A few years ago, there was something about EA's yearly product presentations that felt perfunctory. The agony of them was that the publisher had games that would make your mouth water and your eyes dilate, but then they also had entries in their yearly series and less polished casual games, both of which acted as extra-strength sedatives. You couldn't ignore an EA showcase because you'd regret not seeing the cream of their crop, but if you tuned into one, you'd also see a lot of games that had you begging the presenters to just move on.
Since then, EA has made a concerted effort to better engage their audience and present something that fizzles and crackles off the screen. Their approach can be abrasive; in years past, they've leant heavily on celebrity appearances and excitable Twitch streamers screaming their way through Battlefield matches. However, we are at a place where it feels like the publisher can broadcast their annual presentation on YouTube and not have a highly upvoted comment about which bit of the video you need to skip past.
This year's live event was powered by the unlimited energy reserves of WWE's Xavier Woods. Woods sometimes came across as inauthentic, overselling games that spoke for themselves, but his larger-than-life personality filled the stage. With Woods running the show, you forgot that there was no audience, an exemption that was presumably down to COVID restrictions.
With Codemasters in their empire, EA can expand their racing game library from the arcade genre into the more simulatory. Despite having quite a bit of experience in racing games, I've generally stayed away from the more realistic end of the genre and don't know what to expect from a GRID. What exactly makes GRID different from a Gran Turismo or a Project CARS? I'm not saying there isn't a distinction; I'm just saying I don't know it, and the appearance of the game at EA's event didn't help clarify. When prompted to speak on GRID Legends' mechanics, designer Becky Crossdale mostly discussed the classes of car in the game, which aren't really mechanics.
It's also a little unusual to see a track racer sold primarily on its story mode; that's not what these games are prized for. Having said that, the use of FMV cutscenes for a title with this setting is refreshingly unique, and I am amazed by the gap between Ncuti Gatwa's acting in Sex Education and in the scenes we saw for Legends. It's a transformation from sassy misfit to hard-nosed racing driver.
Character-driven multiplayer games like Overwatch and Apex Legends have become hotspots for original character design. As audiences have come to know the standard shooter classes like the back of their hand and seen the same character tropes in games time and time again, developers have had to start thinking outside the box. We've all seen the gun-slinging space cowboy and the bloodthirsty orc, but I bet you've never seen anyone quite like Seer: a Protoss Victor Vran who dances a path across the map while dispatching futuristic recon drones. Yet, given the amount of time EA dedicated to Apex Legends, it's disappointing that we saw no Seer gameplay. It's not that they're not ready to show it, but this was a teaser for a teaser, with them holding back live Seer footage until the 26th.
Speaking of original takes on the familiar, I've seen a lot of third-person action games and a fair number of deck-builders, but I've not seen a deck-based, dice-infused, third-person combat game like Lost in Random. While it's hard to find a title that doesn't in some way include a random number generator, the generator rarely becomes a diegetic entity in the environment. No one presentation for a card game can ever convey a full sense of its quality, as the appeal is not so much in the basic mechanics as in the complex dynamics between the cards. It's, therefore, a boon to Lost in Random that it can immediately dazzle with its quirky American McGee-style art.
The Battlefield: Portal trailer continued to highlight that while the series remains the king of multiplayer spectacle, it also has one of the largest tonal gulfs between single-player and multiplayer. That's perhaps not an issue in itself, but I've remained uncomfortable with how EA DICE take the horrors of real wars and even specific battles in those wars and then sell them on as pulse-pounding playgrounds of empowerment. But I don't want to beat a dead horse. Playing Halo's Master Chief Collection recently, I was struck by how flashing through maps and weapons from many different Halo games created an experience distinct from any one Halo multiplayer's. It becomes an arcadey jukebox where you're never bound to one set of rules or one look for very long. Battlefield: Portal looks to do something similar to Battlefield, but it takes it a step further.
We've seen plenty of classic games honoured with collections and remasters; it makes sense from a design standpoint that the evolution of that is taking the elements from those individual games and mixing them up like a smoothie. Battlefield has long had a restriction wherein the unique setting of each game has meant that much of the time, the series could not carry beloved maps forward into future games. Sometimes it couldn't carry guns or vehicles either. Now, DICE is throwing caution to the wind and saying, "Fuck it, this isn't a war sequence, this is a sandbox", and that's the way out. It leaves Portal somewhere between a love letter to the series and a platform for transformative, original creations.
Last up, we have the Dead Space remake. Having recently played back through the original game, I can say it holds up just as well as you'd want. The combat feels gnarly and desperate, pushing you to find any inch of ground you can against an onslaught of meatshield zombies. The user interface remains one of the most economical and thoughtful in the medium's history. The Ishimura has an atmosphere you could cut with a knife and is peppered with some undeniably cool retro-future displays. Truth be told, the original Dead Space's look remains so striking that a ground-up remake doesn't feel all that necessary, but I'd happily play through it. With any luck, it'll also get us to what I think we truly want from this series: a Dead Space 4.
Year on year, EA's annual event has strayed ever further from the mothership of E3. It's an example of the redistribution of gaming news throughout the calendar. One that has prevented the summer period from clogging up with more gaming announcements than we can process. In that sense, it's a positive that EA Play Live now happens in late July. But existing so far from the other industry showcases of the year can be a blessing or a curse. You don't fade into the wallpaper, but if you're trying to create a gaming event in your own right, you need a lot of big announcements to prop you up, and I don't quite think EA was there this year.
EA Play Live 2021 was a far cry from the sometimes sleep-inducing EA presentations of a few years back, but a certain substance is still missing. The games this year were promising, and the host contagiously energised, but when you add it all up, forty minutes of presenting gave us gameplay reveals for just two new titles. As one of the biggest names in video game publishing, EA is capable of so much more. Thanks for reading.
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