Another Year of Shootbang: EA'S E3 Conference

Let's start E3 week off with some... feels?

As of this writing, Monday, June 9^th, 2014, marks the day the four big, live press conferences were held: Microsoft’s, EA’s, Ubisoft’s, and Sony’s. And of course, tomorrow marks Nintendo’s Digital Event and all day coverage with the Treehouse, which means by tomorrow afternoon, there will be tons of news and tons of games to talk about, as is the norm for E3 each year.

For Zero Second Cooldown, I plan on going over each conference, talking a bit about what was shown at each conference, and offering my own thoughts and impressions on different, particular games from each conference, and then giving my overall thoughts and, dare I say, a “grade” for each conference.

So with that, I’m going to say that it’s E3 2014, y’all. Let’s talk about EA’s conference today.

EA’s press conference was, well, it wasn’t optimal; I’ll start off by saying that.

If there was one thing we got viewing EA’s conference, it was conceptual prototypes. Well, conceptual prototypes and “feels”. In a way, it feels like a lot of what EA showed today was them needing stuff to show aside from their usual list of sports games and Battlefield.

Starting off with a teaser for the new Star Wars: Battlefront game, which, Battlefront was easily one of my favorite games on the PS2. So, while we don’t know a lot yet, I’m still a bit cautiously optimistic. Battlefront is one of my favorite shooters and I want it to be good. But at the same time, it’s definitely too early to tell if the game will be good or not.

To be honest, the most I really remember about Dragon Age: Inquisition was a lady playing what I presume was one of the themes from the game, the different legs of the dragon each having their own health bar, and the presenter saying something in lines of “All the feels”, which at that point made me really angry and want to stop watching the conference completely.

After that, the most notable things to me were conceptual prototypes (I’m looking at you, new Mass Effect game!) and sports games. Oh, and there was something about Gladys coming over to your part to ruin everything and then laughing so hard that you die in The Sims 4. Oh, and there was a person named Dustin who created a sim named Andre, so I guess I made a sim for The Sims 4 when I wasn’t conscious?

To be honest, and, I feel kind of bad about it because I am writing on it, but at the same time, it is my opinion: I was not a big fan of EA’s press conference. At all. In a way, I wish I had more to say, but in my opinion, basically nothing besides the hope that Mirror’s Edge 2 and the new Star Wars: Battlefront game will be good. That’s basically it. Theoretically, EA could’ve had a lot of good stuff for the current consoles to show, but they didn’t. They just had a lot of things that everyone more or less knew about (especially thanks to that Battlefield Hardline leak) and a lot of conceptual prototypes. Oh, and they had a MOBA? Yeah, they had a MOBA, which was weird because it seems like MOBA’s are the new MMO’s in that they’re the thing a lot of game companies are chasing in hopes of money but not seeing the return they’re hoping for.

There’s also Criterion’s game, which, while it seemed to be early on, could be interesting. The wide variety could lead to a lot of different types of control and gameplay, and it could be really good. But, again, it’s early in development it seems, so it’ll be hard to say until there’s more to say.

And, that’s about it, really. EA just had an incredibly bland, tepid showing. Part of that is due to them having nothing I’m interested in. I’m not huge into sports games or most shooters, so, it makes sense that their showings don’t interest me, but it still saddens me that that isn’t the case. I would like to be impressed by the showings, as I would with every company, but that definitely wasn’t the case today.

Overall, I’d give EA’s press conference a 3/10. Yes, I am deviating from my out of 5 scoring scale, but mostly because I’d probably rate most of the press conferences under 3 and this helps for more variety. But, EA’s E3 conference gets a 3/10 just for being so bland and not having a lot to offer, and that’s about it really.

Check back sometime tomorrow to see my thoughts on Ubisoft’s E3 press conference!