A bit late, but here’s a quick round up of what I saw on the last day. Not that any of you seem to care. It’s a bitter-sweet feeling when the show is finally over – there’s an energy at GamesCom that helps you see through the day, but it’s so bloody tiring all you want to do is lie down and die once it’s over. Can’t wait until next year.
Bethesda
We saw Prey 2 and Dishonored at the Bethesda booth, both looking interesting in their own ways. Prey 2 seems a bit odd in terms of the gameplay appears to be nothing like what it was in the original Prey. Visually it’s looking pretty sweet, and the mechanics are interesting for an FPS, but somehow it seems a little like the Prey IP was just slapped on for convenience.
Dishonored, whilst impressive, failed to get me excited much. A lot of stealth action in a fictional bio-steam-punk world, along with supernatural powers.
Larian Studios
Struggling to remember who these guys are? They’re the people who did the massive RPG Divinity II: Ego Draconis. We saw two games from them – Dragon Commander and Masters of the Broken World.
Dragon Commander looks wonderfully ridiculous. If you can get passed the Dragons with Jetpacks, you’ll find DC to be a wonderful action/RTS hybrid, with a lot of the depth that set Divinity II apart, but more dragons. It’s set in the same universe, but again we sense it being more a convenience thing than anything else. Still looks like a cracking game though.
Masters of the Broken World didn’t impress as much… it reminds me a little of Dreamlords, actually, with a bit of Kings Bounty thrown in. It’s supposed to be a remake of a one-man-band game that was released a while ago.
Codemasters
We only saw F1 Online with Codemasters. A browser based top-down racing and management experience, F1 Online is less about the licensed stuff and more about letting people get in there and create their own teams and cars. There will be a licensed side to it, but I suspect due to licensing agreements, the custom and non-custom elements will not interact for the time being.
Paradox Interactive
No GamesCom would be complete without Paradox Interactive. They only really had one major announcement for GamesCom this year, which was the new game form the Lead and Gold team, War of the Roses. Set during one of the English Civil Wars, this is shaping up to be a frantic hack’n’slash competitive game. No gameplay was on show, sadly, but we do have an interview.
We also caught up with King Arthur II, which had actual demo builds this time, Magna Mundi again, Naval War: Arctic Circle and Salem. There was also Crusader Kings II there as well, which is looking really good, but we’re saving coverage on that until we get the preview build.
Wargaming.net
We were really only seeing these guys for World of Warplanes as despite announcing World of Battleships during the show, they weren’t really talking about it much. Still, it was interesting to see Warplanes in action, and here about how the three games are going to link together to allow people maximum flexibility in their experience with the franchise.
THQ
We saw THQ one final time before the end of the show in order to get a sneak peak at Darksiders II. It’s looking interesting, if a little generic. There have been a lot of third-person hack’n’slash games with mythological themes lately, so we hope Darksiders II can differentiate itself enough to stand ahead of the crowd.
And that’s it for our daily GamesCom round-up. Stay tuned for our ‘Best in Show’ analysis, plus all the preview and impression coverage we’ll be doing on individual games. Here’s to another great year.
