Welcome back to another year of E3!
This morning in Los Angeles, EA kicked off E3 2018 with a press conference in which they announced a new Star Wars game, an Unravel sequel, and took a bigger look at BioWare’s upcoming RPG Anthem, which is out next February. So sit back and enjoy the continuing coverage.
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Battlefield V gets more destructible environments and a battle royale mode.
The next Battlefield game will bring back the destructive environments that DICE made famous in Battlefield: Bad Company.
The developers also said "No loot boxes. No premium pass."
They also announced “royale reimagined” for Battlefield, meaning that Battlefield V will be getting a battle royale-style gameplay mode.
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Battlefront II is taking on the Clone Wars.
Star Wars Battlefront II is getting a bunch of new stuff this year, including a new squad system, a new starfighter mode, a new command-post capture mode, and new heroes and maps taken from the Clone Wars.
There will be new heroes including General Grievous, Obi Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker.
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Respawn’s Star Wars game is called Jedi: Fallen Order.
Respawn’s Vince Zampella confirmed that means you’ll be playing as a Jedi, lightsabers and all.
The game takes place “during the dark times” between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, when the Jedi are being hunted. Per EA on Twitter, it’ll be “an original Star Wars story around a surviving Padawan set shortly after the events of Star Wars: Episode III.” It’s coming in holiday 2019.
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Unravel Two brings Yarny back for a co-op adventure, And you can play it today.
It looks just like the first game, but has a co-op focus that has both players using their yarn abilities to swing around and avoid hazards. They were sure to stress that you can play it in single-player, if you want—the other yarn character just wraps itself around Yarny and you can control them both.
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EA Announced A New Game Called Sea of Solitude
A new EA indie, this time from German studio Jo-Mei Games. The game was introduced in a winningly wandering way by writer/creative director Cornelia Geppert.
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Command & Conquer is returning as a mobile game.
After those announcements, EA hosted a stage demo of a new competitive Command & Conquer mobile game. Called Command & Conquer: Rivals and it definitely looks like a competitive mobile RTS. Not much more to say other then that.
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We learned more about BioWare’s Anthem, coming in February.
We learned a lot about BioWare's new IP Anthem and for that we're turning to our friends over at Kotaku
To begin, BioWare’s Casey Hudson, Mark Darrah, and Cathleen Rootsaert explained that the goal with Anthem is to avoid “diluting” the story by keeping it separate from action-heavy combat. You’ll go on missions that take place in a shared world where, for example, everybody experiences nighttime simultaneously, but then you’ll return to your base, which is a wholly single-player experience. There, you’ll talk to characters and do more traditionally BioWare-y things.
“This is where your story really lives and breathes,” said Darrah.
You will, however, be able to play the whole game solo if you want. BioWare wants multiplayer to be a “choice” that players make of their own accord.
As a rookie Freelancer, your goal will be to push back against the evil Dominion, a group of humans who are trying to turn a powerful item called the Anthem Of Creation—once used by a mysterious race called The Shapers to create the world—into a weapon. If all those impenetrable proper nouns don’t get Destiny fans salivating, nothing will.
In the meantime, though, you’ll also be trying to come to grips with the origin of the untamable world you inhabit. Nobody’s sure what its deal is or how humans—who seem woefully tiny in comparison to everything else—came to be part of it.
The presentation then shifted over to a gameplay demo in which four players, each flying around in specialized super suits, fought creatures called Scars in order to destroy the source of a nasty poision. In practice, it was like the Avengers if everybody was Iron Man. The ranger suit, for example, carried a general purpose jack-of-all trades arsenal, while the storm suit could blow shit up real good. Meanwhile, the colossus cleared a path for his teammates through explosive traps by ploughing right through them and absorbing the damage with heavy armor.
“You’re not your suit,” said Darrah, explaining that you can switch depending on your mood or the specific needs of particular missions.
The mission proceeded through phases, first with a high-flying outdoor fight with plenty of destruction and vertigo-inducing antics. The squad then soared through a more open area in pursuit of their goal. There, they encountered a world event monster—a skyscraper-sized “Titan”—but decided to swerve past it because they didn’t want to get the shit stomped out of them during an E3 demo.
From there, they passed through an underwater cave and eventually came upon an Anthem Of Creation relic. The relic was swarmed by Scars, which the squad took care of using the power of friendship. The ranger threw a frost grenade, which stopped enemies nearly-dead in their tracks. Then the colossus finished the job by opening fire with her heaviest artillery. At the end of it all, they “silenced” the relic, averting some kind of “disaster.”
Next, the squad followed a trail of acid gunk into a cavernous ruin where they hoped to find the source of the poison. There, they encountered a weird, gigantic Metroid-ass looking monster. Then the demo ended.
Just in case it wasn’t already clear that EA is no longer worshiping at the golden altar of ill-advised loot box monetization, BioWare added that Anthem won’t have any. There will be microtransactions, but they’ll be “strictly cosmetic.”There will also be ongoing releases of new content.
But no romances. Speaking with Game Informer, lead producer Mike Gamble said that the time-honored BioWare tradition of playing 12 dimensional genital chess with blue people won’t be part of Anthem.
“There are no romances,” Gamble said. “There are friendships. Some of the stuff we did with Mass Effect – the Citadel DLC specifically – there was a lot of friendship moments. You and Garrus sitting up, shooting – that kind of stuff, we want to lean into that. The romantic stuff, we’re moving away from that for Anthem.”
Anthem will be out on PC, PS4, and Xbox One on February 22, 2019.
