Ripten Real-Time: EA Press Conference
by Andrew Podolsky on July 14, 2008 at 2:44 pm
It’s the first day of E3, and the EA Press Conference is just about to begin. We’ll start liveblogging from 3:00 pm PDT on, so check back shortly for our immediate, firsthand response to EA’s big announcements.
3:05 pm: We’ve been asked to turn off our pagers and cell phones. The lights are starting to dim. Looks like we’ll be starting soon.
3:05 pm: Flurry of EA games– Skate, Mercenaries, Dead Space. “New Sports”, like Facebreaker, NCAA, Hockey, Tiger Woods, NASCAR, and of course Madden 09. “New Sims”, same as the old Sims. Plus the mini-Sims for Wii. “New Casual Entertainment”, Monopoly, Connect Four, Operation. Here’s Harry Potter… looks like a Quidditch game? “New Games”: Battlefield, Spore. “New Partners”, Left 4 Dead, Crysis expansion, Rock Band 2, Burnout, Mercenaries 2, and Mirror’s Edge. Very impressive quick-cut trailer. No game names were shown.
3:09 pm: Exec takes the stage. The people who make the games will be showing the games, they said. Less boring marketing and sales talk. People here cheer appreciatively.
SimsAnimals
3:10 pm: Here’s our latest Sims game: SimAnimals. You can create groups of animals, their friends and adversaries, and shape their habitat. And they will have a mind of their own. Friendly animals like rabbits and deer, and some mischevious like foxes and wolves.
Sim Animals trailer starts. A gloved hand (sort of like the hand in Black and White) picks up a sleeping bear cub. He is chasing a squirrel, stop to talk to a fox who is eating a mushroom. The squirrel steal the mushroom. Both bear and fox go after it. Pretty stylized– not super realistic, but attractive. This is CG, not gameplay. The gloved hand removes a tree, and the bear falls into a stream, then the gloved hand picks it up. The end!
Sims 3
3:14 pm: Here’s the real Sims. Sims 2 Store Beta was just launched, it is now live. You can buy individual items, and buy Sims 3 digitally. Coming in 2009. Sims 3 will have “the most complex characters ever put into a videogame.” Like we haven’t heard that before.
3:15 pm: First look at Sims 3 gameplay. Your entire life starts inside the house. Now someone’s opened the door. Change from black and white to color as Sims run around outdoors– jogging, fishing, beign stylish, talking Simlish on the phone.
They’re having a fabulous party– and you’re invited!
Dead Space
3:17 pm: Next up is Glen Schofield of EA Redwood Shores. He’s introducing Dead Space, a gory M-rated game. This game offers “realistic zero G, just like in Space”. This game has no HUD– (heads up display), so no “clutter”. Here comes a demo of live gameplay.
OK, this looks REALLY cool. It’s over the shoulder third person, like RE4, but with a creepy space atmosphere like System Shock 2. When he aims, a hologram indicates how much ammo he has left. He enters a new area, and a creature attacks and knocks him down. He’s getting smacked around, fighting this monster, aiming for the head but not doing much damage.
Now he’s aiming for the legs, which takes it down. Finally he turns a flamethrower on the thing and lights it up. I guess flamethrowers are in this year (see Gears of War 2 at Microsoft’s thing). The controls seem to be very similar to RE4, and that’s not a bad thing.
Using some sort of electric crossbow, he zaps the thing into submission. That guy took a lot of hits. He makes it to an elevator and rides up.
On the second floor, the halls are covered in organic material. Our hero is snagged by an alein tentacle and dragged through the halls. He fires from the ground but is sucked into a pit killed. Coming out on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 on October 21 2008.
Here’s a new trailer now, with all real time gameplay. This is the first time I’ve seen more than just screens, and I’m definitely impressed. RE4 meets Event Horizon/ System Shock 2/ Bioshock? Yes please.
The trailer’s plenty gory, but isn’t nearly as cool as the gameplay footage. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is sung by a creepy girl. Hm, a little cliched.
Mirror’s Edge
3:25 pm: The makers of Battlefield: Bad Company are showing us Mirror’s Edge, the first-person platformer that had an impressive trailer debut about a month ago. You play as a courier, in an age where information is highly monitored. We watch a lengthy gameplay demo.
Items in the world, like pipes or ropes, will turn red to indicate you can cross on them. Your character’s arms and legs are visible around the periphery of the screen, along with a slight blur effect.
Our character makes an impressive leap of faith. A few people in the audience go, “oooh!”
She enters a room with some boxes piled up. She leaps from a pipe on the wall to a vent, and up into another vent, where she encounters bad guys who start to fire on her. It looks like color is a big part of this game– red items show your pathway, and much of the rest of the game is a stark white. You have a “reaction time” (bullet time) to perform big stunts.
After making another leap, crossing over rooftops, she takes down a couple of guards– first with a kick to the leg, then with a Judo flip. You can complete the whole game without firing a single bullet– it’s hard, but possible, and will earn you an achievement.
Our courier makes it to her target– another courier, to whom she tosses the package. Now she’s stuck on the roof with guards closing in with guns. She makes a leap onto a helicopter, and when she faces the building, you can see her holding onto the helicopter in the reflection. Very pretty.
New trailer: same intro music as before. “The following is all in-game footage”. Showing off some new environments, interiors, color schemes, times of day. These locations are seamlessly edited together. This game has a very Portal-like look to it– very clean and sparse, with the environment the main focus.
Hearty applause– we like Mirror’s Edge.
Spore
3:32 pm: Rock star music introduces Will Wright, the rock star developer. His shirt says “Save SETI at Arecibo.” It’s no Darfur, but a worthy cause anyways.
The Spore creature creator has been a big hit, of course– 1 million species created in a week. More Spore species now than real species on Earth. So Will Wright is bigger than Jesus?
It took about 3 weeks to get 1.7 million species (the number on Earth), and that’s 3 times longer than God, so… “Spore Fans = 38% God”. Flattery will get you everywhere, Will.
Players have made realistic creatures and human creatures. Where are the sex creatures? Creatures in the shapes of ships, planes. Bizarre stuff. No mention at all about obscene creatures. Probably for the best.
Apparently there’s some kind of celebrity website for Spore– Stan Lee, David Lynch, Adam West, and others have made their own Spores. Kotaku’s Brian Crecente is featured on the list– you celebrity, you. Or maybe that’s the gigolo from Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo. No, it’s Brian.
A documentary for National Geographic is in the works. The DVD will be include with the deluxe Galctic edition of Spore.
Will believes non-gamers will fall into Spore the way they did for Sims. By the way, everyone here picked up a copy of the $10 retail creature creator when they walked in– and one of you lucky Ripten readers will win it as part of the “Win Chad’s Swag” contest (look for it on the right side of the site.
3:41 pm: New trailer. The voice over definitely plays up the intelligent design angle. “Someone looked at the microbe and decided they needed a longer flagella.” “Someone made our little champs irresistable to the opposite sex.” “Now we’re talking… or mating, as the case may be.” It’s a very quick, quirky trailer that rushes through the different stages of Spore, from cellular level to planetary level. This game will be out Sept 7 (but we knew that already).
NBA 09
3:43 pm: Hey, it’s Peter Moore! People are asking to see his tattoo. But he says he’s out of arms and legs.
Peter’s excited about EA Sports (he should be, it’s his job). Twenty years of Madden football this year. Exec Producer for NBA Live 09 is going to demo the game for us. Plus a celebrity: NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton. He starts to go on about how excited he is– rambling, almost, and then says he’s interested in Spore. Peter steers him back to “Sports, not Spore”.
They’re having a boring, manly sports talk on stage. Peter brings up “dynamic DNA”… interesting name. This is going to be “more than stats”, it’s about getting the attributes of the players in the game in a more realistic fashion. Your player’s DNA is made of things like “Isolation, cuts, post up, Pic and roll man”. Man, this is all Greek to me. Here’s a video to help demonstrate it.
In NBA 09, DNA is made of “player tendencies”– the decisions they make in the middle of a game. Bill makes some sports joke. People laugh– I have no idea why this is funny. Did I mention I don’t follow sports? I feel like a nerd in gym class here. I wonder if Peter Moore ever stuffed Will Wright into a locker.
I have no idea what they’ve been talking about, but here’s some actual gameplay. The animations look nice. DNA strands are going down the right, next to play calling. This shows which options are more likely to be successful. The replay is a bit choppy when it cuts to the hoop view.
Peter asks them to “light up the hot zones”, and Bill says he loves the hot zones. This shows you where you’re most likely to sink the ball. Marv Albert is calling the action in the game. This is the first time we’ve seen NBA 09 running, says Peter. Peter mentions the Celtics, and some people in the audience boo. Man, can’t we go back to Dead Space now?
Bill gets a good round of applause– he did pretty well, considering his specialty is real basketball and not videogames.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09
3:56 pm: Natalie Gulbis of the LPGA comes out on stage to introduce Tiger Woods. Aw, too bad Tiger isn’t here. She’s going to play the game on Wii. She’s having a friendly game with Peter. The motion controls look like fun, but the graphics are nothing to write home about.
Natalie’s shot lands in the rough– nearly in the water. She’s playing as herself in the game, wearing the same clothes she’s wearing onstage. Khaki shorts, red t-shirt, white cap. She’s not doing too bad against Peter, but Peter just made his putt and won the hole.
Natalie misses her putt. It’s Peter 2, Natalie 4. Not too bad though!
Peter closes. “It’s in the game”.
EA Online
4:02 pm: John Pleasants, of EA’s online organization. They’re “driving a type of connected consumer experience”. Nanea Reeves, who runs the EA online group, takes the stage. Here’s what’s online for EA.
You’ll have a “nucleus” that is the same across all games– your login is your email address. Helps you find friends and a good match online. In Battlefield Heroes, which is free to play, you can get new clothes “so you can look hot”. Big concern for me. Sims 2 also has downloadable stuff at the EA store. Nucleus should be in 25+ EA titles by the end of 2009.
Shawn Fanning is going to tell us about Rupture– a way to challenge friends across games and platforms. You can see what your friends are doing, and these are not all EA games. World of Warcraft, for example, is on the list. You can send achievement challenges to a friend, and respond to trash talk. For more, check out Ruture.com/developers.
EA Mobile
4:08 pm: Travis from EA Mobile takes the stage. This is an area I’m familiar with. He’s talking iPhone and iPod Touch. He likes App Store and the 3G iPhones. Tetris, Sudoku, and Scrabble are available now. Tetris has some touch features– very hot (not).
In Spore for iPhone, you can guide your little cell guy by tilting. In Scrabble, you can shake the phone to shuffle up your tiles. A Scrabble upgrade will let you play over wi-fi– very cool!
3d games like Tiger Woods and Need for Speed are coming to the iPhone too. Here’s a trailer showing some of the upcoming titles– Monopoly is coming, too. No 3d shown– it probably wouldn’t look so good compared to the console games. Interestingly EA only showed iPhone mobile games.
Dragon Age: Origins
4:11 pm: Dr. Greg Zeschuk of Bioware is going to show us Dragon Age: Origins. Here’s a new trailer. Starts with some BS fake gospel quote, the Canticle of Threnodies 8:13. Oookay.
Very Two Towers-like. Soldiers standing in the pouring rain. The armor looks very nice, and there are a ton of battle hounds and soldiers charging into an army of orcs. Archers let a shit-ton of flaming arrows loose (think 300). Aragorn– I mean, some other bearded dude– is looking mighty pissed with his sword. Legolas is there too! Well, at least a Legolas looking elf.
Left 4 Dead
4:15 pm: Gabe Newell from Valve takes the stage. He wants to talk about Left 4 Dead. He shows a slide with a bunch of features– is 2 player on-screen co-op newly announced? The idea of Left 4 Dead is it’s a horror movie you can live with your friends.
The Director in Left 4 Dead sets up the enemies, AI, stuff like that. Depending on how you play, you’ll get different outcomes. For example, here’s two groups– the first is not doing so great. They are beaten up and playing poorly, so they’re getting a pretty easy encounter. Just a few zombies charge them in a gas station.
The second group, however, has been doing much better. The payoff is a dozen or so zombies, plus a boss that blows itself up and takes out the entire damn gas station. Very impressive explosion.
New Survivor designs– chick with a red jacket, old grizzled war vet, lean biker dude, business guy with a pistol. The last guy has amazing skin texture and details, like a half untucked shirt. Now we get to see another trailer. Chad points out that Gabe isn’t very well animated. Well, as long as the characters in the game are, I guess that’s all that matters.
The trailer’s not too impressive– we’ve seen all this stuff before. It’s all gameplay footage, though, and shows some pretty cool action. Shooting zombies doesn’t really get old.
Rage
4:22 pm: We’re back to another EA exec from the beginning, talking about how well EA gets along with other companies. He’s announcing a new partnership with a big name. This is ID! Welcome John Carmack.
John likes that EA can advertise their game for him, but doesn’t take away the creativity. He’s going to show off RAGE– an action/exploration/driving game with new technology. To John this is a new direction. More will be shown at Quake-Con, but here’s a taste.
The trailer: Outdoor environments with dune buggies. Inside environments with Doom 3-looking monsters and humans. A gnarly ogre roars into the camera. Fin.
4:24 pm: This press conference is wrapping up. We never even got to Harry Potter, Mercenaries 2, Skate It, and Warhammer Online. But we’ll have more on that when we visit EA’s booth.
Here’s that trailer from the beginning again– and this time we recognize a few more of the games.
So what stood out at this press conference? Dead Space, Mirror’s Edge, and Left 4 Dead. Spore we’ve seen plenty of times before, and I wasn’t that impressed by the Sims and Sports games. Overall I’d say they’ve got a solid lineup, but that’s mainly because they’ve got the old standbys like Madden and Tiger Woods. In terms of new stuff, Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge are definitely two to watch.
Make sure to check back with us tomorrow for our Nintendo (9:00 am PST) and Sony (11:30 am PST) liveblog sessions.
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3 Comments » |
on July 14, 2008 3:05 pm
I normally dont sit and refresh a page ovver and over but because i like you guys I will do it. Keep it real.
on July 14, 2008 8:02 pm
great job on the coverage. thank you andrew.
on July 14, 2008 8:08 pm
Doesnt sound like they really had much to offer.