EA Press Conference Recap – E3 2017
The EA press conference was first up for E3 2017. The overall impression is that the press conference seemed to be pretty short. I guess they did talk about a number of games . . . maybe there just weren’t that many games that seemed that appealing? It kicked off by talking about various EA Sports franchises – which was surprising. Yes, they all look better than last year’s iterations, but really, how much better can they be?
They then spent some time talking about Battlefield 1 and new content related to that (yawn), There is a new Need for Speed game coming out which looks pretty much like every other Need for Speed game. A new IP was then given stage time (shocking indeed). This game is called A Way Out and is about two inmates breaking out of prison. Probably the most unique thing about the game is that you have to play co-op. They said you either can do split-screen co-op or online. Seems kind of niche – I can’t imagine this turns into anything substantial.
We got the first look at Bioware’s new game Anthem. It was a pretty brief glimpse but looks like a science-fiction setting. The only talk was about how it was going to be a shared-world type game. Sounds pretty similar to Destiny. On the other hand, Destiny was pretty much an experiment in how to make a super polished, almost complete game with as little story/plot as possible. This game is being made by Bioware Edmonton which is the Bioware mothership, so if anyone is capable of putting out a good narrative they are. Anyways, the game is scheduled for release fall 2018, which likely means the game won’t come out until 2019. The question will likely be how good is it and is it too late to the scene to be relevant.
The show concluded with the first solid look at Star Wars: Battlefront II. Shockingly, it seems like EA has paid attention to consumers and made some substantial changes compared to the recent Battlefront release. As we often discuss, if a game releases without a single player campaign, that game will fail. It doesn’t matter how good the multiplayer is, if there is nothing to attach people to the franchise/setting and people will quickly lose interest. So, they announced that this new game will have a single player campaign! They didn’t talk about that aspect of the game much, but this is promising.
The other surprising news has to do with supported content. The last Battlefront release was widely criticized for its lack of content at release with then tons of paid DLC released thereafter. Surprisingly, they announced that all game content/levels/characters would be free for everyone who owns the game. The importance of this cannot be understated. I sincerely hope they make enough money from game sales/non-content microtransactions (skins, non-pay to win gear, etc) that this model can persist into the future.
Additionally, they mentioned that there would be some split-screen game modes available. This is also incredibly shocking as most studios seem to want to kill this so bad. There must be some widely known metrics that developers are aware of showing how much less money split-screen players pay in DLC compared to online only players. Otherwise, I have no idea why everyone seems so hostile to split-screen. It isn’t that hard to notch down the graphical fidelity to allow split-screen. People won’t complain that it looks bad. People understand.
So overall, the Battlefront 2 news is hugely exciting. Anthem cold be exciting but we really didn’t see much of it. Most of the rest was kind of . . . meh . . . Let’s hope Battlefront 2 and Anthem get more screen time during some of the other press conferences.