EA started off with the title Garden Warfare, one of the two new titles in the Plants VS Zombies series. Garden Warfare is a new take on the PVZ series, and is actually a 3rd person shooter title. The game allows the plant of your choice to move around freely as you battle zombies in an arena, the one shown was the zombie's mansion/base. The game features 3D graphics, and it even features sniper, healer, and melee class characters, depending on which plant you choose to play as. Featuring boss waves, different classes of plants, and real time tactics, this is a well thought out, immersive title due out on the Xbone and 360. But seriously, this game is just awesome.
In trailers and gameplay for new reveals like Need for Speed Rivals it is clear EA is pushing the boundaries to make the experience as immersive as possible. NFS Rivals features a rich, crystal clear landscape and ever changing weather patterns, which makes for a game that really puts you in the front seat.
Another surprise was bringing up Aaron Paul, star of Breaking Bad and the new NFS movie to bring us some behind the scenes footage from the movie. For a series where plot is really put on the backburner for action, it'll be interesting to see how the 1st movie installment will do, critically and box office wise.
From there the conference moved into arguably one of EA's biggest territories, sports. Just like in Microsoft's conference, AI intelligence is taking huge steps forward, and your computer controlled team mates will have humanlike instincts, once again making for a much real experience. The sports segment is where this conference started to fall. In this segment EA brought out odd guests who had no business being there, and had many unveilings that were incredibly underwhelming, with minor innovations like micro precision and elite technique that could be seen from miles away that should have been made already. All of these reveals were met with an fake applause track played over the dull, bored, minor cheering of the audience.
From there, things got (somehow) even worse! EA brought out Drake to talk about FIFA 2014. Why? ! Some sort of attempt to bring the mainstream audience into E3? Who knows! The point is it was totally unnecessary and had no connection to what the topic was.
From there EA moved on to the UFC, where it brought out the current heavyweight and lightweight champions (who actually had a connection to the topic) to talk about what fighting was and what it meant to them. After dragging that on for as long as possible (probably to torture us, because they're EA) they showed us the UFC 2014 trailer, which featured pre rendered footage, and no live gameplay whatsoever. Thanks EA!
After the wonderful world of EA Sport's presentation, I needed something else, even if it is another FPS. And that's exactly what they gave us, the first glimpse into Battlefield 4's multiplayer mode, which features an immersive landscape where everything is able to be interacted with.
After recovering from the sports blunder with BF4, they revealed a fan favorite, Mirror's Edge 2, who's trailer used all real gameplay and brought real cheers from the crowd, rather than the fake cheer track used on all their underwhelming reveals.
Along with a few technical difficulties like hearing everyone backstage laughing hysterically when their mics weren't off (Seriously, what were they laughing at?) the multitude of boring underwhelming reveals really outweighed the positives of this experience. So with a strong start, weak middle, and strong ending, EA's conference was well.... extremely average.
And yeah, no Sims 4 news. yay.
-Colby
