EA rebrands its subscription services as EA Play

By Jon Silman August 14, 2020

EA will combine its EA Access and Origin Access gaming subscription services with a new name and look called EA Play. Origin Access Premier is going to get changed to EA Play Pro, and the changes will be implemented on August 18.

“All the great benefits you love (access to a library of top titles, early game trials, and your 10% membership discount) aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we’re adding even more in the coming months, starting with exclusive in-game challenges and monthly reward drops for members on select titles,” EA said in a blog post about the change.

The rebranding won’t cost anything to customers, and prices will remain the same. A current EA Access or Origin Access subscription will run for $5 a month and $30 a year. Origin Access Premier, soon to be EA Play Pro, costs $15 a month or $100 a year. There are a few differences between a basic and premier membership. Premier includes extra content, full access to an early game instead of just a 10-hour preview, and a “premier” vault of access to back games, as opposed to a “basic” one.

“Moving all the benefits to a single brand is an important step in streamlining our services to ensure that being an EA Play member is the best way to play,” EA said.

The subscription contains exclusive in-game rewards and challenges, special member-only content, early trials of new games, access to a bevy of well-liked EA games, and the ability to save 10% on EA purchases like games and DLC. These games include upcoming releases like Madden NFL 21, FIFA 21, and Star Wars: Squadrons, the company said.

“[Perks] will vary from title to title, but we’re talking things like early access challenges and rewards like Ultimate Team Packs, exclusive vanity items and cosmetics, and more,” EA said.

EA also hosts an annual live event called EA Play that is “dedicated to sharing the latest EA news and game updates with our global community.” The company is giving that a new name as well: EA Play Live. The last live event was in June.

The rebranding arrives just as EA is getting ready to bring its gaming subscription services to Steam. On August 14, a landing page for EA Access on Steam said that the service was “coming soon.”

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Three players build to fight a monster in Wild Hearts.

Although Capcom’s Monster Hunter series is more popular than ever in the West, it’s still a daunting series to get into because of its overbearing tutorials and complicated UI. Koei Tecmo development team Omega Force didn’t want to repeat this mistake with Wild Hearts -- its upcoming fantasy monster-hunting game with a complex offensive crafting element. To solve this issue, it partnered with Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label to better understand how western players prefer to be treated in the earliest stages of a complicated adventure.
“We wanted to understand better how this game might be received by players in different parts of the world,” Co-Director Takuto Edagawa said when discussing the fruits of the EA partnership. “Players around the world don’t tend to like information being over-presented. They don’t want you to explain too much; they want to learn more in a hands-on way by experiencing it themselves through play.”
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Digital Trends put this to the test with our playable three-hour build of the earliest parts of Wild Hearts and found its introduction and tutorials to be better than anything Monster Hunter has done. Within 30 minutes, Wild Hearts players should be familiar with the basic concepts the game deals with and be set for what’s shaping up to be an enjoyable cooperative hunting and crafting adventure.
A wild hunt
“One thing that was very important to us was to not do a lot of explaining and then get into the story and gameplay,” Edagawa tells Digital Trends. “We wanted you to be able to play as soon as possible. We know that our players want to experience the game and world as soon as they can, so that was the fundamental approach we took with the opening.”
Wild Hearts begins peacefully, with a lone hunter walking through a forest rife with small friendly Kemono creatures. Soon, a small-time hunt begins as the player spots a deer-like Kemono. During this hunt, players will learn the basics of the camera and movement controls, the attacks at their disposal during combat, how to climb ledges with limited stamina, and how to sneak up on an enemy.
These are some basic fundamentals in hunting games, but the difference compared to Monster Hunter Rise is that the game isn’t constantly stopping the player with long cutscenes or large text boxes to explain basic things. Text boxes only appear if players choose to activate them when a tutorial pops up.
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The best game openings get right into things, which Wild Hearts successfully does. According to EA Originals Executive Producer Lewis Harvey, this is the aspect of the game Koei Tecmo wanted to work closely with EA on, although EA provided some character and world design input to the Japanese development team at Omega Force as well.
“EA has a great wealth of experience in its user research division, and we were able to provide a huge amount of testing and data to Koei Tecmo that really helped them fine-tune the game and make critical decisions around their feature set,” Harvey said. “A lot of the creative input and feedback we have given has been around tutorialization, onboarding, and clarity of features and UI to players.”
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Karakuri building skills are critically important when preparing for hunting large Kemono, too. After escaping the cave, I used the Karakuri more traditionally to build a camp near a girl I found unconscious on the ground. Once I did that, another giant Kemono that looked like a giant rat with plants growing out of it attacked, and I set off on the first real hunt of the game, concluding the opening and kicking off the true Wild Hearts adventure.
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