First of all, I hate EA. Thought Microsoft was bad? This is a company notorious for its dirty deeds, with the authentication codes and the endless DLC and demands to make you spend more money on nonsense. But the way I tried to look at this conference was, each developer might have some affiliation with EA but they are not EA themselves (well, aside from the EA Sports games, obviously), so this allowed me to observe the games. Returning again from Microsoft's miserable conference are Titanfall and Battlefield 4.
So EA began with the next installment in the Plants vs. Zombies series: Garden Warfare. The name alone nearly turned me off from the game, because anything with any semblance to Call of Duty will disgust me, but thankfully they had a demo of the game to show for the audience. We see our usual humanoid plant life starring in a third-person shooter where each plant has its own capabilities, as with every other PvZ game. The group of players combine their own plants' skills to take down waves of zombies in fully navigable, three-dimensional stages with several points of interest, such as objectives to defend or flower turrets to set up, dotted across the stage. After defeating several waves of zombies, the players reach a boss stage, where they fight... a disco zombie? I thought this was kind of like a bonus or joke wave, but it was a cool thing to see in a game where the style can make things like this work. Then they fight the real boss, which is some giant zombie boss and a shorter version of him. At some point, they send in a flying garlic flower that pelts the boss down until finally calling in an airstrike of corn stalks... I think. It looked nice and all, but then they said it was an Xbox One exclusive.
The next thing they showed was... Titanfall. Again? Pretty much. I really do not remember seeing anything new or different from the Microsoft showing of the game, but they did something very interesting. While the Microsoft conference declared the game was an Xbox One exclusive, the developers of the game at the EA conference said it was exclusive to the Xbox One, PC, and even the Xbox 360. Is there a dispute between Microsoft and the developers of Titanfall (note: this is me wishing ill for Microsoft). I think there was just some kind of misunderstanding about the game, but whatever the case, so far there is no word on the game being available for Sony or Nintendo. Not that it really mattered to me, or that it should to anyone else seeing as how this isn't something as big as Halo.
Next, one of the EA spokesmen decided to show some other games they were working on, though all they did was show two games. One of these games was far so important that nothing else about this conference mattered at all, and that was Star Wars: Battlefront! I don't know if it's a remake or a new game... as a matter of fact, nobody knows if it's anything. All you see is a snowy landscape, possibly that of Hoth, and after about ten seconds or so, a Snowspeeder comes crashing down, zipping by the feet of an AT-AT. That is all you see, and then right away, EA moves on to Need for Speed: Yet Another Racing Game. WHO CARES!
Here, I lost track a bit because IGN's broadcast got a little screwy. Honestly, there was nothing about the new Need for Speed that I felt was any different from any racing game I've seen before. It certainly seemed more exciting than Forza 5, since this game is not as contained and since the cops, as always in N4S, are present. This whole game was completely overshadowed by Aaron Paul (Jesse in Breaking Bad) and his out of nowhere appearance, and from here it goes downhill for a while. EA goes from talking about games to talking about a Need for Speed movie, which looks exactly like Fast and Furious except with an actor who is actually a trillion times better than Vin Diesel and The Rock combined. As much as I love Aaron Paul, I found myself asking why was EA wasting their conference?
From here on, EA clutches on celebrities to show off their games. Some basketball star from the Cavaliers talks with a spokesman about dribbling in NBA Live 14,' and that was the best part of the EA Sports segment. Actually, I think the best part of this segment would be the Madden game, since that one didn't have a guest star to show up and talk about it (as far as I can remember). FIFA should've been the better part of this segment, since soccer is a true sport with fans worldwide, but then they get Drake to talk out of nowhere about how he's always been a fan of FIFA. I don't understand, why do we need Drake to tell us that FIFA is a good game? What's even more bizarre, however, was that gameplay footage of the new FIFA was only "Pre-Alpha" footage, and the game is coming out in a couple to few months. By now, we should have like the full game ready to see!
Then we have the EA UFC showcase... *massive facepalm.* This was so corny I thought I was in Kansas. To start, this was a celebrity freakfest, with Bruce Buffer to do a boxing-style announcement of the next spokesmen, and then with head of UFC Dana White, champion Jon Jones, and champion Benson Henderson coming up to introduce the game. Further hindering this performance was the reveal of the new AI system: MMAi... *massive facepalm.* The Head of UFC then talks about how he believes the first sport ever was fighting, which is okay coming from him, but then we get a trailer that feels all too much like the Call of Duty: Ghosts trailer, showcasing boxing in civilizations as ancient as Greece... Please kill me now.
Sure, "boxing" may have existed in Greece, but this is all just too corny.
Thankfully, before I began to contemplate prying my eyes out, they finished the EA Sports segment and closed with another look at Battlefield 4. At first, I was about to shut off the conference, because who the hell cares about the Battlefield 4 campaign? Why am I going to watch the same thing I've seen countless times before twice in one day? This showcase started off badly enough, with the two spokesmen showing up without applause and with one of them still thanking the audience anyway. Then they go on to say they try to make shooters that aren't just about pretty graphics, setting up a promise which, believe it or not, most have failed to deliver.
Thankfully, they actually did something different from the Microsoft press conference. They showed off the multiplayer and the new "Commander Mode" made for mobile devices, and what better way to do this than by showing it, on the PC, in a full-blown sixty-four player match? They played a match in a map called Siege of Shanghai, a metropolitan city map based in, well, Shanghai. A lot of it looked like "souped up Battlefield 3" as I said before, but that's not such a bad thing. The dynamic environment and capability of destroying structures has improved greatly, from being able to destroy underground support beams for roads (which was used to trap a tank) to toppling down full blown skyscrapers. The closest thing Battlefield 3 got to this was that tower in that Russian countryside map. We also see how Commander Mode is integrated into the multiplayer, where the player in the role of the Commander on the mobile device has a cartographic view of the action, where the enemy is, where the objectives and other things are located, and with the ability to call in a few attacks of his own. We see the Commander call in an artillery strike on a group of tanks that were about to knock down a skyscraper the demoing squad was on. We didn't get a full multiplayer match, as the demo ended as the building collapsed, but this was still quite a beautiful look at what to expect from Battlefield 4.
Before EA left for the day, they closed the conference with a trailer to a new Mirror's Edge. I've never played the first one, though, and I think I heard it wasn't all that good, so I really don't have much to say about this new trailer, other than... it's pretty?
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