E3 2015 - EA

Opening with a Mass Effect 4 trailer (Now titled Mass Effect: Andromeda) is an undeniably strong start even if the trailer itself is a bit of an oddity. First of all the Johnny Cash soundtrack is very unexpected but i suppose symbolic of the different and separate galaxy we're told this story will explore to the Shepard trilogy. We see the hand of a masked person in N7 armour, flicking through a series of images or live feeds of alien worlds.

The display collapses into either a galaxy map then possibly just a window and whatever ship the character is standing in warps quickly to the orbit of a red planet, bringing into question the advancement of technology in this galaxy, as travel that fast was only previously possible with the Mass Relays.

We get a few brief glimpses in-between black screens of a new land vehicle, similar to the Mako, jetpacks or at least boosts on the back of our character's suit. Shields, omni-tools and seemingly the omni-blade are all still present which aside the N7 armour makes me wonder exactly how different this galaxy is if it's retaining all this technology and establishments from the old trilogy.

Is it possibly a parallel galaxy? So N7, Omnitools etc will be entirely redefined?

Aside from that there's no clear look at our enemies, teammates or any species under their armour at all actually. Very much a teaser but as a huge fan of the Mass Effect series, consider me very damn teased and alert for at least the start of the rest of this conference.

A pointy grey suit welcomes us all and then struts around talking about how EA are inspired to play and how playing gets them up in the morning. This is news to me 'cos i assumed their butler or their expensive supermodel prostitutes would rouse them from dreaming about paid DLC every day.

"How do i sleep at night? Always on-linen."

Mr slicked back everything goes on to thank the audience. "You make us better" he says, wisely dropping the word "off" from the original script of this speech. Admittedly fifty shades of grey then quite promptly exits the stage and gets on with a Need For Speed trailer that starts and ends like an urban deodorant commercial but somewhere in between there's some cars racing, police chasing and high speed collisions.

Difficult to know if it was in-engine footage or not since video game cars are graphically photo-realistic at this point. The next male model speaker continues to describe this "definitive" open world Need For Speed experience as the footage shows some actual gameplay with what seems a smooth, robust but expansive car customisation feature, and the actual gameplay, driving through city streets, avoiding police, drifting and such.

My interest in racing games declines as the realism increases so i try to give a fair account of this preview despite basically not giving a shit about it. It looks good i guess if you like that sort of thing.

We next hear from a man with no eyes talking about the RPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic's upcoming expansion called Knights Of The Fallen Empire. As if "Bioware" itself were now a buzzword we're promised twice "Bioware style storytelling" with choices that matter and a dynamic player driven story. At the same time the footage on-screen shows two bald generic looking Jedi guys doing Jedi things together. None of it's gameplay so at the risk of sounding flippant, none of it matters. However this expansion is coming 27th October 2015 completely free so can't complain too much.

May the blunt force trauma that took your eyes never be with you again.

Another slick and slim suit steps onto stage and claims to have something "unlike anything else you will see here today." Unravel is a yarn-based physics-based puzzle platformer by Swedish developers ColdWood. Whose creative director is far too giggly, nervous and innocent to be at an EA press conference.

The game itself is similarly quaint and cutesy with "Yarny" Spiderman-swinging his way across real world levels but with that miniature person puzzle logic like lassoing a fish to drag your twig raft across a pond. It looks very nice and quite inventive but not exactly  "unlike anything you're expecting" Nintendo have been messing around with stringy platformers like Kirby's Epic Yarn and Yoshi's Woolly World for a while now.

Unless of course the developer's poetic metaphors about the "thread of life" and emotional connections actually feature in the game in some way. In which case I'd be far more interested. But overhyping from the suits aside, Unravel looks thoroughly charming and a lot of fun.

Suddenly lights start flashing, "Danger Zone" plays over the speakers and a big zombie minion mascot clomps onto stage, posing for the audience and generally making everything very strange, corny and surreal. Before too long the zombie is sent away and we learn that this charade is in promotion of Plants VS Zombies: Garden Warfare 2.

Don Mattrick's career options are limited these days...

I'm sceptical of anything that advertises its "craziness" and "wacky hilarity" as much as this and most of the humour doesn't appeal personally, but as a class-based third person shooter it looks solid enough and quite creative. Asking the audience "How fun does that look?" however was a stupid idea as our latest suited man gets nothing but silence in reply.

He then reveals something that i never thought I'd see needing an announcement. A single player mode. So this series was exclusively multiplayer up until now? That sounds fucking awful. Single player shouldn't be a feature, it should be a staple. I'll concede that things like splitscreen have sadly lost their necessity with more constant online connections but entirely multiplayer games creep me out...Maybe I'm just an antisocial hermit.

Speaking of things I'm unfamiliar and uncomfortable with it's EA Sports. They have a hockey game that looks a lot like hockey, a golf game that looks a lot like golf. In terms of the latter they're claiming no load times which is good and there's realistic real world courses or "fantasy" sets where you can golf over the grand canyon or something, which is kind of cool.

A basketball game looks a lot like basketball until they bring up "GameFace HD Scanning tech" and an NBA Community manager called "The Hoop God" and everything gets piercingly awkward. If you've ever wanted to see a scruffy black guy pat a fat white businessman in the stomach, who then proceeds to steal his face with an iphone app and project it onto a basketball player in front of a huge crowd...Well firstly, seek professional help and secondly, EA does just that, because "we make it a priority to listen to you" apparently.

"Rangers! Angel Grove is under attack by a giant parasite known only as Origin"

"The Hoop Gawd" does finally peace out but not before he prophesises the prerequisite "Freshness" to enjoy NBA Live 16. The chunky suit claims they spent two years on their motion animations and controls and what's more you can "up your swag" which i roughly translated as skill upgrades.

EA's mobile division talks crushingly dull statistics briefly and announces a new mobile Star Wars game called Galaxy Of Heroes and another based on those Minion things. Minion's Paradise is a kind of city management and mini-game thing based on a tropical island. If you actually find those yellow tumours funny then maybe you'll like it i guess.

Continuing EA's tendency to exaggerate, a guy from FIFA 16 introduces "the greatest football player of all time" Pele'. Pele' recites anecdotes for a solid five minutes as the speaker turned interviewer next to him gazes lovingly into his eyes.

Go on, touch his knee.

I'm sure Pele' is a very accomplished even legendary player in his field but i know nothing about football and care even less, so this entire section is wasted on me and just appears like a fanboy gushing over an interview with a personal idol and an audience sitting there in awkward silence. Pele' exits the stage to a polite applause as our flustered Fifa fellow tries to continue describing the game's mechanics.

The only noticeable new feature is playable female footballers. They claim to have been developing female players for ages but i can't help thinking this seems a very topical addition given some of the recent criticisms of Ubisoft and other companies regarding female characters.

Mirror's Edge 2 or Catalyst as it's being called, will be an origin story of the protagonist Faith battling against corrupt, invasive corporations. The core gameplay appears to remain the same but some significant changes include an entirely open world with supposedly no loading screens and no gun combat, only melee martial arts.

The following in-engine trailer looks very enticing as a dystopian future focused on mass-surveillance and privacy invasion.The first game hinted at this kind of world but the story seems far more fleshed out this time. Mirror's Edge Catalyst has a release date of February 23rd 2016.

These themes being presented at an EA conference is more than a little ironic.

EA bigwig Peter Moore brings in the conference's finale with Star Wars: Battlefront. One of the developers then tells us the game will feature 8-40 player matches providing a range of options depending on what kind of scale you want to fight on. As i was just lamenting the death of splitscreen earlier, I'm delighted to hear that Battlefront will in fact have local splitscreen multiplayer, as well as at least some of the film's stars as hero and villain characters.

Our final preview comes in the form of Pre-Alpha gameplay footage that already looks pretty fantastic and shows off arguably the best level from Battlefront 2, the planet Hoth. The map seems vastly expanded, third and first person viewpoints remain, all the vehicles you'd expect and despite there being no space battles, this iteration seems to have not squandered the extra time and space by putting a lot of effort into refining the existing gameplay.

So overall some slimy suits, terrible comedy, desperate audience pandering and mind-numbing sports talk with some promising and good-looking games scattered in between. I suppose i should give them credit in that i was prepared to not sustain consciousness for the entire duration but did in fact, stay awake. Just.

As forced and unnatural as it sounded, EA's constant insistence about player feedback, and listening to the consumers did actually have a little proof backing it up. At this point they might have finally been overtaken by Ubisoft as the evil, money-sucking corporate overlords of the gaming world. I guess I'll find out soon at Ubi's own conference.