E3 2003 - Summary of Trends and Favorites
by Scott K (Tha Wiz)

Biggest Gaming Trends: I personally thought that the biggest trend in the industry was a big movement towards “go anywhere” and free-roaming games. A lot of the games that I saw ditched the whole “do mission A, then mission B” kind of thing and went more for a “do what you want, but doing or not doing things may effect the outcome of the game”. Spider Man 2 and True Crime were big examples of this. I also saw a bigger movement towards the MMO shooters too, with a lot of up-and-coming games implementing the FPS/flight sim/vehicle wargame style similar to Battlefield 1942.

Technology Advances: I definitely saw a lot more attention being paid to trying to make most games as realistic as possible, almost to appoint of being kind of scary. Painkiller by Dreamcatcher was a good example of this, since the clothing of enemies that were shot moved like it would in real life, and various parts of the body being shot would prompt different movements. Everquest also got a facelift and everything looked much more real in the new EQII title. There also seemed to be more style blending, like Soldner and Savage that combined elements of an RTS and FPS together, and were looking pretty cool.

Best Booth – Hands down, my favorite booth of the show had to be Nintendo. The whole thing was the size (lengthwise) of my entire street and had a good setup that was easy to navigate through to get to the games that you wanted to check out. They also had the largest amount of up-and-coming titles on display that were all playable, including some that I really wanted to check out like Mario Kart and the new F-Zero.

Best game (I never heard of): Savage. This was actually a close one between this and Painkiller, but I have to say that the whole concept and gameplay of Savage (not to mention a company that I hadn’t really heard of until E3) really threw a curveball at me. Thus a lesson was learned … don’t necessarily be looking for the next big game to come from a big developer. The smaller guys sometimes have the best stuff.

Game I REALLY want to play when released – I’ll have to give that one to Painkiller ultimately. While I was impressed by a lot of other games, I’m a run-and-gun FPS psychopath by heart. This game had some of the most amazing graphics and fast-paced gameplay I’ve seen in a while, and I had to literally tear myself away from it since I couldn’t put it down.

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