Even the games that we expect to feature plenty of flexibility and open-ended appeal kept their freedoms tightly in check for the purposes of the show.
Crysis 3, for example, will likely be full of free-form action, but the focused presentation kept the pace moving quickly, without hinting at the flexibility you expect from the franchise. The same could be said for
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which (hopefully) will feature plenty of ways of executing your foes but moved so quickly--and relied so heavily on the mark and execute mechanic--that it looked like the game was playing itself. The less said about Black Ops 2 in this regard, the better, of course. (Look! Hovering drones can do the shooting for you!)
Thank the heavens, then, for the developers and publishers that understand that we love games because they're games. Ubisoft understood this better than any other publisher when it came to press conferences, which is part of what made
Watch Dogs one of the most talked about games of E3 2012. In the GameSpot war room, we traded glances and tried to make sense of what we were seeing during the game's demonstration. And then the pieces started to fall into place. We saw multiple protagonists. Third-person action, hacking, and an open world in which you can view private information about perfect strangers. The game did the talking, and the press responded.
We didn't need a litany of explosions, "Press A to Avoid Boulder" prompts, and collapsing skyscrapers to entertain us. I can go to any random Michael Bay movie for those things. I came to E3 for the games.
