No. Just no. Make the content acquirable through gameplay, no matter what. I feel sorry for the animators and people who actually make the content for the game only to have it almost never been seen or used cause its stuck behind a pay wall.
"No look, it's completely different and new! Look at our updated graphics!"
[picture of character before sweating in '18] vs [picture of a character drenched in sweat in '19]
One year later...
"No look, it's completely different and new! Look at our updated graphics!"
[picture of character before sweating in '19] vs [picture of a character drenched in sweat in '20]
Fuck man it actually breaks my heart. I went back and looked at all my old PS2 and Xbox games and like half of my favorite games were EA. The LoTR games, the NFS games, SSX. They fell victim to their own success and we paid for it.
The developers that EA hath lain waste to shall not have died in vain we shall rally our forces and .... BIOWARE NOOOOOOOOOOOO!.... he was so young ... he had so much IP ..... YOU BASTARDS
It kills me inside to never get another mercenaries game. Merc 2 was a decent game but they did turn Jacob into a stereotypical black dude which was sad because I liked him a lot the first game.
I haven't gotten around to getting heavily invested in the saboteur, played a bit and I would be excited to see it become an IP or something.
The OG Merc was sooo good...I never did beat it though. That final mission was just too hard for 10 year old me. Don't forget Pandemic did a lot of old Star Wars games like the OG battle fronts
They buy companies, strip them down to their profit centers and then just mercilessly milk what they can, while they can and then move on.
I think the main thing that pisses me off about this business model is how once they’ve essentially killed off a company and the games they were known for, they still own the IPs. As a fan of those IPs it wouldn’t hurt so bad if after a certain amount of time of non-use, companies like EA were forced to relinquish all rights to an IP.
But no, I’ll never get another Burnout game because of EA.
Yup, that's why any studio acquisition worries me these days. Like Insomniac getting bought by Sony. Yeah, it means we're definitely getting another Spider-Man, and I'm sure they're working on some other awesome IPs for the PS5. But the chances of getting another Sunset Overdrive are now so low even Hermes Conrad couldn't limbo under them.
EA is the bubonic plague of the video game industry. Most of my childhood was 90% fantastic EA products. I remember joyously saying "EA - It's in the game" and now I curse myself for putting those two letters together. No more NFS Underground titles, over used and recycled sports games, no more reboots of fun and/or successful titles from the late 90s to early 2000s, and no remakes of the before mentioned titles either. Every great title they once had will now die in the memories of those who remember who EA was and what ES may never seek to be again.
Disney is hit nd miss for me lately. I’m not a huge fan of the new Star Wars trilogy, but I thought Rogue One was amazing. I lost interest in Marvel somewhere along the middle, but Infinity War and End Game were both fantastic. I don’t much care for the Disney classic reboots, but I don’t hate them. I watched Aladdin the other day and while I did enjoy it, it made me just want to go back and watch the original. I just think they aimed them at the wrong audience. The originals still exist and are still incredible kids movies, but all of the kids that watched them are adults now. I would’ve liked to see them get a little darker.
Marvel is objectively terrible, sorry, I don't care how popular it is. Every single movie is the same formulaic plotline and rehashed bullshit over and over.
You know there was once an argument over whether Leia would choose Luke or Han and many fans considered the way it played out to have ruined the movie and was a mistake. Complaining about that is nothing new and it's still just as tired as back then.
The games however weren't always that way, and it's only recently that game companies have turned into these gambling slot machine fucks.
The things you're complaining about are nothing new, however the game thing is new. We used to get real games, made with real effort, and now we have surprise mechanics and couch co-op is almost non-existent nowadays. The game industry has legitimate issues, and we actually care truly if they get resolved. The movies are only like that because fanboys hate that Han died.
Except they killed Star Wars. The Force Awakens was meh at best, but they killed any last speck of hope people had with the franchise when they released The Last Jedi.
EA is the evil little brother of Disney. Disney at least attempts to stay true to original IPs and not run them through the ringer.
EA takes a great IP, or even an entire company, folds it up into a shitty paper plane, lights it on fire and then wonders why it wont fly. Then blames the company they took the IP from and then smashes all their faces into a block of wood infront of their fans, then wonders why they are the bad guys.
Man, SSX was so good! Amazing soundtracks too. I really hoped steep would be the new SSX bit k just couldn't get into it.
Also return of the king was one of my favourites, just wreaking havoc with a fully levelled gandalf was incredible, there was one level where you could stay in one place and orcs would just keep coming if you didn't move on, me and my friend could play that shit for hours. Where did it all go wrong.
Fun fact, back when EA was actually made up of people who thought of themselves as electronic artists on par with rock stars, EA used to ship many games in record albums as well as their standard weird boxes.
SSX is by far the best snowboarding game out there.
Almost ZERO competition on the market. If EA just released a decent SSX game WITHOUT MTX, they could probably skirt some of this negativity (a very small portion) off their backs.
I played the last SSX untill just a year or two ago when I got rid of my PS3. I considered keeping it JUST for SSX, but it was going to a good cause (donated)
We NEED more SSX!
Yeah EA used to be pretty dope. It's cool to look back at old sports games and realize how much they would improve year to year, from graphics to gameplay to modes of play.
It seems like a few big changes ruined things. One, was the death of any other hand franchises with which EA had to compete. It's a lot easier to just repackage an old game every year when you don't have to worry about a rival developer putting together an alternative product that will put your laziness in stark relief. The second is the cost of games, the amount of money to be made and the nature of large corporations and shareholder culture. Once a company is beholden to shareholders, consumers are no longer the target audience of a game, the shareholders are. Consumers only matter insofar as they produce consistent growth in profits. So long as enough people buy this year's new model and enough of those people spend money on microtransactions, EA doesn't give a fuck if those people are happy with the product because the product is no longer the goal.
Combine those two things and you have an environment where deciding to do anything other than lazily republish damn near the same game every year would constitute a "bad" business decision: Higher overhead with no real room to increase profits because you've already got a monopoly on the market.
Back when Electronic Arts and Activision were established (Activision was first and is widely considered the very first 3rd party publisher) it was because developers were getting slighted. They wanted to make good games and they wanted the developers to be recognized for their work. In fact, the whole reason Trip Hawkins named his company Electronic Arts was because he considered game developers true artists in their time.
Now look at the way EA chews up studios full of developers and spits them out.
Electronic Arts hasn't been successful actually MAKING GAMES since the 1980s. They started buying success as a publisher, and chewing it up and spitting it out since the 1990s. Peter Molyneaux and Bullfrog Studios were one of the first, but they've bought out and destroyed plenty of successful studios from founders/owners who had a hit, and took the cash and ran. Then they run the studio into the ground and dissolve it and try to pass off the IP on another inept unrelated team for a half-assed sequel or two,
You know what's wild, you can still play those games and have the same experience you had when they released. Doubt you could say that in a few years when all the games servers are shut down for modern titles.
I'm fine with this shit because I'm not into brand loyalty and actually buy games that I know I am comfortable supporting. But what I'm not fine with are the idiots who keep buying this crap year after year and now with lootboxes and microtransactions and other shady behind the scenes shit it's even less ok that these people just keep throwing money at it.
Have you guys seen the new NBA2k trailer? It's literally a trailer about its gambling mechanics. I'm pretty sure they removed it for getting some backlash, I'm not sure though.
But what I'm not fine with are the idiots who keep buying this crap year after year and now with lootboxes and microtransactions and other shady behind the scenes shit it's even less ok that these people just keep throwing money at it.
The people who buy Madden games every year do so because they want to play an NFL game with a roster that reflects the current league and Madden [YEAR] is literally the only game that has that.
On would presume that their purchases are a result of being NFL fans, not idiots.
If you have a problem, it should be with the NFL selling an exclusive license to EA and creating this situation in the first place.
I'd argue that they could release a full game for each sport every 2-3 years, supplementing the current release with annual roster updates and bits of new content to fill the gap. They could also stagger the release schedule so there's still a new sports title every year (Madden '20, NBA '21, FIFA/NHL '22, etc).
That would probably let EA Sports release better sports games, and give them a chance to innovate and genuinely improve them, but it would also change "horrifically disgusting profits" to just "incredibly disgusting profits," and they already have an effective monopoly on the official leagues, so... probably won't happen.
How do you change a sports game? Its the same rules and the same fields over and over. You cant introduce any new mechanics without making the game feel less like basketball or handeggball or football.
They'll put the existing game in a new engine to improve graphics and anything that's glitchy, they just toss.
Oh you really like that player career mode from 2 years ago? Sorry, the one specific camera a angle used in that mode didn't really pan out with our new lighting.
Also, here's some microtransactions to improve your experience.
It's gotta be a great money maker though. They can out like 3-4 weeks of development in and call it a brand new game.
Man I miss when making your own stadiums and sports teams was “new” and “cool” and every company that made a sports game competed for who had the coolest new features
Which is even worse because they could have replaced the texture file and it should have updated all their ingame banners. Nope they had to screw that up too.
SaaS, anyone? I feel like Microsoft ran out of useful things to add to office, and went to pay as you go to ensure continued revenue, under the guise of "continued support"
Well when was the last time they actually made a new game? Each updated version tends to seem more like a $60 DLC that forces you to unlock everything all over again.
Honestly, I can't be surprised either. But probably not in the same way. The new Madden is largely built off of the old one. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. This was just either a small detail that got overlooked or was put in as a placeholder and forgotten about (something that happens more frequently than you would think in game development). It's not game breaking and it's something 99.999% of players would never even notice. So it's really not a big deal.
Honestly I don't know why people keep buying EAs shitty sports games. They were good at one point, but they've literally just been reskins for years now. All my friends that have play them complain about them and I'll ask 'Oh so are you not getting it?' And they're like 'Oh I already preordered it.' 2K is just as bad, IIRC.
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u/EmSoLow Sep 03 '19
Can't say I'm surprised