EA, It‘s In The Game, Or Is it This E3?
With E3 once again descending upon us like a cloud of... poison gas, it’s time to gear up for the onslaught of press conferences at increasingly foolish hours, at least for those outside of America, like myself. E3 started again with the EA press conference, and unlike last year, I didn’t actually forget about it and miss it, go me.
EA decided to go with a smaller venue this time. No large, bombastic stage with giant screens that you could probably fit a house in, and not the other way round. This time the stage was much lower and the whole set up felt more involved, at least with the proximity of the crowd. But this new EA style of stage didn’t exactly reveal a new EA presentational style, and that they only had one song to play on their streams on loop for about 30 minutes.
The show started with a reminder that Madden is a thing. There were drums and an odd marching band, that was stationary, the non-marching marching band. I sat there hoping for the newest game mode to be added, Marching Band Mode, allowing you to march along with all your favorite sports teams. The best city march bands covered in the latest Madden. You’ll be sad to find out that no such thing exists, the motionless marching band was there to inform you that Madden will now also get a story mode, probably also devoid of the moment the professional sportsman abuses his partner or rapes an underage girl, or is a massive racist/homophobe, but I guess they can’t make it TOO realistic.
Eventually the Supreme Evil of EA, Andrew Wilson, slithered out revealing that the reason they’re doing this E3 press conference isn’t for the hot hot marketing and making a large dragon hoard’s worth of money, it’s for the players. Because they love the players. And money. With that reminder of how much they love players, and the players’ money, they quickly spun into one of many filler pieces about the community that surrounds EA, specifically Battlefield 1.
Did you know that people actively stream Battlefield 1 and make Youtube videos CONSTANTLY to this day? I say “to this day” as if Battlefield 1 is an old game, it came out 21st October. It all began to feel like the one year anniversary video that was seen with Overwatch, at the start of Overwatch’s One Year Anniversary. Honestly, I began to get the feeling that Battlefield 1 wished they had half the community Overwatch had. Instead of cosplay, fan art, a shocking absence of porn, that you got with Overwatch, you just had YouTube “personalities” (I use the term loosely) screaming into their cameras. Outside of this awkward and incredibly forced segment about YouTubers and people are almost definitely like you and me, but they’re not as they all earn several thousands and become completely detached from the common game player, you had the big reveal of more content coming out. Which is sweet, did we see any gameplay of it? I don’t think so. There was sweet concept art of Russian ladies who will kill lots of people, but there wasn’t much else other than more content, which is fine.
Outside of riveting presentation that definitely wasn’t read off an auto cue, we got sweet sweet football. FOOTBALL! That’s right, you can rest easy now, FOOTBALL is coming again. FIFA18 is coming out and what did they talk about with the game? Well, there’s the sequel to The Journey, which now means that for the first time you probably have to play one FIFA game before the other. For the first time ever, a football game has an actual sequel in the traditional sense. Well, that’s if The Journey was the main appeal of FIFA, but it’s … well it’s the football isn’t it. More football than ever before. This segment was also introduced with another segment revolving around what I can only assume to be YouTuber’s and the like, all chomping at the bit to find out what has happened to Alex Hunter, what team is he going to go to, who will sign him? Is he actually real? Apparently he’s not an actual football player, who knew.
Smash cut, it wasn’t a smash cut but we’re pretending it’s one in this write up, to ANOTHER YouTuber, or “YouTube Creator”, I don’t think he created YouTube, he was too young, talking, badly, about the new Need For Speed, with probably other YouTube people also in the background. Need For Speed is back, with a revenge! Wait, that was the other game. With a payback. Nailed it. In this brief “gameplay” segment we witnessed that Burnout is still alive, its soul is just trapped in the horrible cage of Need for Speed. There was also a bit where a lady jumped onto a truck, the truck then exploded for some reason and then the lady burst out of the back of the truck driving a car. Going 0 – 60 out of an exploding car. I don’t know what I should think of it, it was odd. You punch cars with your car, but it also looked really slow and boring. I miss Burnout.
Something odd happened in the EA conference, they announced something new. It may shock you to read this, I know, but dreams do come true. A Way Out, a game from the people who made Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, with EA. EA really wanted to let everyone know that it was with EA and that nice games can’t just exist, they have to exist WITH EA. Overall, A Way Out looked really interesting. A forced co-op game, with even more pressure on split screen co-op. It revolves around trying to break out of prison, or something, but it’s the case that if one player is in a cut-scene the other can just walk around and rummage in the bins or do other sneaky things. The gameplay trailer was actually rather convincing, shame it was one of two games that EA hadn’t actually announced before, and also wasn’t plagued by YouTube personalities. Shame I don’t have any friends to play A Way Out though. Or just friends full-stop. No friends.
Where would EA be without mentioning Bioware? I don’t actually know as they managed to poke their head into the conference and in an odd turn of events, arguably the biggest reveal for EA has been held off for the Microsoft conference, a teaser trailer will have to suffice, so says EA. Anthem was the name of the new game and all we know about it is that there’s a wall, monsters and suits of armor that look like Titans from Titanfall, I’m predicting a Monster Hunter style game, and hopefully it’ll just be good. I guess we’ll find out more on this new EA game from Microsoft, thanks EA, back to the games we already knew about, eh?
To close the show came Star Wars Battlefront 2, I know, I didn’t know a sequel was coming either, except we all did and I’ve heard the trailer roughly one thousand times. Watching The Supreme Evil, Andrew Wilson, tip toe around the negative response Star Wars Battlefront received, “constructive feedback” they called it, the triumphant announcement that Battlefront 2 will have three times the content rang a little hollow, basic arithmetic shows that 3 times 1 is only 3, but hey that’s just me. Thankfully EA put a lot of effort into the Star Wars Battlefront 2 presentation as it had someone talking who sounded like they had an actual pulse. I think everyone came to attention when the sassy, attractive Imperial trooper lady strutted onto the stage with all the authority, and leather/latex, of some kind of Star Wars dominatrix.
The most shocking reveal of the night around Star Wars Battlefront 2 was that there was going to be around 30 minutes of gameplay to be shown, solidly. Unyielding. Also that all future content is going to be free. Although, EA free will most likely translate into loot boxes, micro-transactions and things not really being free. You know Overwatch? Imagine that business model because EA REALLY wish they created Overwatch, seriously, it’s a large undertone I got from the entire presentation. Make one of their games Overwatch, please. I wish the sassy and attractive lady presented the entire EA conference, she could read off an auto cue with the sounds in her voice that suggested life, and that’s almost the minimum I expect from a presentation.
Overall, EA’s conference wasn’t anything to write home about. It was overly reliant on YouTube personalities to try and sell the games. The idea being that these “famous” people you like are seen liking the game, your idols are there playing the game, it must be good. Ignoring that they all got sweet, sweet money for the privilege. The idea that if popular people are seen doing a thing, it must be popular. YouTube advertorials ran through the conference like a disgusting streak, whether it was awkward presentational skills seen with Need For Speed or the tedious and boring commentary that surrounded the gameplay segment at the end, which included one player not even playing Star Wars to start with, they were playing NBA. I think it created a new rule for television and broadcasting, never work with animals, never work with children and never work YouTubers.
It was a disappointing highlight reel of games that had already been long since announced, all of which have become so recurrent that everyone knows what the gameplay will be and what the game is just by saying the title. FIFA18, it’s just more FIFA. Madden, more Madden than ever before. NBA Live, more of everyone’s second favorite NBA franchise (out of two). It’s tried and tested series and franchises that lead the whole conference to feel hollow and empty. The attempts to make it engaging, by involving YouTuber’s and this fake sense of community that EA tried to force through the whole conference didn’t make up for the lack of games. I think in total they showed eight games. Not too bad for an hour long show, some might say, but when you take into account that both Anthem and Battlefield didn’t have any gameplay at all to show, three were sports games that are more or less copy and paste and then you had a long line of Star Wars multiplayer, which I guess we can at least confirm was actual multiplayer and the only non-scripted segment of the night, there wasn’t much to see. If you want to see some great EA reveal, come back in the Microsoft one, that’s the take home message.