E3 Day One: Great Beginnings, Or Dead Air? (Part 1)

   

      Ah June, that time of year when summer begins and traditionally games are far and few between, except for one instance, the Electronic Entertainment Expo; commonly known as E3. This year it started on Sunday, at 1:00 pm Pacific time with the Electronic Arts conference, and ended with the Bethesda conference at 7:00 pm Pacific, which is a new trend to the conferences that started last year with Bethesda and its amazing showing. The question to be asked is did Bethesda match, or surpass the showing that they had last year, and did EA bring out the 'big guns' to open up this years' E3?
    
​      The best response to that question would be, sort of, though in all honesty it depends on what you were looking for, and interested in as a gamer. Are you generally a fan of what EA releases as a company in general? Then the answer is yes, are you interested in Fifa, and can't wait for the new version to be released? Then the answer is yes, Are you more interested in the obfuscated future ideas that EA has for you without any real reveals and answers to your gaming related questions? Then yes, EA did a great job of starting this years' run of E3 conferences. In response to Bethesda, it can be said that while the conference was not as good compared to 2015, that is a slightly unfair comparison, due to how much, and how well the messages were delivered by them.

      Starting off with EA this year, there was a bit of an expectation that they were going to start this E3 off with a properly amazing conference that would set the bar for those that come after to follow, sadly that did not happen. It started off quite strongly with multiplayer, and single player reveal trailers that make that game look like they are pulling out all of the stops to make this second attempt something that lasts longer that a month in the play cycle of gamers, especially since it is released on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with a release date of October 28th 2016. But after that it was a tad bit all over the place, what with the dual cast in L.A and London the conference seemed to lose focus, which wasn't helped by the way the speakers didn't seem to really know how to talk to their audience.
      
     With the pre-requisite mention of the sports games Fifa and Madden 17, along with the E-sports tag-along that rode the Madden coat tails, though thankfully the time spent on both of these games were nothing close to how long was spent in previous conferences. While the presence of Sports games are something that has an audience, it feels that the time spent on this topic, and the lackluster representation some of their larger I.P received this year was once again created under a committee that didn't understand a major proponent of their audience. Interspersed into the middle of the conference was the announcement of what is called "EA Originals" which is a program that was created to help independent game developers to make the games that they want to make with the support of a major publisher, the first game to be introduced through this program is called Fe, which looks quite interesting at a glance, though with it being so early in development it is too soon to judge it, though the major issue, with this Originals program, is that the details of it, and the games to be included in it were just barely glossed over, which is a common issue with the EA conference as a whole.
     
     By far the largest waste of time had to be the coverage of the Star Wars games that are still in development. It reminded one of the E3 2014 EA conference where they spent more time talking about how excited they were to show you what they were working on, and not having enough time to show you, and people working on computers drawing non-descript Star Wars themed things, and skits, that by the end of that presentation, other than the knowledge that games exist, and they were being worked on, no real relevant information could truly be gleaned from what was said. The last bit of the conference that was truly interesting was the Battlefield 1 presentation, that came towards the end. While the Single player video, as well as the Multiplayer shown was a good way to end the conference, overall the presentations were over bloated, verbose to the point of boredom, and did not truly excite to the point that it should for something that is supposed to be the start of E3.