Ubisoft E3 2019: Nice And Calm, But Boring

This conference for once, started differently to has it has in years, without Just Dance. If you thought that was strange, they started it with the Assassins Creed Symphony, in which the idea sounds cooler than the execution, the song choices were good, but due to it being live there were a bevy of technical issues, thankfully it was short. Thankfully the montage was short and sweet, then the highlight of the show appeared, Watch Dogs: Legion.

Sadly, it was leaked before E3, but even so, what was shown was pretty amazing. Taking place in near future London, you build a resistance as a part of Dedsec where you recruit civilians based on their skill set. Whether that is a hacking specialist, assassin, done or robotics expert, the major draw is the characterization of every npc that you recruit, with it feeling like a more involved version of what they had in Assassins Creed Brotherhood. Every npc in the game has a fully simulated life and schedules, and you have to complete their origin missions to recruit them, with a release date of 6 March 2020.

After a small tease of a show coming to Apple+ that is produced by the actors from It's Always Sunny In Philidelphia, titled Mythic Quest: Ravens Banquet, they moved on to info on the new Rainbow 6 content drop titled Phantom Sight. After a weird trailer for that they revealed the addition of Adventure Time characters coming to their free-to-play game Brawlhalla, which will include Finn the human, Jake the dog, and Princess Bubblegum. They then spent way too much time on the information drop for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, which in itself would not be a bad thing, if the info wasn't dry, drawn out and already given earlier. Though they did announce a community content hub for the game that you can sign up to called Ghost Recon: Delta Squad, and a beta that you can sign up for at ghostrecon.com today, which starts on 5th September of this year.

After that they quickly moved on to a Tom Clancy themed mobile game called Tom Clancy's Elite Squad, that is open to pre-register right now. Weirdly enough they decided to show Just Dance 2020 in their normal way in the middle of the conference, moving quickly along they showed off a trailer for a limited time in-game event in For Honor called Shadows Of Hitokiri, that goes on until the end of June. It looks fun for those who enjoy playing For Honor, they then revealed Rainbow 6 Quarantine a new 3 player squad based co-op game that releases in early 2020. After a decent content reveal for the near future of Division 2 detailing the free story content coming in July, fall 2019, and early 2020 for chapters 1, 2, and 3 respectively, they conference decidedly slowed to a crawl, thankfully it was close to the end.

First they showed off their Uplay+ which is similar to EA access in services and price at 14.99 a month, though if you sign up now, your first month will be free when it arrives to PC in September. Finally Roller Champions was shown, which is a roller derby game, a mulitplayer skill based team PvP game, with a pre-alpha demo available on PC through Uplay today. As is their m.o. they had one more thing to show, which was a new game from the Assassins Creed Odyssey team titled Gods And Monsters, and even though they gave a release date of 25 February 2020, not much info was given.

Overall, up to this point, this was the best conference of E3, and while it had it's slow and snore worthy moments it was still entertaining especially comparatively to Bethesda and Microsoft. Though to be honest this was not Ubisoft's best showing at E3, Watch Dogs: Legion was good enough to give it the best score yet.

B-