E3 2011 – EA Media Briefing

Following on from Microsoft’s Kinect powered briefing in the morning, it was EA’s turn to show off. We were promised lots of games with some live demos. In a packed Orpheum theatre in downtown Los Angles we excitedly took our seats. I’ll cover the games in the order they were presented.

Mass Effect 3

This is the final chapter in the Mass Effect series. It looks like Bioware have cooked up some spectacular battles as a fitting denouement for Commander Shepard based on this live demo. Seeing the action played out on a cinema sized screen was absolutely breathtaking too. Much of the demo was taken up by an on-rails battle between Shepard and a massive Reaper. This particular action sequence reminded me of a similar on-rails battle in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. If you replace the helicopters with Reapers they are practically the same game :-p

Need For Speed: The Run

I was a little disappointed with live demo. There was a lot of button bashing and not enough driving as the main character tried to escape capture/death at the hands of the police. It all seemed overly scripted; turn corner, get hit by another car, jump out and escape on foot. However, I did like the autolog integration as you race your friends across the whole of America. However, I would like to see more racing and less running. This is a Need For Speed game after all and not Grand Theft Auto.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The CG trailer was very impressive. In fact, forget the game I’d pay to watch 2 hours of the cut scenes. They are that good. When the iconic “dual of the fates” music started blasting out around the theatre I was a very happy bunny. I can only hope at the gameplay matches the visuals on show.

SSX

In typical theatrical fashion, the stage filled with smoke before the video showing off some quite awesome snowboarding skills from a few of the SSX characters. If this is close to the actual game play then is game is going to totally rock. I watched an almost perfect recreation of everything I expect from a SSX on the current crop of consoles – great visuals, sounds and vast amounts of pistes on which to perform increasingly outrageous tricks. I am seriously looking forward to playing this.

FIFA 12

The big announcement for FIFA fans everywhere was the EA Sports Football Club. FIFA just got its own social network. You can connect and compete with other people around the world as your favorite football club. You can also replay significant matches in your chosen club’s history, and in many cases try to avenge painful defeats. You can share the results of all your matches on Facebook too. The football club concept does seem to be the logical next step for FIFA, I’m only surprised it’s taken EA this long to include it.

Madden 12

Between the 3 massive real-life NFL players showing off the incredibly shiny Superbowl trophy we got to see some footage of Madden 12. It does look very good to my non-NFL trained eye. I’m hoping that the game will include the player damage model that has been added to FIFA 12, so when you sack the Quarterback he stays down for the rest of the game!

The Sims Social

Think Sims + Facebook. This game will give you the chance to replace fictional Sims with your real-life friends on Facebook. This really could cause all sorts of trouble when friends/coworkers fool around with each other’s Sims. Virtual cheating might just become a little more common place.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

We didn’t really get to learn anything new about this game from what had already been shown in the announcement trailer last month. This is one to check out on EA’s booth later I think.

Overstrike

From the creators of Ratchet and Clank comes this 4 player co-op adventure game. The look of the game appears to have been heavily influenced by Team Fortress 2, which is no bad thing. The trailer introduced us to the each of the 4 characters, rather than showing any actual gameplay.

Battlefield 3

If you didn’t know any better, after watching this full-on and very loud live demo of armored desert warfare you’d swear that Battlefield 3 is a tank simulator! Between this and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, this is far the more realistic of the two. I found myself being drawn into the action a lot more than I did with MW3. Admittedly this was helped somewhat by watching the demo on a giant screen with an amazing sound system.

DICE have also announced that it is working on a social network/stats product for the Battlefield games called Battlelog. You will be able to check out Battlelog when the open beta starts from the 11th Sep 2011. Battlefield 3 is due for release on 25th Oct 2011, just before MW3 in Nov 2011.