Gamescom Spotlight: Electronic Arts

by Bryan Vore on Aug 15, 2012 at 11:05 AM

We demoed EA’s top titles at Gamescom and have all the latest details.

EA’s booth is crammed with several high-profile titles this year and we saw all the big guns. Of course, Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel is here, but you should already know everything about that from our latest cover story and month of online features. I offer impressions of Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, and Medal of Honor Warfighter, and Adam Biessener throws in his two cents on SimCity and Battlefield 3’s upcoming Armored Kill DLC.

Dead Space 3

The first segment of Dead Space 3’s hands-on gameplay consisted of basically the same content as what was shown live during EA’s press conference and in the latest trailer. Things go bad on Issac’s ship and he has to pull on a space suit and escape before it’s destroyed. He and a team of soldiers then investigate another ship called the Roanoke since they received a distress call from Issac’s pal from the last game, Ellie. Once onboard, it’s not long before necromorphs crop up and start causing trouble. Combat feels like it should and the creepy mood remains despite concerns that the tone would be lighter this time. A lot more random objects appeared after stomping the creatures’ corpses, which came in handy for weapon crafting.

This totally revamped feature was unveiled for the first time here at Gamescom and looks to add plenty of variety to Issac’s arsenal. You start by choosing a compact or heavy stock depending on what kind of weapon you’re trying to make. Next comes the core, which determines if you’re making a plasma cutter, ripper, flamethrower, or any other weapon type. You can pick a top and bottom core in the same gun to combine two different guns into one. Adaptors modify elements like making the plasma show wider or enabling rapid fire. Then attachments add on scopes, ammo efficiency, additional explosion radius, and more. Finally, upgrade circuits can beef up your reload speed, damage, rate of fire, etc. If you’re particularly pleased with you creation, you can create blueprints and share them with friends (though EA wouldn’t go into specifics just yet).

Crysis 3

I got my hands on the new Hunter multiplayer mode and it definitely turned around my initial skepticism. As was revealed at EA’s press conference yesterday, Hunter mode gives two players cloaked nanosuits and bows and pits them against a squad of normal human soldiers (16 total players on PC and 12 on console). As the cloaked players make kills, the soldier players respawn on the other side until the last one falls or time runs out. The two-minute time limit means the cloaked players can’t slowly stalk their prey if they want to succeed and the five total rounds mean most everyone gets a chance to hunt. Even though it seems like the cloaked players hold all the cards, the soldiers can make it if they run in groups and watch each other’s backs. After all, it takes longer to charge up an arrow than it does to pull a trigger and the cloaks don’t render their wearers totally invisible.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Up to 12 players can compete in and sometimes work together in the mixtape-styled multiplayer. We all drove over to a starting line and first competed in a speed trap event. Here we blazed down a straightaway to build up the highest speed while passing a tracking camera. You get 90 seconds for the event so you can use it to best your score or try to wreck others. Step two was a team race in which the whole group had to forge temporary alliances to make sure their team beats the other. Step three was a drift challenge to see who can keep a drift going the longest. I just did a crazy long donut in a circular paved area. As long as you keep above 40mph it counts. Step four was a jump competition where we went back and forth over two ramps facing each other. It feels great to get some air, but there’s the constant threat of smashing into an oncoming competitor. Step five was an every man for himself race. Once it was finished an overall winner was declared (not me)and everyone loaded up on multiplayer experience to put towards new cars, mods, and paint jobs.

Medal of Honor Warfighter

The theme of multiplayer continues! I tried out the new Homerun mode, which was apparently named by the Medal of Honor community in a contest. It features a max of 12 players. Half of them defend two flags and the other half tries to capture them. Maps are purposely small to facilitate fast play as one death means you’re out of the game watching a spectator cam. Each player is paired with a buddy who they can see in a green outline through walls and also heal one another and replenish ammo. This naturally encourages these two-man teams to stick together while helping the overall team as well. Fans of Counter-strike should enjoy the quick, intense matches on display here.

SimCity

The SimCity World feature, which EA debuted at Gamescom this year, sheds more light on how cities and players interact with each other in Maxis’ always-online city-building sim. The Citylog, inspired by Medal of Honor’s Battlelog and Need for Speed’s Autolog, presents a constant stream of social interaction and reminders (and, crucially, quick-join functionality for easy access to friends’ regions) that draw players toward their friends’ activities in SimCity. Leaderboards do the obvious thing, while challenges present time-limited cooperative and competitive one-off events for players to engage with. The global market lets you see what various commodities are currently worth so that you can try to make big profits buying and selling. Those features have a huge draw for me, especially since I tend to dump dozens if not hundreds of hours into these types of games. The impressive but short hands-on time I had with SimCity, though, is what really sold me on the game. Simple but powerful overlays let you call up detailed information about everything from pollution to sewer coverage, and the charming presentation is top-notch. You can bring up concerns about always-online all you like, but that wet blanket doesn’t stand a chance of damping the burning enthusiasm that playing SimCity has instilled in me.

Battlefield 3: Armored Kill

Tanks, tank destroyers, anti-tank rockets, and more tanks are the order of the day in the next Battlefield 3 DLC pack’s Tank Superiority mode. Battlefield 3’s ear-shattering, armor-piercing, skull-rattling armored warfare is front and center with a heavy vehicle always ready to go when you respawn and wide-open maps designed to highlight the biggest hardware’s strengths. My playtime at Gamescom was limited to a single match on one map, but grasping the concept of Tank Superiority isn’t exactly rocket surgery. I must confess to some disappointment in how the mode tramples over the squad dynamics that make Battlefield 3 such a powerhouse of a multiplayer team-based shooter, but that’s not the point. Armored Kill is for players who want to immerse themselves into the high-powered world of modern tank battles, and it accomplishes that with extreme prejudice.