E3 2016: EA

E3 is upon us, so let's just get EA out of the way now so we can look forward to the rest of the week.


It's time to talk about E3 once again! It's the one time of year where every gamer across the globe hold their breath to see exactly what new games will be announced, if any games will get a release date, or to be blown away by new footage from the games they'll eventually love. This E3 is going to be a bit different than other E3s because of Nintendo dropping out of their annual press conferences, companies moving away from the actual E3 event to host their own events, and VR gaining a much stronger position as a viable game platform. Whether any of these changes are permanent ones is up to anyone's guess, but a constant that will always remain is that EA's press conferences are always worthless.

EA is good at two things, and two things only; sports, and completely failing at hyping up a game's reveal. Both of those aspects were at E3 in full force, despite it seeming that EA is actually trying to make positive changes in their games. Still, no matter how much goodwill that EA tries to make for itself at E3, it's still EA after all, so they're bound to mess it up somewhat.

Sports happened again at this E3. We saw the usual trotting out of the Madden horse and the FIFA cow, but that was to be expected. Of course EA would dedicate a lot of their time to their most marketable franchises. To be fair, FIFA 17 could have been interesting with it's single-player focused story mode, which is the big selling point on this game, but why would anyone ever care about puttng a story mode into a sport's game? It just seems like the focus is put in the wrong direction instead of making something actually interesting.

What was somewhat interesting was the reveal of Titanfall 2, a game that we knew was coming, was leaked that it would be revealed at E3, and has a leaked release date of this year. Still, the announcement was still solid, if a bit light on content. We know that there is now a single-player story mode included, which I'm pretty happy about given how quickly the appeal of the first game wore out due to it's lack of longevity, but there was so little of the game that actually interested me that EA has an uphill battle to make people invested in a game that was just announced for an October release date.

On the brighter side of things, we got a new look at Battlefield 1, now with blimps and a beta this summer, which looks great for people who like Battlefield, Mass Effect: Andromeda had a developer diary that showed off some gameplay of the new title, with more information to be revealed in the Fall, effectively making it an announcement of an announcement, which EA LOVES to do so much, and the news that there are two new Star Wars games are also being developed and will have more details later on.

Honestly, nothing happened at this conference. We knew everything going into it even without the leak, because leaks just kind of happen and shouldn't be held accountable to the publisher. Still, outside of sports, Titanfall 2, Mass Effect, and Star Wars, there was absolutely nothing of value gained or lost from this event. It was as if it didn't even exist, which is probably it's biggest crime. It didn't grab my attention. It just... happened.

D+