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Listen you’re all busy people, and one of the reasons we stay up pounding ProPlus and Red Bull to watch all the conferences live is so those of you that don’t have the time can rely on us to catch you up. So without further ado, here are the most important bits from EA’s EA Play press conference this weekend.
- The climb down from ‘Battlefield V won’t have a battle royale mode’ to ‘Battlefield V might have a battle royale mode’ came to the natural conclusion of ‘Battlefield V has a mode called royale.‘ So I guess they kind of have us on a technicality there?
- Vince Zampella sat in the audience and just announced Respawn is working on a Star Wars game called Jedi: Fallen Order – like he just said it, he sat there wearing a plain black cap and it 100% looked like he was only there for that bit and they turfed some YouTuber out from their seat, just so Vince could casually drop that they’re doing a new Star Wars game as if neither EA nor the audience really give a s***.
- The faint hope (and I’m getting really deep into this here, folks) that when Vince Zampella said that they’ve been ‘working with Lucas on getting the name and the setting for what our Star Wars game is going to be’ it meant they’ve been working with literal George Lucas and he pulled another ‘Darth Icky‘ and wanted the game to be called ‘Jedi Knights: The Darkenering’ or some s***, so Respawn spent hours arguing him down until literally five minutes before Vince was on camera.
- FIFA 19 is super happy it gets to have the UEFA Champions League now.
- Andrew Wilson still appears to not age.
- The Origin Access subscription service will have, like, an extra bit called Origin Access Premier, which will give access to the EA Vault and streaming access to EA’s current PC games. It’s like Origin Access, but more, and is coming this summer.
- Star Wars Battlefront II ‘didn’t get it quite right’, which is an interesting way to say ‘prompted politicians to call for legislation of part of the entire industry’, but later this year it’s getting a bunch of new levels, and heroes and villains, from the Clone Wars era, so everything is cool now.
- Unravel
2Two is a thing and is out like right now and there is a big murder turkey.
- Cornelia Geppert, the writer and creative director of Sea of Solitude, was really genuinely hyped about her game, and it was lovely (and continues the theme of EA getting a European dev on to demonstrate real emotions, as with Josef Fares)
- Esports American Football player Young Kiv and actual real life American Football player JuJu Smith-Schuster came on to reveal Madden 19 and their banter may cause you actual physical pain but like fair play to both of them for getting up there and doing it (also Madden is back on PC now).
There was an extremely long Anthem bit that included a Q&A panel with BioWare high ups answering totally not curated Twitter questions, but at least we saw some real gameplay and it looks like BioWare being wrestled into a Destiny shaped boxwait f*** all that, there are no romance options, Anthem is dead to me.- Various people at EA talked around the loot box controversy without really saying what microtransactions will look like going forwards; Andrew Wilson said ‘choose’ and ‘choice’ a lot, kind of like how drug dealers can say you technically have a choice whether or not you keep taking heroin, I guess?
