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Battlefield Bad Company mixed in with EA slagging

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Johnny C:
I imagine that they made GUN.

I enjoyed GUN.

Not the last Tony Hawk game, though. I hated that.

dennis:

--- Quote from: Johnny C on 05 Jul 2008, 12:24 ---LOL CAPITALISM

Not EA's fault that teenagers don't have anything to do with their time in the summer - which it is right now, look outside - than master video games. The unfortunate fact is that when you're an adult you don't have nearly the time or energy to expend on getting better at a video game than a teenager does. The multiplayer is unbalanced because it's July and it'll be unbalanced until September and there's barely anything that anyone can do about that. Welcome to the real world, kids.

Also why does everyone take a shit on EA for things they did in the last decade, you people are utterly confounding sometimes.

--- End quote ---
Man, it's not that people mastered the game already, it's that the game is so flawed that people are already exploiting the flaws. Multiplayer is unbalanced because there's no balancing. This stuff doesn't happen in COD4, for instance. Or Halo. Or even BF2. BF:BC is broken.

Have you even played this game?

dennis:

--- Quote from: Storm Rider on 05 Jul 2008, 12:34 ---First of all, if you don't care about the useless sports titles, then what does it matter to you if they keep releasing them? Sports fans want annual game releases, and like it or not, those sports games help them finance other games. Plus, if you look at critical assessment of EA's sports games, at least the FIFA and NHL games have seen a pretty dramatic increase in quality in the last few years. Hell, they came out with skate last year, which I haven't played, but is apparently the most original and unique sports game in years. Furthermore, EA has been taking risks and pushing more and more original IP recently, like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Saboteur, Rock Band, and fucking Spore for crying out loud. They're distributing and at least partially financing all of Valve's products, and are you going to argue about the quality or originality of that?
--- End quote ---
First of all, EA has no creative or deadline control over Valve. EA is only distributing their brick and mortar retail segment. This is why Valve games are typically uncompromised.

Second: The majority of EA's annual sports titles involve only incremental development. Major development happens by necessity when a new generation of consoles come out. The only reason to release yearly titles is to move more product. People will buy them because you shut down the servers and stop supporting the previous year's incarnation.

Third: most of the original IP you talk about originates in dev houses that they bought. EA, again is the publisher. Mirror's Edge is a DICE game. Saboteur is a Pandemic game. Rock Band is a Harmonix game. Spore is a Will Wright game. No one thinks of these games as "EA games". What EA does do to these games is implement asinine DRM and control marketing. Their level of creative control varies, but really, it comes down to deadlines with these houses. EA did learn to stop assimilating the dev houses and let them work with some degree of autonomy.


--- Quote ---And on the 'half-finished' front, would the old EA have pushed back Mercenaries 2 for over a year to give it more development time? Would they have delayed Army of Two for four months and out of a holiday season release when it was supposed to be one of their marquee games for the season? Would they have moved Dragon Age back to 2009, when it's been in development since 2003? Hell, the original release date for Bad Company was March of 2007. Was the game released 'half-finished'? I'm not impugning what Dennis is saying, since I haven't played this game myself, but considering the reviews this game is getting, I doubt it. From what I've heard, spawn camping has always been a problem with the Battlefield games, and it's not specifically with this installment of the series or something that can be blamed on EA. The fact of the matter is, even if the accusation of rushing Bad Company is true, every publisher rushes out games occasionally. They're publicly traded companies, and they have to report to their shareholders and put games out in a given financial quarter.
--- End quote ---
Not every game is in a state to be released at all when the deadline comes around. If you can't play the game, you can't very well release it. The content of BF:BC was already pretty much there and finalized, but what EA seems have to cut is QA time. A proper QA cycle would have caught many of the problems people are seeing now, including the technical online issues they had at launch. Quality assurance is just as important as content development, but management more often than not thinks QA is expendable vs. a deadline.

Also, being a publicly traded corporation is not the same thing as having responsibility to the market (i.e. gamers). The bottom-line for a publicly traded company is  profit. EA is definitely no exception.



--- Quote ---I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the new evil empire of the video game industry is Activision. After acquiring Blizzard (which as I pointed out in the Diablo 3 thread, hasn't put out an original property in a decade), they're even larger than EA, and they're churning out the most formulaic crap I can possibly conceive at an amazing rate. EA is not the company putting out five Guitar Hero games in 18 months. The only remotely original games coming out of Activision anymore are the Sierra games, and frankly the only reason those exist is that they were in production before the acquisition. For whatever reason, EA has moved on, but gamers haven't, even though there's a far worse culprit at this point that nobody ever calls out on their bullshit.

--- End quote ---
EA has gotten better, but really it's only as a result of losing lawsuits. Hopefully they are coming around as to learning from their development mistakes, but I think it's naive to think that EA will move off the bottom-line mentality. They've realized that giving developers more autonomy is profitable in the long run, but I don't expect them to start listening to gamers themselves rather than gamers' dollars.

Storm Rider:
What caused the change is irrelevant, the point is that the improvement is there. Furthermore, what difference does it make whether or not the IP is coming out of a studio that they bought or not? They're still financing and distributing the game, so they're instrumental to its release to the public. And I never said they had creative control over Valve anywhere in that post, only that they facilitated distribution.

Really, what this ultimately proves is that they must have added in multiplayer pretty late into the equation, since it was intended as a single-player only game in the first place. Ultimately, if the single player part succeeded, then I'd say DICE achieved its original goal, and the buggy multiplayer is an unfortunate consequence of that focus during development.

I'm not arguing anywhere that EA isn't a profit-motivated company, only that their methods have substantially improved in recent years but nobody's giving them credit for it and instead heaping shit on them based on events that were nearly a decade ago.

Ozymandias:
Oh, geez. Whatever, Bryan. All they're doing is letting the companies they buy use their vast resources to pursue their own goals and ideas, just like every other major development company in the industry does. I mean, when Army of Two got bad reviews upon pre-release, it's not like EA could've just said "fuck it, bad games happen" and shoved it out unfinished and terrible. No one does that.

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