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Star Wars Battlefront’s upcoming sequel leads the lineup of games that EA Play attendees will be able to try out, Electronic Arts announced today.
EA Play 2017 will run from Saturday, June 10, through Monday, June 12 — the three days before E3 2017 — at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. That’s much farther from E3’s location than the first EA Play last year, which was essentially across the street from the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The next Need for Speed game will also be playable at the event. The long-running racing franchise has been on hiatus since its 2015 reboot, which was simply called Need for Speed. Developed by Ghost Games, it launched to a lukewarm reception that likely led EA to give the series a break last year. The Swedish studio will again be at the helm for the unnamed new game.
It sounds like EA Play’s hands-on opportunity for the Battlefront sequel won’t be the first one for the game. That makes sense, since Lucasfilm is holding Star Wars Celebration 2017 in Orlando next month. In fact, EA debuted Star Wars Battlefront at Star Wars Celebration 2015.
EA also said that much of its 2017 sports lineup will be playable at EA Play for the first time: Madden NFL 18, FIFA 18 and NBA Live 18. The holdouts are EA’s NHL series, which did appear at EA Play last year, and its mixed martial arts franchise — EA announced in January that it plans to release a new UFC title before April 2017.
This will be a big year for all three of the EA Sports titles that the company will have at EA Play. Developer EA Tiburon is converting the Madden series to the Frostbite engine for Madden 18. It’ll be very interesting to see what the Nintendo Switch version of FIFA 18 looks like — assuming, that is, that EA brings it to the show. And NBA Live 18 represents the return of that troubled franchise after its own hiatus.
The five aforementioned games won’t be the only titles to appear at EA Play 2017. “We’ll have more to share in the coming months,” the company said.
EA Play will be open to the public once again this year; EA announced today that ticket sales will begin at 9 a.m. PT on April 20.
