OPINION – E3 kicked off today with Electronic Arts’ presentation, and the whole time I was pondering on whether this was worth it? In a way, it was, since it was the most generic, and lackluster conferences from EA this year, and just like last: It ended up being hilarious.

 

While E3 has been on the decline for a while according to some critics, I still believe it is one of the best comedy routines of all time from EA. Executives come out and try to sell the future for videogames, while trying to look one of „us”. In comes Electronic Arts to kick off E3 2016, and boy was it boring.  We have their CEO Andrew Wilson who looks like a James Bond villain about to take over the world, and Peter Moore in London to hang out with some football stars.

EA to me is in a weird situation. They axed most of their IPs as soon as they do not become profitable and tried to move onto the next huge thing. Except for the past two years, EA has not been able to show anything remarkable for the gaming audience. This year was the same, however mostly due to the leaks that occurred we were now even less impressed.

Titanfall 2 announced finally to the PS4 players after it bombed hilariously on the Xbox One. While the game looks good, and it now even has Singleplayer mode, I wonder if the brand is even popular enough to survive. The timing is also awkward as hell, most notably due to Infinite Warfare’s sci-fi adventure not being liked by many people, and even Battlefield is going back to the past for some bloodshed. Still let us hope for the best for the sequel, as the multiplayer trailer seemed to be a frantic action shooter.

 

EA had an hour of a press conference, and to be honest, it felt once again short. Up next was FIFA 17 – The Journey, and in the vain of NBA 2K16 where Spike Lee had some fun. It seemed like an eternity, as EA decided to show off just how awesomely bad Frostbite is for a sports game. After FIFA 17, and a weird Murino cameo, they decided to peddle more of their own weird branded Major E-Sports tournament (we have a zillion of those, show us the games!)

Well they did, it seems EA decided to have a soft spot for us gamers, and decided to launch EA Originals! I wondered for a second what could it be? Maybe an effort by a small studio to remake old EA games such as Dead Space 1, Mercenaries, Saboutore, or maybe just to try to bring the C&C Franchise to the console machines?! Nope, sadly the entire thing is just a Kickstarter themed plan for small developers to join up with EA to publish games through them. Their first such partnership was with a development team from Sweden, and the presenter from the development team looked like he was about to get a heart attack. Their game was called Fe, an indie game with a dying world in the snow. It looked nice, but it also felt like EA was running out of companies and IPs to kill so they decided to throw small amounts of money at random people to make new IPs to be killed.

They also showed Mass Effect: Andromeda, which is starting to look like a bad omen at this point, and does not seem that a lot of progress has been made by Bioware. No story trailer, no long gameplay cutscenes, just a few behind the scene cuts, and mere seconds of gameplay. This game is starting to shape up a Destiny type development if this keeps on going with Bioware. Will we ever get a game out of this? Who knows!

Next up was Jade Raymond promising us many many many many Star Wars games, shortly of … 2018. A new Battlefront game has been announced; Dice will get additional support from  Motive, plus it seems all other development teams are on full steam ahead to crank out Star Wars games. That’s fine, but it has me worried that now all EA will ever do is crank out a yearly Star Wars, Battlefield, and Sports game. In my eyes, it ruins their portfolio, and even Activision seems more varied, and fun than EA if these changes will occur. Putting on six development teams on one franchise is such an overkill that while will probably make a lot of money, seems like the potential waste.

In the end, we got new Battlefield 1 footage, that looked amazing, fun frantic, and I cannot wait to try it out! There’s also a Singleplayer campaign trailer for the game, and the multiplayer will support 64 players, and full on destruction physics.

Snooze and Wiz

The first conference of E3 from EA was mind-bogglingly bland, boring, and even Battlefield 1 could not save it from the overall weakness.

All in all, EA gets a 2/10 regarding presentation

Oh and seeing Whiz Khalifa, and Zac Efron high on the Battlefield 1 stream was the most weirdest and fun thing I have ever seen in my life. That was a 10/10