In some parts of the internet a debate has broken out over whether EA or Ubisoft had the worst press conference, but it's apples and oranges. While Ubisoft would go on to have a presentation that was actively awkward in all sorts of places, EA’s was merely boring. You can feel a distance between the quality of much of what EA publishes and the level of interest they drum up during their press conferences. Look down the roster for this one and you’ll see plenty of the right games there, but EA insisted on a conference where by and large the captivating titles were given smaller slots, while the mundane were given larger ones, and all the while you were strung along with the promise of that Star Wars game at the end, hinting that EA on some level also thought they were wasting peoples’ time.

On paper even a pre-rendered Mass Effect trailer sounded pretty good, but in the context of the conference it just didn’t resolve into anything. Where Mass Effect is incredibly character driven, the trailer was far more intent on showing large, empty sections of the world. A soundtrack twanged away in the background suggesting you were watching an outer space cowboy movie but it just felt out of place. When Need for Speed was carted out then it felt like we were on the right track however. Visually, it was a powerfully realistic game and I have a soft spot for seeing urban areas presented in high detail. We can only hope it plays as well. Unravel was perhaps the highlight of the whole thing for me though. It was cute, heartfelt, and ambitious in its symbolism. It’s hard not to love the artist behind it and it was good to see EA of all people supporting a smaller dev doing something personal and experimental. We were however seeing peak EA at this point and it was a long way downhill.

When Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare was first seen at E3 it was a positive experience because it was something that on paper you wouldn’t expect to work, but there it was looking pretty good. Maybe I’m in the minority opinion, but it feels like there are a fair number of unremarkable class-based shooters kicking around and Garden Warfare 2 looks like just another member of that family. There were some pleasant enough environments in there, but having a zombie who looks like a superhero or a breakdancing Minion rip-off zombie just isn’t funny. The game was leaning into the humour and falling embarrassingly flat. You could infer from the jokes that it’s meant to be for kids and that might be correct, but either way it just wasn’t clicking with me.

Then there were the inevitable sports games. I’m happy to put my cards on the table and say I’m not a sports fan, a lot of people who play games are not sports fans, but that’s obviously not where all the tension here arises. Not to say that EA’s sports games are completely devoid of evolution, because that wouldn’t be true, but there are clear barriers to them coming out with anything radically new year after year. It’s not just that many of their current formulas sell, but that if you’re making a sports game that isn’t some totally off-the-wall Mario Soccer-type thing, there’s only so many ways you can interpret the rules. While shooters can add their jet packs and laser guns, and platformers can let you throw fireballs now and flip gravity, it’s not like anyone can add a second goal to the pitch in FIFA, or have invincibility power-ups drop in NHL. Changes frequently have to be more subtle and often major change is difficult to introduce. It leads to a situation that encourages (but doesn’t justify) marketing gimmicks that suggest more has changed than it actually has, verbal stunts like telling us that playing this year’s basketball is going to be some grand process of self-actualisation.

Kudos to them for actually getting Pelé. Even as someone with little interest in football it was captivating to listen to such an important figure in the game speak, but Pelé was human, humble, and drew out his stories, and so he seemed unfortunately out of place there. It felt that they were unfairly trying to lend themselves some of the authenticity he has worked hard to build up for himself over the decades and it was jaw-dropping in all the wrong ways that they had him wheeled out on the back of a Minions-themed F2P mobile game. It’s the kind of behaviour which makes it feel like EA are being actively disrespectful.

I thought after all that Mirror’s Edge might provide a bit of a redemption for EA, but there was far too little of it. It’s bold and exciting that even after one game with a very successful art style there are areas in Catalyst with a whole new kind of appearance, a cool reflective black in contrast to the dreamy white of the original. Just seeing Faith running across walls and kicking off ledges was enough to elicit excitement and it sounds like they’re leaning further into giving you the sense you’re in a real dystopia, something that fell apart in the first game because of a gap in delivery between the motion comic cutscenes and the 3D world you played in, but it was a fleeting glimpse of the game. It’s not even as if they don’t have gameplay to show, the game is apparently up for demoing on the E3 show floor, they just didn’t want to place it into the press conference.

As if we could forget, our end point was Battlefront, a game that looked more like Battlefield than I think anyone was expecting, not that that was necessarily a bad thing. Even as someone who’s never been into Star Wars, the moment when the player turned around and saw Darth Vader on the map was delightful. When you’re so often resigned to some lesser role below the real main characters of the franchises in these games, it was cool to see that you can deploy the big guys like Luke and Darth.