameplay sessions is that Legion will be a giant sandbox, with players also able to control any electronic device (as with previous Watch Dog entries) and generally have fun in a cool real world location. Although with all the dogs, you might need a good sub-woofer to play.
- Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: We’re less enthused by Valhalla, especially now that we’ve seen extended gameplay. Odyssey was a fantastic setting for Assassin’s Creed, bright and colourful and full of Greek mythos, but Valhalla just doesn’t tickle our fancy in the same way. It’s ironic that for such renowned killers, Vikings have been done to death themselves.
Still, for anyone who enjoyed more recent entries in the series, Valhalla is clearly more of the same, with the addition of new features like Viking raids, plus what seems to be more emphasis on exploration to unlock skills. You can also dual-wield shields, which is our kind of block party. We’ll reserve judgement until we play, of course, but Ubisoft will have to do a little more to make Valhalla the ideal resting place for our cash.
- Hyper Scape: Ubisoft’s answer to the Battle Royale genre launched to open beta this week, so you can play it on PC if you get in on the early action. It’s faster, more frenetic and a little more stylish than many competitors, with heavy character customisation options, right down to the tattoos you can choose. Artistically speaking, Ubisoft definitely bring a French flair to their games and Hyper Scape shows that in abundance. We’ll have to wait and see how the beta is received by players, before knowing whether to get hyper about it.
- Far Cry 6: One name: Gus Frings. Ok, well, Giancarlo Esposito - but everyone will know him better from his most famous role, as the big bad of Breaking Bad, playing a mild-mannered drug kingpin with a vicious streak.
From the cinematics shown at Ubisoft Forward, we can already tell that Esposito is channelling his best ‘Gus’ energy for his star role in Far Cry 6, where he will play Anton Castillo, a dictator ruling over Yara, a ‘tropical paradise frozen in time’.
During the cinematic trailer that was shown, Castillo teaches his son a life lesson by handing him a grenade, telling the boy to hold the explosive and then pulling the pin. Castillo then leads his son to the edge of a balcony, where the boy must drop the grenade to unsuspecting protestors below. It was a chilling few moments that certainly whet our appetite for Far Cry 6 when it releases in March 2021.
Meanwhile, it’s back to the future for another videogame film adaption, as Capcom’s Monster Hunter movie has been pushed to April 2021. It was originally due to release on September 4 this year.
Monster Hunter has become arguably Capcom’s biggest modern-day franchise, after the huge success of Monster Hunter World, with fans of Dark Souls and Pokemon realising that it might just be the perfect amalgam of the two. The film version of Monster Hunter, however, doesn’t appear to have the same pedigree behind it, with the director, Paul WS Anderson, responsible for the decidedly average Resident Evil series of films.
Unsurprisingly, Milla Jovovich will play the lead role, just as she did in the Resident Evil films, but will be joined by the equally awesome Tony Ja, who trains her to become a hunter.
Can Sony capture the monster they really want here? A box-office monster?
