by Chris SelogyWe give you a good look at what to expect from the rest of the press conferences at E3 2017 that take places over a long, long weekend.
E3 is back, and this year feels like an especially important year with a new piece of hardware that’s expected to be given final launch details along with the other two platform holders having recent launches that they can follow up on with strong announcements to keep momentum going.
This first half of 2017 has been crazy with great game after great game that has overloaded us in terms of covering them, much less for us to play everything we’ve wanted as they are released. This is going to be a big show for all of the publishers to showcase their wares for the rest of 2017 with some heavy hitters coming as early as August and I’m sure we’ll see more crowding into the fall in October and November, though it’ll be interesting to see who joins Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5 in passing on this fall altogether and hoping for a better shot at some space in early 2018.
Let’s move onto the actual preview part of this article and break things down to all of the third party press conferences that fill in the rest of the big announcements at E3 along with the rest that are not hosting a show this year.
EA Play – Saturday, June 10 at 12 PM PT/3 PM ET
- EA has announced the games they’re going to feature at this three day event outside of the main E3 show.
- The surprise of the list is that NBA Live makes a return with NBA Live 18 that looks good from screenshots and video, but that’s not saying much for this generation’s EA basketball series.
- Expect plenty of time from Madden 18 and FIFA 18, especially with the latter having Super Bowl champ Tom Brady on the cover and some sort of story mode that will be a big push for EA Sports.
- Need for Speed Payback has already made its debut with a fresh trailer at the start of June, which looks to take inspiration from the Fast & Furious series and more of a focused style of racing compared to the last self-titled game.
- Star Wars Battlefront II will probably be the biggest push of all EA games at this event with their renewed focus on campaign and the hype leading up to Episode VIII’s release this December.
- I would not be surprised to see a teaser of one or both of the other known Star Wars games from leads Amy Hennig or Stig Asmussen with the Hennig game from Visceral being the game that’s further along, as far as we’ve heard. Stig’s game with Respawn was announced too recently for them to have much to show at this point.
- The Switch seems to just have the generically-named EA Sports FIFA from EA at this E3, but we’ll have to see if EA is encouraged to commit more resources to Nintendo’s new platform after a strong launch.
- As for surprises, Bioware’s new IP was recently delayed to 2018 with most of the Mass Effect: Andromeda team getting moved to help work on that new IP, so that seems like a long shot for anything more than a teaser.
- Popcap seems like they’re poised for another big show that could include Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 3 after the huge success of the first two games and maybe either a return to Peggle, Bejeweled, or something new if they have a side game to go out alongside Garden Warfare 3.
- EA is still publishing some indie titles with the game from the creator of Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons and another title called Fe that was shown last year.
- To cap off the show, they’ll have some DLC expansions to talk about for Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 to continue the support for both games after their fall launches.