E3 2018 Press Conference: EA

It's that time of the year again! E3 is upon us!

E3 kicked off yesterday with the first press conference held by EA. This time I'm gonna make this a little bit different from previous years, by presenting you with a full list of games shown (or announced) and then writing a few sentences about the games I'm personally interested in.

Here are the games in order of appearance:

Battlefield V
FIFA 19
Origin Access Premier (well, not a game, but an announcement)
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Star Wars Battlefront II
Unravel two
Sea of Solitude
Madden NFL 19
Command & Conquer Rivals
Anthem

So let's talk about the last 2.

C&C Rivals will be a mobile real time strategy game. Most likely free-to-play, but hopefully not pay-to-win (we know how free-to-play games look at EA - remember Need for Speed No Limits?). It's interesting to see an RTS game on mobile - a curious attempt to make a game in a genre which desperately needs to be played with a mouse - without a mouse. Reminds me a little bit of Halo Wars... Unfortunately the Android pre-alpha is not available in my country, so I wasn't able to try out the game for myself. Well, as long as it's not riddled with microtransactions, I'm down.

The second game is of course the most anticipated game from last year's E3: Anthem. Judging simply by the looks, it's "Destiny with jetpacks in the jungle". But hopefully it will be much more than that. Apparently EA learned from their mistakes, as it was stated in the press conference: Anthem will have no loot boxes and you can't buy gameplay advantage - only cosmetics. Hell yes! Check out some gameplay here:

The rest of the press conference was pretty much uninteresting for me, since it was only the same rehashes as every year (FIFA 19, Madden NFL 19) and I still don't care for Battlefield or Star Wars. EA CEO Andrew Wilson came on stage a few times and we could even hear a faint "apology" for last years MTX debacle. Well, he never actually apologized, but at least he said that they "listened to the players". Even the Design Director of Star Wars Battlefront II came on stage and apologized. Hopefully this will mean a step in the right direction.

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