July 2012 - Ubisoft has two major displays at the Comic-con event in San Diego - one featured demo games, and the other a preview of game play. On the playable games, they were showing a dual booth with a standard FPS game based on the Walking Dead television series on AMC. Rather than following the story line of the graphic novel, this game was designed to accompany the series and features straight forward zombie shooting action. It is more of an action game than the graphic novel based interactive story game from Tell Tail Games also onthe Wlaking Dead theme.
Walking Dead Collectibles in the Ubisoft booth
In the same booth, the San Francisco division of Ubisoft has created a Spartacus game to accompany the Starz series. This game feaures an incorporation of the assets from the show into the product, and as a result, has a very effective TV look and feel. The demo had only a couple of levels to test with - one was very easy, and the other a mid level challenge. The full game will include more difficult challenges in additon to the lower level action. The images in the game are very dimensional, and at this time the director for the project had no comments on the game being available with a stereo 3D mode.
Walking Dead and Spartacus by Ubisoft at Comic-Con
In their theater, where they were taking pre-release orders, they had a game play clip of Assassin’s Creed III. In this game, the Assassin comes to early America in the American Colonies during the year 1775. The story line has a brave young warrior fighting to save his homeland. But what begins as a struggle over territory turns into an extraordinary journey that will transform him into a Master Assassin – one that will forever change the destiny of a newborn nation.
The game play has you are Connor, warrior son of a Native American mother and British father. As the colonies draw closer to revolution, you will dedicate your life to the freedom of your clan. Your crusade will lead you through blood-soaked battlefields and through crowded city streets, to the perilous wilderness and beyond. Connor has a new favorite weapon - a hatchet, and he continues to be a master of both strategy and physical skill.
The game play has added winter scenes with snow, ice and wind bringing a new level of realism to the game. A new skill, that requried a great deal of development, is the ability for the character to climb and traverse trees. This adds a new level of dimensionality to skills and makes the user investigate a 3D game space instead of a traditional 2D traversal. Being in America brings a whole new set of backgrounds, situations and assignments to the character and the game play, and should have a very extensive addition of maps and weapons.