E3: The Activision Conference 2006

The number two publisher had some goodies for us at the start of E3 week, including Spider-Man 3, Call of Duty 3, Tony Hawk's Project 8 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

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Next up, a staffer from Lionhead stepped up to show off the latest features available in The Movies: Stunts & Effects, in an amusing demo that made the audience chuckle. It looked at the intricacies of how to use (or rather how not to use) your actor in a stunt, in this case jumping out of a second storey window leading to injury. This actor then literally limped off to the 'hospital', which had an extreme negative impact on this film's production scheduling and costs - not good.

The Movies: Stunts & Effects

A highly requested feature from the obsessive Movies fanbase has now been included, a manual 'freecam' camera to set up the player's own shots, while better effects such as weather, leaves blowing around, or set pieces such as 'choppers' will also enable the creation of more unique movies.

The next demo was for Tony Hawk's Project 8. The trailer, presented entirely at around 1:10 slow motion, was well crafted to show off the game's superb graphical detail and animation system, which we're quite excited about; animations based on various skateboarding scenarios and physical reactions blend into each other, rather than unrealistically switch from one to another.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 uses fluid new animation technology

The engine has been built from the ground up, with eight years of previous Tony Hawk code "thrown out the window" - and it's pleasing to see Tony Hawk in this next-gen world complete with shaders, the dynamic and fluid animation system using multiple processors, and a render engine creating a "fully streaming world". Additional touches such as "speed wobbling" (you'll know it when you see it, and think how rubbish things looked before) make Project 8 comfortably live up to the developer's claim of the "most realistic skater game ever", even though what was shown was merely an "extremely early" look at the game. Fans, be happy.

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The final title shown was the anticipated Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, from a team that's open about its "obsession with multiplay", aiming to offer an experience of shooting, driving and having fun, but at the same time offering great depth. Quake Wars might not look particularly Quake-like, but it's still quite the looker; the E3 build level with temporary HUD apparently still had work to be done, but looked solid to us.

The Splash Damage team showed off Quake Wars

For starters, the team at Splash Damage is using what it calls Megatexture Technology to create unique terrain, streaming 8MB of textures at any one time. This technology is made more efficient with "area relevance", requiring less streaming. The Nvidia 7900 that was used in the machine for the demo was throwing out nice detail using these techniques.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Gameplay wise, a satisfying level of depth is expected, with soldier and field ops interoperating with covert ops, and the need to co-ordinate airdrops and intelligence - enabling some rather strategic play through the levels. There's no doubt that this team knows its game inside out, and this demonstration went a long way in reassuring us that the final title will live up to expectations... "when it's ready".

PS3 and Xbox 360 together backstage, how cute...

Overall, Activision put on a substantial presentation that had us convinced of its strengths and portfolio going into the next-generation - there's a lot to look forward to here.

Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo.com

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