As I watched EA’s GamesCom presentation live, and covered it here at Games Thirst, I can say I was mostly impressed. Though nothing new in terms of IP’s has been revealed, what I saw was fantastic. I’ll highlight the biggest moments for you here:

 

Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel

It was big, tight, and impressive. Army of Two has never looked, or played, so good before. Visceral taking over looks like it was a good move, since you can tell there’s a lot of differences between this and previous games; and that’s a good thing. A more serious tone, not in the dialogues and the like, but in the world itself. Frostbite’s destruction also makes this one of the most interesting third-person shooters to come out in the following months.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted

A return to Need for Speed’s true open world setting, introduced in Underground 2, was needed. And Criterion seems to have pulled it off in a fantastic manner! Frostbite makes everything look and behave greatly, with Need for Speed’s arcade-styled racing never controlling so good (as it looked like). Autolog 2 looks like a big update too, and it’s a great feature shared between a ton of platforms.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter

For me, this was the winner of the show. Battlelog, co-op mode, refined competitive multiplayer, customization, the inclusion of many military units from all over the world, Frostbite in both single and multiplayer. Warfighter truly is overhauled, and with what I listed above, I think it’s needless to say why I believe it won the show.

Origin

Some hate Origin – and I can give them some right in that. It didn’t start off as dynamically as it should. But it’s getting a lot of features, having much less to be jealous of Steam. It’s getting gameplay sharing (screenshots and videos, hopefully), achievements, progress tracking, improvements on UI, and it’s spreading on Facebook, Android, Mac and more. With more than 50+ developers aboard, Origin is shaping up to be something huge, taking into account how many updates it’s receiving, becoming better and more stable with each one.

Battlefield 3

Expecting Battlefield 4 news would be self-torture. You know it wouldn’t come. But Battlefield got a ton of incredible new details for us; apart from the DLC packs, and a glimpse at Aftermath, the most exciting new information about it is the upcoming Premium Edition. It will pack a Premium code, Battlefield 3, and an exclusive multiplayer “welcome pack”, all this for 59.99€/69.99$. It’s a great deal, at least around here, with Battlefield 3 alone costing 35-40€, and Premium 45-50€.

Crysis 3

Hunters Mode was what won me the most. I know it will look great, I trust Crytek and I know they will do a better job porting it to consoles this time around, while maintaining top quality for PC’s. So Hunters Mode was the focus. Crysis’ take on the popular Infected Mode, a team starts with 2 cloaked Hunters with bows, hunting 14 CELL troopers – all human players. There’s a timer, extended each time you kill a CELL, who is converted to a Hunter. The goal is obvious, nothing new; but what’s exciting is how it plays, in the Crysis universe. Definitely looking forward to this in February.

Dead Space 3

While the gameplay demo was a poor choice, in my opinion, since it consisted of mostly scripted sequences and no true terror scenes, I was intrigued with the announcement regarding the weapon crafting system. You can literally craft anything – a pistol firing spikes and having a grenade launcher as a secondary. It’s crazy. And we got a release date, too; February 5 and 8 for North America and Europe, respectively.

On another note, we have NHL 13, SimCity, The Simpsons: Tapped Out and FIFA 13, which impressed me less. What they got was engine refinements and new, mostly online, features.

Don’t fret! We will detail everything later today, with each game getting its own article! Until then, you can read the live feed of the conference, as I typed it out. What excited you the most? Sound off below!