As everyone usually expects for the EA press conference, you get your new sports additions like FIFA ’18, Madden 18′, and NBA Live ’18. As someone who has been out of the sports game playing loop for a while, they all seemed relatively the same to me, but NBA Live ’18 was getting back into the swing of the franchise, as previous installments were cancelled in previous years for a variety of reasons. As a PC gamer, I go into every EA press conference now with hopes of the Madden franchise returning to PC, but nope, not this year. Battlefield DLC was shown, as well as Need for Speed Payback. I can’t say I’m a big Need for Speed guy, but the game looked intriguing enough to see how it will turn out on release, but the slow cutscenes of crashes/collisions seemed a bit annoying.
One of my favorite surprises of E3 2017 was the presentation of EA Originals, where A Way Out was shown. A Way Out is developed by Hazelight, the same developers that made Brothers A Tale of Two Sons, which was a very well made game. A Way Out showed to be a game about breaking out of prison in required split-screen co-op, either online or local. As a fan of the show Prison Break, this game is very intriguing to me, and I can’t wait to see all the game’s mechanics explained over the next year. It is slated for 2018, and on my ‘Most Anticipated’ list. This game came out of nowhere.
The headliner of the EA press conference was Star Wars Battlefront 2, presented by actress Janina Gavankar, who plays Commander Iden Versio in the new single player story. Janina Gavankar announced that the single player story would take place in the gap between Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Episode VI) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Episode VII). I am personally intrigued by the timeline of this story because it gives a good reason to play the single player story, even for those that might otherwise skip it. All that being said, a major disappointment of the presentation was that no gameplay footage of the single player was shown. A single player story was not included in Star Wars: Battlefront a few years ago, so one would think that showing off the ‘new’ addition would make perfect sense right? Nope, apparently not. Instead we got to see an exhibition of the multiplayer mode by YouTubers, which to me seemed like the same thing but with prettier graphics. A lot of things happening with no real dissection of details.
