E3 2018 – Day 1 EA Play Recap – FIFA 19, Star Wars and more!

EA kicked things off at the first day of E3 2018 with some amazing games, including new games from the FIFA, Battlefield, Star Wars, NFL, and Unravel franchises.

There was also update announced for Origin Access, with a streaming service and free trial to Origin Access. Here are all the major news & updates in from E3 2018 in one place!

FIFA 19

The game will be releasing on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch and even PS3 & Xbox 360, on September 28. If you order the Champions Edition, you can get early access to the game on September 25, three days before everyone else.

For the first time in over a decade, EA has the Champions League license for use in its FIFA Franchise and this will be major feature in FIFA 19.  Sorry Konami, EA Sports is now the new king. Here you can find more info on Champions League. Here’s the new reveal trailer –

Battlefield V

A lot of new information for the new Battlefield game was showcased at E3 2018.  For the release date, there will be 3 different releases. On October 11 2018, it will release for EA Access subscribers on the Xbox One, making Xbox players the first ones to get the game. Then, for those who pre-order the Battlefield 5 Deluxe Edition (the premium edition of the game), they’ll get it on October 16. Then, the standard edition will release on October 19.

We finally saw some multiplayer footage for Battlefield V, and the new official multiplayer trailer was released. As expected it looked action packed and showcased a variety of different weapons & vehicles from the WW2 era.

They also confirmed that battle royale will be coming to Battlefield 5. We didn’t get any gameplay for this though and they say it’s in very early stages.

The presentation also introduced several other game-modes:

Battlefield V Grand Operations

In this new game-mode, every grand operation is inspired from true historical events. This will take players through different fictional ‘days’ or stages of the grand operation, with the result of each day impacting the future ones. Like in the previous Battlefield 1 game, there will be defenders and attackers with different roles.

Here’s the pre-alpha gameplay for this mode by JackFrags –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfzmCI9-aKY

Battlefield V Combined Arms

Combined Arms will be a new four player co-op mode for Battlefield V, which DICE says will bridge the gap between single player and multiplayer. In Combined Arms, four players will move towards a territory and complete different objectives, with limited resources at hand. The game will keep generating new objectives, until the players decide to leave and get extracted.

Battlefield V Tides Of War

This is Battlefield’s new metagame in which you can customize vehicles, weapons and even soldiers with new skins and apparel with progression of the game. We saw some insane customizability in the presentation, something very comparable to what CS:GO has. DICE said that these skins are unlocked by a “grind currency”, and there was no news about the existence of micro-transactions or a purchasable currency that could be used to unlock things.

No Season Pass!

This is some very impressive news. EA & DICE finally seem to understand that players do not like the concept of season pass, and they’ve totally scrapped it from this game and now all newly released maps will be playable by all players.

Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

Respawn Entertainment, developer of the popular Titanfall game franchise, announced that they are developing a new Star Wars game to be set between Episode III and Episode IV of Star Wars. It was revealed that the game will have a dark setting, as that period of time between EP3 and EP4 was when the galaxy had darkness all around in life and Jedis were being hunted. Not much info was released on this and there was also no gameplay reveal, or a release date, but it seems like the game will be released in late 2018, way after the lineup of EA Sports games releasing in September.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 Updates

With gamers going crazy battling the dark side of microtransactions, the force really did win and EA removed microtransactions from Star Wars Battlefront 2 earlier in 2017. At E3, EA admitted that the game had a “rough start” at its release, but they seem to offer a promising future for the future of Star Wars Battlefront 2.

In 2018, Star Wars Battlefront 2 will get a new DLC called Clone Wars, which brings a ton of new content with new heroes, villains, and iconic locations focused from the Clone War setting into the game. This will be released on June 19 with a major update as well.

Anthem

Bioware’s new open world shooter game called Anthem got more updates at E3 2018. It looks very promising and we hope that there aren’t any enormous problems and glitches at release (I’m looking at you, Mass Effect Andromeda). We saw some new gameplay features being showcased at E3 2018.

It was also confirmed at E3 2018 that there weren’t going to be any loot boxes in the game, but players will have some customizability options for their suits and weapons. It wasn’t confirmed if there will be a system where players could pay for these customizability options though, but the lack of them announcing such thing indicates that there will no microtransactions.

We also saw a new cinematic trailer for the game, and some new gameplay features being revealed –

Madden NFL 19

The American Football game NFL 19 will be released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on August 10 with an early release on August 7 for those who pre-order the game. The reveal at E3 2018 showcased some new features. We saw some intense gameplay from Cleveland Browns & the New York Giants playing in the newly released trailer.

NBA Live 19

NBA Live 19 is the new basketball game from EA Sports. It will be released on September 7 for Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

EA showed off some new features like player customization, emotes and dances for NBA Live 19 at E3 2018. They also released a trailer, showing professional players like Paul George, Stepth Curry and Joel Embiid playing basketball in the game’s engine.

Unravel 2

Unravel 2, EA’s new beautiful platformer game was also released at E3 2018. The new sequel now supports co-op with a friend!

The game focuses on adventures by a woolen toy called Yarny. The developers said that the new sequel will be less of a puzzle and more of a platformer, adventurous gameplay. The game is available now on PS4, Xbox One and PC, and here’s the official reveal trailer we got.

Conclusion

The first day of E3 2018 was definitely very exciting and EA kicked off things very well. We’ll have more updates in the future, so check back here if you’re interested.