Here is a sequence of words you won't want to hear: 2017 may be E3's Year of the Influencer. The use of e-celebs to promote wares will be less pronounced in the Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft presentations, but the EA conference's habitual return to bouncy YouTube and Twitch characters is to some degree just Electronic Arts moving with the current. It's happening for the same reasons that the public is allowed into E3 now and that EA have, for the second year in a row, ended their conference by showing a whole match from an upcoming multiplayer game. From the perspective of the industry, E3 is increasingly a marketing event and so will always bend towards whatever method of presenting games is capable of putting the most eyeballs on screens. The optimal method used to be a formal and business-like interfacing with the games press, but most people looking up video game content online now are not reaching for their Gamespot or their IGN but their favourite streamers and Let's Players. The industry embracing this fact is not new, it's just E3 took a little time to catch up. The most forward-thinking choice made in any recent E3 might have been Ubisoft having YouTuber Tobuscus co-host their conference a few years back. It was a sign of what was to come.

It's hokey and entertaining when companies court online personalities in this way, but when I stop and think about it, I find it hard not to see something a little bit sad and a little bit gross in it. When developers and publishers give fans advanced previews of games or fly them out to their studios to film their visit, they're aware that it's possible for someone's reaction to be simultaneously earnest and misleading. There is always the strong possibility that any positive response on the part of the "influencers" in these set-ups is a response to a games company taking an interest in them or giving them exclusive early access to a title, rather than being a response to the quality of the game itself. Influencers may even feel pressured to praise the game they've seen, socially indebted to the company to do so, and there are others who are trained presenters who may be employed to paint on a smile when presenting company products. It's the enemy of truthful criticism because there are a lot of people who trust these personalities, it's why we call them "influencers". Fans may accept their favourite streamer's reaction to a video game as representative of their future reaction to it without understanding the critical apparatus that should be employed when we try to divine the quality of a piece of media from the outside. It feels awfully manipulative on the part of the companies.

Once we start following this sceptical line of thought, it's hard to stop. Yes, the influencers might be an example of smoke and mirrors that benefit those looking to make big money on games, but then you could reasonably turn this accusation against a lot of what we see at E3. Did the Need For Speed demo not look carefully scripted? Do we believe EA mentioned all those charities and then asked for applause for mentioning them because they're pure altruists? Can we rely on any of these demos to be fully reflective of the final experiences we'll get? There was also a different flavour of exploitation on show in the form of Battlefield One. When EA premiered the historical FPS last year, the impression given was of a game that took an unthinkably horrific war, one that had never had its horrors recognised to the just extent, and processed it into gory escapism. There was some pushback to that idea around the time, partly on the grounds that we didn't know the complete content of Battlefield One when EA revealed it. A year on and its clear that EA are doubling down on it not being a dignified reflection on an era of suffering, and that the Great War is instead an opportunity to "squad up and go tear it up".

It's not all doom and gloom, however. Need For Speed: Payback is explosively colourful and borrows one of Burnout Paradise's best dynamics: Physics which make it easy to shunt other cars off of the road combined with a camera that always has its sights where the action is. My only major worry is that the open-world nature of the game may make it blend too far into The Crew and Forza Horizon. The standout contender of the briefing was A Way Out which looks to be pioneering into territory few other games even think about: Camera and co-operation within a strongly narrative format. There are a lot of games that have downplayed traditional "gameyness" and built themselves instead on care for character interaction and thoughtful plot. However, these games are almost always solo affairs. We have many games doing great work with co-op, but those games are almost always put you in the shoes of a combatant working tactically alongside other combatants. A Way Out could fill in the blanks, giving us good co-op that interfaces with a focused and film-like story and presentation. It also looks to be a never-before-attempted experiment in cinematography, keeping two simultaneous shots on-screen throughout the game.

Lastly, we come to Star Wars Battlefront II. When responding to complaints about Battlefront (2015), EA seemed to care more about their distribution model than the mechanics of the experience, and in their demo, it was often hard to tell the impact that any one player was meant to be having in the match as a whole. However, I do have respect for EA acknowledging that there was a lot of criticism of the original game and not going for the low-hanging fruit of paid DLC this time around. They seem to understand that the last Battlefront was just too slim and may even be using the free content injection into the game to ensure the online community does not quickly dry up. The game also looks to be pushing for an even more ambitious working scale than its predecessor. Hopefully, it's still possible to feel important on such large maps, but at any rate, it's good to see the first look at this game take place in a map with a lot of buildings which help you judge the scale. There were also a lot of indoor areas which provided more cover while being less claustrophobic than some of the narrow trenches of Battlefront (2015)'s first couple of maps.

For both the right reasons and the wrong reasons, EA were entertaining this year. There were times at which they were predictable and times at which they were even obnoxious, but they got in, showed some interesting ideas, threw out some goofy presentations, and got out. That's a lot better than they and Ubisoft have been doing at recent E3s. Thanks for reading.