E3 2016 - EA

So begins EA's conference. The spotlights start sweeping, generic electronic music starts pumping and the overlord-mother-screen injects subliminal messages into your brain mass as the code-words flash "PLAY. TO. FEEL. LIVE TO PLAY. WIN TO FEEL. PLAY. WIN. REBEL. RULE. SUBMIT."

"Ignorance is strength..."

The hypnosis finally wears off and slippery silverman CEO Andrew Wilson slithers on stage talking about "a new type of show" which equates to the conference for some reason being held in two different places simultaneously. Shady McSnakehips hosts the Los Angeles event while Peter Moore resides at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, dressed in a sexy little black number that I thought he'd probably regret under the huge Apollo spotlights, but it seems quite the opposite. In fact he's a bit nippy...

They constantly switch between these locations presumably so the audience doesn't fall asleep and yet I zone out of Wilson's stock chatter about EA's vague importance in an abstract location somewhere in the game industry.

"Did any of you see the Battlefield trailer last month?"

Wilson asks, trying not to disappear up his own arse and suppress a wanky smirk given the widely known knowledge that Battlefield 1's trailer has become the most liked trailer in Youtube history for reasons not entirely clear to me personally.

Sergeant Slick promises an hour long gameplay stream after the conference before introducing Brian Cox's less successful younger brother to talk about Titanfall 2, Swiftly moving into a multiplayer gameplay trailer we see new features such as teleportation, grappling hooks and advanced Titan-on- Titan melee combat.

He goes onto announce a new single player mode exploring the bond between a sentient Optimus Prime voiced Titan and their pilot. The single player's as yet unclear story shows mainly what you'd imagine with the increased spectacle of scripted set pieces, warfare against what seem to be un-piloted machines and human soldiers but also interestingly a few seconds of the world's (probably hostile) wildlife in the form of some large frilled-lizard type creature.

Titanfall 2 is due October 28th 2016 which I thought I'd make a note of since no other games in the conference are given a release date.

Next up is a hip-hop backed Madden NFL17 trailer that looks like every other Madden trailer and I don't give a shit so let's move on. Except we can't move on because Peter Moore wants to talk mooooree about competitive gaming and how they're trying to involve more players in competitions and tournaments despite not being professionals. "Challenger" "Premier" and "EA Major" are some words he says that all basically mean competition in the sadly not dead language of "marketing dronese". 

A documentary video involving two pro gamers of Madden tries desperately to get us invested and excited for an upcoming tournament and potential face off between them. The video then cuts to them and some other finalists loitering awkwardly onstage whilst a man known only as "Stan" interviews the much hyped competitor who now has a broken arm...I'm sure it'll still be a close contest though... 

I feel like this entire segment should have been nicknamed "Stiff"

We return to Perter Phwoore who announces a 1 million dollar prize fund for one of the numerous competitions they're planning to hold...at some point, I guess...Honestly sports games are like a slow form of lobotomy for me.

Next arrives a man I suspect might suffer the most misspelled name in the world, Aaryn Flynn talks about Mass Effect: Andromeda, describing it as larger in scope than the previous games, with an entirely new cast of memorable characters. A behind the scenes trailer shows snippets of footage in between lots of developers sitting at their desks. 

We see a new streamlined or flattened (depending on your cynicism) Normandy spaceship, a variety of new alien worlds and a Yahg-like enemy charging at an armoured player character. At least one Asari exists here with what seem like significantly improved facial animations and expressions, possibly motion-captured if other footage in the trailer is any indication, and a new Mako (land vehicle) replacement that looks a bit too much like a remote controlled toy car. 

We see more planet-side and outer-space environments and a structure looking curiously similar to The Crucible, which fans of the series will know is potentially a really big deal. The trailer finishes with a woman abruptly waking up in a spaceship and breathlessly whispering "we made it." A sentiment the development team and fans will likely echo if the game dodges more delays and is ever actually released.

Actually in all honesty, take as long as you want, just please don't fuck it up.

Short back and sides returns to talk about the hundreds of updates EA have made to all their games recently which doesn't seem like much of an achievement to me when most game updates are there to fix bugs.

EA Play To Give is the next ambiguously titled nebulous jargon concept project to be introduced and after running it through my "translator" (a starving marketing executive I keep tied up in my basement) I can confirm that I still don't know what the fuck it is.

It seems to be about connecting gameplay features to charities, as though completing certain objectives would donate to charity but they also talk about Play To Give having an end and another 1 million dollar donation going...somewhere...I'll talk to my translator again and get back to you,..This time I'll use the "phrasebook."

Do YOU even know what you're talking about?

Zigzagging back to Teater Moore he checks the audience isn't dead before introducing FIFA 17 where an aggressively bad actor steps out from a small gazebo and gives a speech about the magic of football that I'm pretty sure even the most avid football fans would be curling their broken toes at.

It turns out the guy is also the protagonist in the game's "story" mode, oh wait I don't have to put mocking quotes around "story" since they've decided to call it "The Journey" and that does it all for me. You follow Alex Hunter through the highs and lows of a blossoming football career. Interestingly they chose to focus on the inner spirit and enthusiasm of the character rather than the violence, racism and corruption that are equally important features of the sport.

NBA2k16 Livin' Da Dream is not only an atrocity of a title but a similar attempt at an emotional, dramatic story mode in a sports game. I can't in good conscience recommend you looking it up but the acting was about on par with Mr Hunter's cringeworthy performance on the EA stage which suggests to me another horrific soap-opera trainwreck of a story.

Sorry Gazebo Joe, no one's acting career has kicked off at E3.

Peter Moore (no relation to the serial killer of the same name) insists on continuing to talk about FIFA and how they've now got the likenesses of real life football managers in the game. So now you can see all your favourite soulless, testicle-faced middle-aged men angrily swearing at you from the sidelines, just like on TV.

Jose Mourinho, arguably the most famous of football managers for having a precious shred of something close to a personality, joins Peter on stage to announce that he too is in the game before interrogating and publicly shaming Peter Moore on their inability to secure more than four football manager's likenesses in the game, 

Peter tries to win back control of the situation by asking Jose if his son is in the trap of their microtransactions not realising his mistake of being a grinning EA employee rubbing his fingers together and talking about money at an event with cameras.

And you were doing so well too! With all your talk of charity and not being a money-obsessed tyrannical conglomerate.

I had some jokes to write about the rest of the FIFA footage but my beard was so long that it got tangled in the keyboard and I didn't realise because I was fucking asleep.

A stretched Scandinavian Bill Nye steps out wearing an obnoxious "we are gamers" shirt and starts talking about how magical "Yarny" and last year's cutesy platformer Unravel was. He then introduces EA Originals, an effort to support small developers and even apparently redirect all profits straight back into their projects.

An example of the new initiative is introduced by a nervous man named Klaus from the undeniably small twenty-person Zoink Studios in Gothenburg. We see screenshots of an indie game called Fe. A game where you play as a fox-type creature exploring the nature and wildlife of a purple hazey forest.

As titularly apt as it would be, a Jimi Hendrix soundtrack might not quite suit the tone.

Seemingly an open-world platformer where your magical fox critter communicates through song with the peaceful creatures of the forest and uses stealth to avoid those that are hostile or "spread silence." The game looks good but it also unfortunately looks like 90% of all other indie games where a small vulnerable player character explores a harsh stylised world, see Limbo, Cave Story, Don't Starve, Closure, Never Alone, et cetera. It seems the supposedly more innovative indie scene of game development may have unwittingly created their own form of mainstream.

The Star Wars theme suddenly and jarringly blasts gentle Fe off the stage and Jade Raymond talks unnaturally slowly, possibly drunkenly about the frightening amount of Star Wars games being developed. A trailer jumps between almost every major studio in the United States hyping up each of their own different projects, all bubbling with love of the franchise and not even entertaining the idea of the well running dry.

The Battlefront developers make a point to mention that they've "listened to the players" and realised how stupid they were not to include Force Awakens content and that they're scrambling to rectify that as we speak.

The show closes with Mr Fantastic bragging about how mindbogglingly visionary they were to take Battlefield to the only logical place the series had left. To make his point he then leaves the stage, travels back in time to WW1, lives through all four years of it and returns older, wiser and under a different name to continue talking about it.

Such a shame he lost that shirt in the trenches...

A trailer for Battlefield 1 is started and then for some reason stopped before showing the full thing three minutes later with an equally unnecessary hip-hop soundtrack.

He mentions again the much-hyped gameplay stream of Battlefield 1 happening after the conference and we cut to a small area embarrassingly close to the main conference to talk about that upcoming footage that had better be pretty breathtaking with the amount of preamble it's getting.

Bafflingly, the players of this live-stream are Jamie Foxx and Zac Efron who look absolutely the contractually legal minimum amount of excited to be there. This pointless cutaway to a pointless non-showing of footage comes to an end and the time-traveller describes the game's environmental destruction, dynamic weather systems and "behemoth" vehicles like blimps, accompanied by screenshots that could have easily been footage were this stream not so monumentally important.

Perhaps your next charity idea should be "Play To Give A Fuck".

Shrimp-hips returns to say goodbye and also give one final push to what must now be a life-changing Battlefield 1 gameplay stream and the conference officially comes to a close. The event didn't feel as long and tedious as their previous conference but it also didn't match up in terms of pure, unfiltered embarrassment and stupidity. 

EA's conference was a middling mop of mediocrity with no unexpected gems and those present soaring by like shooting stars to a pensioner that takes a full minute to crank his neck upwards. Amidst these glimmers sat a lot of ultimately meaningless platitudes and business aspirations that are essentially the filler or advert breaks to any conference. 

Not an unbearably painful conference but a woefully forgettable one all the same...Unless you like FIFA of course, in which case you must be off your tits with all the crazy content you've seen. Don't worry though, perhaps ask Perky Peter Moore if you can borrow his...