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[Dimmukane]

Wut

[Melodic]

Whai

[dennis]

not all of EA's sports titles are horrible.

check out SKATE, the game,story,graphic's,and controls are fabulous.

sure it might sound like a Tony Hawk rip off but in reality it's just a more real like skateboarding game.

and yes the controls are way different than Tony Hawks but after a while you will understand them and love the game.

Skate is good. I enjoy it.

I am hesitant to call things "EA titles" simply because EA owns the studio producing the game.

[Dimmukane]

Well, in that case, it was all EA.  It was an internal studio.

[dennis]

Well, in that case, it was all EA.  It was an internal studio.

EA Black Box is an independent studio.

[Dimmukane]

Really?  What were they previously?

[Ozymandias]

Black Box Games. They were an offshoot of some people from Radical, bought by EA in 2002, and are now fully integrated as part of EA Canada.

[dennis]

According to their corporate website, they became an independent studio with EA Canada in 2005.

[Johnny C]

EA funded it and EA released it. It's an EA game.

Honestly it's like you're actually going out of your way to make it possible to still hate EA.

[Ozymandias]

Besides which, I dare you to find a good game Black Box did pre-EA.

[dennis]

EA funded it and EA released it. It's an EA game.

Honestly it's like you're actually going out of your way to make it possible to still hate EA.

That's kind of like saying "Rock Band" is a Viacom game.

[Ozymandias]

I think it's pretty obvious Harmonix operates by and large on their own accord, regardless of EA/MTV, whose influence comes in the form of funding and DLC. There's less ads in Rock Band(read: none) than there are in Guitar Hero 3(read: every single stage has some sort of branding, as do many of the guitars). I think it's also pretty obvious Black Box does not operate of their own accord since they have basically been a shovelware developer for EA for the last 5 years until skate. came out.

[Storm Rider]

Black Box was the Need for Speed developer for a while, right? I never played those games, but I remember before the last couple they were supposedly pretty good.

[Ozymandias]

Need For Speed was originally an EA Canada title that got moved over to Black Box just to pump out lots of sequels after they were acquired.

[Nodaisho]

And the Need for speed games are good. Was it black box that did Underground? Because that was the best of all of the ones I have played, I think not having to worry about making an interesting open map meant they could make tracks that were good to race on, and they weren't afraid of making roads that were actually straight for *gasp* more than 50 meters.

[dennis]

I think it's pretty obvious Harmonix operates by and large on their own accord, regardless of EA/MTV, whose influence comes in the form of funding and DLC. There's less ads in Rock Band(read: none) than there are in Guitar Hero 3(read: every single stage has some sort of branding, as do many of the guitars). I think it's also pretty obvious Black Box does not operate of their own accord since they have basically been a shovelware developer for EA for the last 5 years until skate. came out.

My point still stands. Also, Black Box didn't become independent until 2005. That is after most of their "shovelware" came out and before Skate came out. Obviously, they still handle the NFS franchise, so they still have to make games for it and I don't think I'm speculating any more than you are when I say that perhaps they give NFS games a low priority and fewer resources than Skate?

[clockworkjames]

What the fuck is up with EA only supporting awesome games for a year or two before leaving them to root unsupported and unloved

The SSX series are possibly some of the best sports titles ever to come to console and even now they are in a league of their own but the most recent addition of "On tour" had no online play and was pish. SSX3 however had amazing online play and is now unsupported. Servers offline, slopes closed.

I didn't spend the best part of 20 months of my youth making some awesome friends from all over Europe and getting a shit hot reputation, climbing my way to the top of every race score board with my partner in crime "Skins-noTHC" the stoner gamepad jockey from Holland just to log on one day and find it was all for nothing.

This got me thinking to todays titles, EA's website shows no trace of these awesome games but what other awesome games have they stopped patching and improving and even making, C&C and Battlefield for example, C&C has got better but battlefield has gotten much worse and when was the last time BF2 got patched? Have they given up on all the glitches and expansion packs? Has this cash cow been milked for all it is worth and left to rot? We need to play shitty BF2142 now? No thanks.

How much longer will CoD2 and 4 be supported? What about burnout takedown and revenge? They are both so much more awesome than paradise. How much content? When will console servers go down like so many others? Do we just enjoy it while it lasts then bury these awesome titles under newer sub-par pish?

tl;dr FUCK YOU EA.

A blog I made a while back.

Also I am looking at buying Battlefield 2: The Complete Edition because I lost my installers and cannot be assed finding them, only had core and special forces anyways. God I feel like such a slut.

[Ozymandias]

(CoD isn't even an EA franchise)

I don't know how NFS can't be classified as shovelware. It wasn't Black Box's franchise to begin with, it was just passed off to them. They made 8 titles in 6 years for it. Just because it turns out that they're also good developers doesn't mean that wasn't how EA treated them and used them.

It really isn't far to condemn a company for not supporting games after a while. If you can find a non-Blizzard company that still patches their games after 3 or 4 years, then you've found Valve(maybe) and that's it.

[clockworkjames]

Why did I think CoD was EA? Maybe I meant BF2 or something.

Don't drink and blog kids.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

Don't blog, kids.

fixed

[Storm Rider]

Considering that Need for Speed is EA's second largest franchise (you have to remember, it's fucking huge in Europe), I seriously doubt it gets budgetary constraints.

[Nodaisho]

The lack of support is why I like PC games for online (partially that I haven't bothered to figure out what I need to do to get the network adaptor working on my PS2), they stop having servers up and as long as there are still people that want to play, someone else will put one up. EQlive could shut down tomorrow and thousands of people would just shift to private servers (though other thousands would go catatonic after 8 years of their life went down the drain).

Ending support of something is also why I prefer to buy games and music on a hard copy, though with the right copy protection (was it spore that was going to make you check every few days?) that could get screwed up unless you did the sensible thing and looked for a crack for the protection. Maybe it is just false reassurance, but I like having a hard copy as well as having it on the hard drive.

[Dimmukane]

I also like having physical copies.  At least for now.  This helps whenever I have to reinstall anything.  I built a new computer just over a year ago, and was installing my games on it, and found that my copies of Half Life 2, Far Cry, and Neverwinter Nights 2 had gotten discolored over time(meaning they couldn't be read, which ironically supports the reason I like having physical copies).  So I downloaded everything for Half Life 2 off of Steam, which took a good 5 hours, and I didn't re-install HL:DM or HL:Source, which would've been another 2 gigs or so.  Neverwinter Nights 2 I had to pirate to get my game back, which took an overnight torrent dl.  Having the disk (at least when it's in good condition) keeps me from having to deal with those long waits to start playing again.  However, seeing as bandwidth is only expected to increase, I don't think this'll be much of an issue in the next ten years or so.

[Nodaisho]

Bandwidth will increase, but so will what they put in, there is a race to add more realism, which in a shooter game could take one hell of a lot of work (you could map out all the veins and muscle and organs and bones of a target, have an algorithm to see what the bullet would do on impact, using an actual object with weight, shape, and travel time rather than hitscan, and that is without getting into penetration and deflection), I think that eventually we will reach the desired level of realism in games, but then something else will come in fashion. It will be nice to have instant loading of normal sites in a basic internet package though.

[Dimmukane]

The two big things that add disk space are art and pre-rendered video.  Which hasn't gone up as much as bandwidth has in the past few years (Well, bandwidth only has a slight edge, currently).  But in all honesty I expect to see programmers writing algorithms that tesselate and variate on textures at runtime to cut down on overall art assets.  For instance, Borderlands (and possibly Too Human) used algorithms to generate over half a million weapons.  The programmers and artists did not hand design the textures for each one, they made maybe several thousand, and then the algorithm did the mix and match, swapping out color palettes from time to time.

As for pre-rendered cutscenes, the games that use them are generally on consoles.  They're not going to suddenly get longer, and many games are switching to in-engine cutscenes to save space (and because they look pretty good now, anyway).

I may be wrong, but that's just where I see things going.

[dennis]

Procedural rendering of game art is coming along, but mostly it's limited to abstract stuff, like landscapes and textures. However, the tradeoff with procedural rendering is that while you use less disk space, you use more clock cycles.

[Dimmukane]

Which are constantly improving, though...which is why I think it's going to progress that way.  I could be wrong, of course.

[Melodic]

The modern CPU is more advanced, and has more potential for advancement, than any other current piece of computer hardware. Procedural rendering will be huge, methinks.

[dennis]

I agree that procedural rendering will be the way of the future (or possibly hinted rendering, using input such as google earth or whatevs). However, CPUs are largely the same as they were back in the 80s, just denser and faster and more specialized. The current architecture is pretty outdated, and while innovations such as cell processing are big steps, we're going to need a new architecture soon.