E3 2017: EA

E3 kicks off this year with the worst press conference. Better sooner than later, right?


Welcome to another fun year of E3 coverage! It's time for us to get hyped about video games that we won't see for months, if not years, then be immensely disappointed that they don't look as good or play as well as we've been shown. Hooray!

This year has EA going first with what it traditionally a pretty terrible press conference with little to get excited for and even fewer reasons to care. This year they separated themselves from the rest by having their conference two days earlier to try and "stand apart" from the crowd. In truth, it just makes them all the more forgettable.

What's there to say anymore about EA? We knew going into it that we were going to get a monster amount of sports coverage for Madden, FIFA, and NBA, but there was a lot of that this year. Admittingly, some of its features look cool, like Madden's story mode, but who can honestly say they're excited for a story mode in a football game? And I mean legitimately excited, that this was something people were clamoring for. If you like it, more power to you, but EA does sports and Esports coverage. The end.

There were other game announcements that took place, one which looked fairly interesting and another that was a tease for nothing. A Way Out is an Indie split-screen, co-op game that looks pretty neat. Imagine a cross between LA Noire and Shawshank Redemption and you'll get the kind of vibe I got from the title. I'm interesting in it, but then we got one of the two big things EA was touting about before the press conference, and that was Bioware's new IP, which was revealed to be Anthem. It look pretty cool and has a neat sci-fi twist on Attack on Titan, but we got a teaser for the game rather than a full trailer. Thankfully, the full trailer and potentially some gameplay will be shown at Microsoft's press conference tomorrow, but it's still just an announcement for something that we need to wait and see on. So... why not just announce it tomorrow?

If the whole press conference was a stream of meh, Battlefront II actually came along and redeemed a bit of it in my eyes. We knew we'd see Battlefront, but we got confirmation of the story mode, which is nice, but we also were told that anyone that bought the game would get free updates and free new maps and modes, plus the game would include split-screen co-op as well. It seems like Battlefront II is shaping up to be everything that the original wasn't and EA is pushing to make it a much better game than the underwhelming, multiplayer only shell we got in 2015.

On the whole, it's easy to pick on EA for their bad press conferences. There were no embarrassing moments this year, but the entire conference was plagued with a sense of "Why should I care?" We knew about everything going into it in pretty extensive details, and the new surprises were too tiny to generate any genuine excitement. In other words, it's another EA press conference. NEXT.

C-