Ubisoft at E3 2014: Everything we know, collected in one stream

Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, Rainbow Six, The Crew, Ghost Recon, Rayman, Far Cry, Raving Rabbids, The Division: Ubisoft has a slew of popular game franchises, but which does the company’s CEO think has the potential to be their biggest money maker?

“Those two because RPG on one side and open-world, modern open-world on the other. They can increase the number of people that can be interested in the subject.”

We already loved Far Cry 3 more than was probably healthy, but then Ubisoft went and added grappling hooks and attack elephants to Far Cry 4. Has somebody been reading our dream journal? Russ Frushtick and Chris Plante grilled Ubisoft’s Alex Hutchinson on that exact question (and also some more game-centric issues too).

After you’re done watching, make sure to stop by our E3 2014 hub.

OK, so Tom Clancy’s The Division may not have had the cheeriest trailer at E3 (see for yourself below), but that didn’t stop us from wanting to learn more. We brought game director Ryan Barnard by our studio to help us move past the bummers with the sweet release of shooting bad guys.

Want more? It’s all waiting for you at our E3 2014 hub.

The Crew puts you behind the wheel, pairs you up with a few friends and lets you zip through America taking on a series of challenges as you go. Not since the jogging part in Forest Gump has cross-country travel been this much fun. (Though admittedly less inspirational.) We sat down with Julian Gerighty, creative director, to discuss the game.

Want more? It’s all waiting for you at our E3 2014 hub.

Far Cry 4 was “inches away” from having the option for players to select either a man or a woman as a playable co-op character, director Alex Hutchinson told Polygon.

The Far Cry series has never had a playable woman lead. When asked if he thought a woman protagonist would work in Ubisoft’s brazen and oftentimes violent open-world shooter series, Hutchinson said that yes, it could work - and it should already be working.

What’s better than one assassins? Four assassins, and that’s exactly what you’ll be getting in Assassin’s Creed Unity. Our own Ben Kuchera and Chris Plante sat down with Ubisoft creative director Alexandre Amancio to unpack this new, multi-assassin approach to the long-running franchise.

Want more? We’ve got a ton for you at our E3 2014 hub.

Speaking to Polygon, Witts said the procedural destruction system was balanced on gameplay opportunities. When players shoot at a gyps wall, it will break like a gyps wall. If they shoot at a wooden floor, it will fall through like a wooden floor. The damage inflicted is based on the materials of the game world, which means players won’t be able to destroy entire environments, but they will be able to use them to their advantage.

“Our environments are based on a layered material system,” Witts said. “So in some maps, players can’t destroy certain things, but they can shoot through them.”

Ubisoft hasn’t been shy in its attempts to expand its business beyond video games.

There’s the Rabbids cartoon series, which is now a popular Saturday morning program for kids in the US and in Europe. There’s the upcoming Rabbids interactive TV series, which will launch in North America in the fall. There’s an Assassin’s Creed movie currently in development, and a Watch Dogs movie deal was announced before the game even shipped. Ubisoft wants to be an entertainment company, says Ubisoft’s SVP of sales and marketing Tony Key, because it’s a lot less risky than just being a game company.

Assassin’s Creed Unity’s four-player co-op will not offer female assassins due to the pressures of production work, Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancio told Polygon during a recent interview.

Amancio said that though female assassins were planned for the game, Ubisoft ran into “the reality of production.”

The company showed pre-alpha footage of a multiplayer match between teams named Raven and Rogue, with hostage captors setting up defenses to protect their position inside a house while an invading squad of counterterrorist operatives set up a strategy to breach the home. The multiplayer match’s five-on-five action got smaller and smaller as players died (and didn’t respawn).

The invaders took out the hostiles guarding the hostage and attempted to extract her. All the walls inside appeared to be destructible, and the soldiers were soon beset by the defenders, who took back control of the hostage. The attackers used a drone to get a glimpse of the bad guys’ position; they were using the hostage as a human shield. Eventually, they went a floor above the criminals and breached the ceiling, taking them out. The match eventually got down to one versus one, and appeared to end with the counterterrorist soldiers failing to extract the hostage.

Ubisoft, once a stalwart supporter of Nintendo’s Wii U, is holding off on releasing an unannounced new title for the console until there are more of them in people’s homes, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told Polygon this week.

Watch Dogs, Guillemot said, is still coming to the Wii U this November, but Ubisoft is being much more careful with new projects.

Rainbow Six: Patriots, the controversial, long-delayed anti-terrorism shooter, is officially, and permanently dead, Ubisoft confirmed this week.

“It would require doing a lot of extra things.”

There will be much more to share about The Crew, including the kind of multi-hour “faction” missions, involving long coast-to-coast drives across the United States, shown on stage today at E3.

Ubisoft used its E3 presentation to show the set-up for post-apocalyptic thriller Tom Clancy’s The Division.

An extended preview of the game showed the effect of a devastating pandemic on an unseen family in New York. It also showed the central character facing down some looters and a menacing clean-up crew. No new information about the game was provided, although producer Petter Mannerfelt said that the game would provide “a journey through the New York you know to one that is a hostile place, lost to a virus and to chaos.”

Far Cry 4 was the first game on display during Ubisoft’s E3 2014 press conference.

The opening cutscene of the game featured the player taking on the role of a character on a bus in the Tibetan mountainside. A sign identified the areas as the “Kryat border.” The bus was stopped by a military group with rifles, and when a gunfight broke out, the main character crawled out of the back of the bus in an attempt to escape.

Ubisoft today announced Just Dance Now, a mobile/web-based version of its popular motion-tracking dancing game that lets users play Just Dance anywhere as long as they have an internet connection and a smartphone.

According to Ubisoft, anyone with a smartphone and access to a big screen can download the app, connect the two devices and play. There is no limit to the number of people who can play at the same time. The game’s launch date and pricing were not announced.

Press play above to see a time lapse version of a city in the massively multiplayer game. Revealed at publisher Ubisoft’s E3 2013 press event, Massive Entertainment’s third-person shooter was originally scheduled to launch for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC in 2014. Ubisoft announced a delay to 2015 last month.

For more on the game, be sure to read our interview with Tom Clancy’s The Division’s developers, conducted in the wake of its reveal.

Tetris Ultimate, a downloadable, multi-mode version of the classic puzzle game from developer Blue Planet Software, will arrive for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this summer and PC this fall, publisher Ubisoft announced today.

In Tetris Ultimate, 1-4 players will be able to battle cascading blocks in six modes: Battle, a head-to-head skirmish; Endless, where players score as much as they can in 30 levels; Marathon, which includes 15 levels; Power-Up Battle, which equips players with its titular powers; Ultra, a three-minute timed challenge; and Sprint, where you need to clear 40 lines as quickly as possible. The Tetris Company, which controls the franchise’s publishing rights, and Ubisoft announced in January that the franchise was headed to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this year for the game’s 30th anniversary.

Ubisoft has not released a Nintendo 3DS game since Rabbids Rumble in November 2012.