While E3 may generate oodles of press for anyone looking to get potential consumers thinking and talking about their prospective products, one of the biggest problems companies at the expo face is that it’s easy to get drowned out in the sheer noise of the show, even when you’re an industry giant. However, last year Bethesda Softworks found a simple solution to the problem. They may be a relative juggernaut within the industry, but their press conference still wasn’t going to attract the same attention that a console manufacturer like Sony or a veritable collector of franchises like Ubisoft would. However, by broadcasting their media briefing a good day before anyone else’s, they won themselves a full evening of buzz that wouldn’t have been nearly as fervent if they’d gone for a “Day Zero” conference and tried to talk over the show’s more popular vendors. Not one to miss a trick, EA carved out their own E3 away from E3 this year, where their showcase preceded even Bethesda’s conference.

Not much is usually expected from EA, they have too many eggs in annualised franchise and microtransaction baskets. That being said, the briefing this year was still a little disappointing. Nothing was offensively bad, and the expanse of EA Sports franchise-stroking was predictable, but it was reasonable to think they might make some more substantial presentations of non-sports games. For example, Mass Effect: Andromeda seemed like a shoe-in for being fleshed out with gameplay and story details, and maybe even a gameplay demo. It was teased last E3 and it’s coming out in under a year, so it’s a bit of a bummer to just see it being given another teaser trailer and pushed to one side. Similarly, you can feel this intense, driving energy behind Titanfall 2, but that game only got a plot/gameplay trailer, whereas the twentieth Battlefield game was shown off for over an hour.

For what's it worth though, I’m glad we saw something rather than nothing out of both of those games. The new Titanfall would appear to have more personality than the original game and is putting some meat on its bones by moving from what was essentially a near-future modern military game to a straight sci-fi. Gameplay-wise the shooter has been best remembered for its mech combat, but another important part of the original game was the fluidity with which your character could move across maps, and the grapple hook in Titanfall 2 looks to take the play further down that route. Mass Effect: Andromeda is probably a game with more potential, but I think there’s also cause for concern over whether it’s going to bring out what’s best about Mass Effect. The game claims to be about exploring hostile new alien environments, but a lot of sci-fi games are about that. One of the things Mass Effect did well that few other futuristic adventures did was give you a cross-section of that world’s sociopolitics and a chance to exist within its more peaceful and civilised spaces. By pushing the series’ setting out to this distant frontier, away from the hubs of civlisation, I worry that might get lost.

The best world-building presented in the show was in the form of Zoink Games’ Fe. It would be easy to lump the title in which other “charming”, slightly lonely indie games like Unraveled or Grow Home, but Fe’s darker world sets it apart from those titles. It’s interesting, because usually when games present a grimer environment it’s because they want to evoke feelings of hardship and grittiness, while the way Fe was presented, it seemed like the developers were using its murky colours and ferocious monsters to not only intimidate, but also instil a sense of charm and humanity. I like that as an idea. Then there was a very wishy-washy video about the creators of Star Wars games realising imaginary worlds, and finally we hit the inevitable Battlefield 1 portion of the show.

Battlefield 1 is a game that feels remarkably pleased with itself for just being Battlefield with some tweaked thematics. The forcefulness with which EA tried to push the notion that this is a whole new experience only drew more attention to all the ways in which this is a by-the-numbers Battlefield game. It’s also so hard to get away from how disrespectful this game feels to the victims of World War I. The initial announcement, which came with dubstep warbling over shots of trench warfare, could have been seen as a one-off, but the newer trailer they showed followed the same pattern, and EA seemed only too happy to tell us how “epic” it would be to re-enact the horrors of a war that claimed a whole generation of men.

Presumably, the single player will have more to do with WWI as a historical event, but the multiplayer is basically the same team-centric empowerment shooter the series has always been. In fact, as much as the early 20th century tech is meant to inform the gameplay here, it seems more about Bad Company-style transformative environments than unreliable guns and mustard gas. The only things that felt particularly true to the conditions of war were the weather affecting battle and the way that the ravaging of the demo’s small French town emphasised the bleakness of these fights. Still, the post-conference madness was the kind of shambling mess that you turn up to EA for. The awkward pre-tournament interviews, the overblown machismo, and the baffling decision to show a good 15 seconds of Snoop Dogg smoking weed as he represented an EA game told E3 veterans “Don’t worry, you’re home”. Thanks for reading.