EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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TheFeniX
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EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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The giant video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) is not universally loved – if you play games or talk about them on the internet, you may have noticed. Despite releasing some of the most successful games of the last 20 years (Fifa, Battlefield, Need For Speed, Mass Effect) the company has plenty of detractors. Why?

Like its great rival, Activision, EA is sometimes seen as a soulless corporate monolith, interested only in frisking players for as much cash as possible. For two years running – in 2012 and 2013 – it was voted the worst company in America by readers of the Consumerist blog, beating banks as well as corporate tobacco and weapons manufacturers. The disastrous launches of SimCity and Battlefield 4, the confining and somewhat invasive nature of the publisher’s Origin digital gaming platform and the voraciously monetised smartphone version of Dungeon Keeper, have kicked further dents in its reputation.

If you were to lead the company, what would you do? This was the question facing Andrew Wilson almost a year ago. Previously the president of the EA Sports label, the Australian became chief executive in September, replacing John Riccitiello.

He took over a business that had seen six years of financial decline, its attempts to muscle into the casual gaming space having led to the expensive acquisitions of Jamdat, Playfish and Popcap, its sales falling, its MMO (massive multiplayer online) Star Wars: The Old Republic haemorrhaging money. What would you do?
The player-first philosophy

Wilson looks every inch the young thrusting business exec. Square-jawed, tanned, super confident, he is what a 3D printer would come up with if you typed in “modern CEO”. He is personable but media savvy: when we met in Cologne, it was clear he has a message to get out there. He doesn’t waste time.

“When the board asked me to take on this role, there were definitely things I wanted for the company – that I’d wanted for a long time,” he said. “I wanted us to be player first – to think about who the player is and what they want. For a long time, the games were the most important thing that we had. But then, in some ways, we got to thinking about EA itself, about how to to make it a good company. I said, okay, the player needs to be the lens through which we see the world and the filter through which we make decisions – and if we do that everyone wins. Players end up with great games, the people who work for the company end up working in a much more positive place and ultimately the shareholders will get a return.”

But the philosophy was tested, and found wanting, within a month of his appointment, with the controversial launch of Battlefield 4. It was a mess; the multiplayer servers were continually down and saved games kept disappearing.

Investors began a lawsuit against EA claiming that they had been misled about the product. Months later the company released its free-to-play smartphone version of much-loved strategy classic, Dungeon Keeper, but the game was full of aggressively pushed in-app purchases. Another controversy, another dent to the public image.

What has all this taught him? “There are different elements that you hope to learn from,” he says. “As you push the boundaries, things are not always going to go how you like. One of the things we’ve tried to do is give our teams more space to evaluate where they are at at any given moment in time and change development process to facilitate that.

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A scene from the Battlefield 4 video game, whose launch was a disaster for Electronic Arts.

“With Battlefield Hardline, we wanted to get it into the hands of gamers earlier and really test it. The beta test was stable, so clearly some of the things we’d learned since Battlefield 4, on the server and the client side, were working. We learned about scalability and stability and that allowed us to let gamers in earlier and give us feedback. What we got from the community was, ‘this is cool, but we think the fiction should go deeper’. We were then able to make a judgment call on that. I don’t think it would have been possible before.”

Hardline, a spinoff from the main Battlefield series, featuring cops and criminals, was delayed to allow for more development. Responses so far have been mixed: some have seen it as a re-skinned Battlefield 4 but the hands-on sessions at E3 went down well. “Moving Hardline was the most frightening moment of the year,” said Wilson. “It was a hard … it was a big deal. But the feedback was positive from the gamers, the studio and the shareholders who invest in our decisions.”
It’s ready when it’s ready

So is this the EA maxim now: delay launching if necessary? Wilson says it is. “We decided that we couldn’t get an innovative Need For Speed title out this year so for the first time in 17 years we’re not launching one, we’re giving the team extra time. We moved Titanfall on Xbox One out of our fiscal year; we moved Dragon Age, we moved Hardline. These were difficult decisions. The business of what we do, as measured by the stock price and fiscal returns, has grown - to me that’s reassurance that we’re doing the right thing.”

But there’s something else game players are worried about – the dearth of originality in the mainstream games industry; the reliance on long-running franchises. In 2008, EA released Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, two idiosyncratic and fascinating games – they were not amazing sellers but they have dedicated fans. Can that happen again, in the era of 400-staff teams and multimillion dollar budgets?

“We can experiment more now than ever!” exclaims Wilson. “I grew up in this business making games where the first [contact] you had with a player was when you dropped the demo. But the funny thing about demos was, by the time they were out, the game was done – if you got any feedback there was very little you could do. Now look at what we’re doing with Shadow Realms – we’re not planning on launching that until late 2015, but we had it playable on the showfloor at Gamescom.

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A presentation of "PGA Tour 15" is given at the Electronic Arts (EA) World Premiere: E3 2014 Preview press conference at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, June 9, 2014.

“Our objective now is to bring players in much earlier. It gives us a better sense of what we’re investing in and whether there is demand for it, and it gives players an opportunity to say, ‘we like this, we like that, but it would be cool if this happened’. Here is the reality of games development. When you sit down and talk to the great creative leaders we have in the industry, the vision they sell is often intoxicating and contagious. However, what often happens is that either the vision doesn’t manifest in the game, or the player never gets to the vision because of a dumb HUD or a poor UI or some other fluff that gets in the link between the idea and the gameplay.

“This whole concept of the industry hiding everything until the very last moment is an outdated way to make games. Invite people in as early as you can, deal with the feedback and build that back into the game. What you get two or three years down the track are amazing games built with the help of the community.”
Virtual reality and Hollywood

We talk a little about industry trends and virtual reality comes up. Wilson is clearly intrigued by the concept but isn’t sure if the consumer format will be head-mounted displays, holograms or some other platform. “We have a series of incubation labs working in and around that technology, across the company right now,” he smiles. “When and how [they will be released] we’re not certain, but it’s very interesting to me.”

I mention that I think virtual reality (VR) will bring about new forms of gaming that are more about presence and emotion than action. He nods enthusiastically and tells me about something he saw at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which has a successful game design course – Wilson has lectured there a few times.

“They had a project set up on Oculus Rift where you’re in a hunger line waiting for food. As you standing there, the person in front of you goes into shock from low blood sugar and collapses. The researcher are registering the ways in which different people responded.

“What I can tell you is, it’s amazing the impact that this experience has – you watch playback of people playing, you see them kneeling down trying to pick the person up, they’re reaching for their mobile phones! I just think … that’s games. I want to make games that immerse people like that.”

That’s interesting, I say. Take a company like BioWare: it makes great genre adventures like Dragon Age and Mass Effect but it would be fascinating to see the studio tackling a drama, something in the real-world. A romantic comedy even. If games did that, couldn’t they truly overtake cinema as the emotional story-telling medium of our age?

“I don’t want us to be a movie studio, but do I believe that story and emotion and the development of characters is going to play an important role in games,” says Wilson with unguarded enthusiasm. “If you look at a lot of films today, they’re basically video games. They should have been video games. When I sit down with Patrick Söderlund [head of EA Studios], this is what we talk about. We say, why aren’t we sitting in Hollywood reading cool scripts, and then building games that immerse people? Our medium can deliver on scripts so much better than a linear two-hour story can. Yes, I think that’s in our future.”
Present tense

Meanwhile in the present, there is plenty to do. Fifa 15 is on the way; Dragon Age Inquisition and Hardline too. Sims 4 looks interesting but fans are worried about how much content is being left out of the initial release. Wilson says he doesn’t want to focus on extracting money from people, but a hobbled Sims release followed by waves of downloadable content would hit the company’s reputation once again. And Wilson says he doesn’t want that: he doesn’t want to be a contender in the Consumerist awards ever again.

electronic arts dragon age inquisition

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A cellist performs during a presentation of "Dragon Age: Inquisition" at the Electronic Arts (EA) World Premiere: E3 2014 Preview press conference at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, June 9, 2014.

“We didn’t even make it out of the first round this year,” he laughs. But it is awkward and for a moment the tension shows. “When I came into this job, the board didn’t want the company to be perceived that way. I said if we commit to delivering amazing games built on creativity and commit to engaging with gamers when they think we have done them a disservice, then that puts us in the best possible position.

“I hope we never appear on that list again, I truly do. But I expect that, as we push the boundaries of entertainment, we will get feedback from time to time that people want us to do different things. That’s okay. That’s the cool thing about our industry.”

We’ll see. But certainly the company has reported better than expected earnings in the last two quarters, with Titanfall proving a strong seller. It is expecting big things from The Sims 4, Fifa 15 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, and there is something new on the way from Burnout creator, Criterion.

I have to ask one last thing as I’m being ushered away. How is the EA Dice team doing with the much-anticipated shooter Star Wars Battlefront and the surprise sequel, Mirror’s Edge 2? “Both are in development,” he says. “We had a review in October, where the executive team headed up to Dice to see the latest on both of those games. They are making amazing progress. We also saw some other stuff that’s hiding in some dark corners up there; they’re incubating new ideas. We’re feeling very good about the future.”

Sims 4 is out now on PC. Dragon Age: Inquisition is out on PC and console in November. Battlefield: Hardline is due on PC and console in early 2015. Keith Stuart travelled to Gamescom on a press trip with other journalists, with accommodation and transport organised by Electronic Arts.
Isn't Sims 4 bug-ridden and launching with a shitload of cut features? I was thinking about biting the bullet and dealing with Origin to get it for the wife (she loved the series), but I'm not really digging it.

Claims to hold off on launching titles? Early player testing? Is this the start of a new EA... no wait, we've been here before: we'll have a few dust-ups and everything will go back to business as usual. Hope I'm wrong, really do. But I've already seen what DA:I is shaping up to be and it's ugly... in more ways than one. You're only allowed so many train-wrecks and EA went past that years ago. Their bottom line is literally supported by people who just don't know any better.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Mr Bean »

This is the thing EA and Activison failed to notice. When you take three or four years making a polishing a Triple A game you can sell billions worth. This is way something like the Mass Effect Series and GTA are such mega sellers. But if you take a four year cycle and tell the same company to do it in two or one... your not going to get the same product.

Now they almost did the smart thing with CoD, they almost managed to make it yearly by giving it to two studios. But again you need three years to turn out top product. Call of Duty 4 for example had about a two and a half year dev cycle, MW2 had two but benefited from reuse from MW1 while MW3 showed the mess when the talent mostly left and the cycle was cut to 18 months.

Had Activision set up a round robin of developers with old Infinity Ward then Treyarch and given year three to Raven or Certain Affinity to build three different Call of Duty series rather than ping ponging dev between projects we might be sitting down for COBLOSP-9 next year rather than running into a wall of what next?

Look to GTA. Costs money and time to make a great game. Give them the time and the money and bring in a seperate dev studio to fill in each year. In an ideal world something like EA could have twelve big studios each working on turning out a great game every four months. Because a 60$ every four months is more than enough to let you pull in billions per year when you plan from the start to have a year long DLC cycle. Hell that leaves you perfectly pegged time wise to keep to a three rotation schedule if you just use enough studios to fill in the gaps rather than forcing few studios to make more games faster.

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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Ghetto edit:
The real reason EA won worst twice aside from vote rigging was because they hired PR people from the bottom 10% of the class. The Old Republic, Sim City and the wonders that is Sims 4 all point to taking formerly great games and removing the things that made them popular in the effort to further monetize them. Sim City was the best example of this, like sticking a coin operated seat warmer in a BMW.

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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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EA wants to not be the Worst Company only in the sense that they'd be happy if it fell into their laps. They have done nothing to suggest they are willing to actually stop doing the things that make everyone hate them.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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If declining profits is not going to force them to rethink, nothing will.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Mr Bean wrote:This is the thing EA and Activison failed to notice. When you take three or four years making a polishing a Triple A game you can sell billions worth. This is way something like the Mass Effect Series and GTA are such mega sellers. But if you take a four year cycle and tell the same company to do it in two or one... your not going to get the same product.
Mass Effect is a funny story. Now, I'm not a fan of 2 or 3 due to their direction, but I'm not about to claim they aren't good/great games even with some areas of production below what I'm willing to accept. The following is based on years old info cobbled together, so take it with a grain of salt.

Mass Effect was basically done when EA acquired BW, so it got released with little if any EA intervention. Future releases had to deal with "More like CoD" from EA, but BW was essentially left to run rampant and made 2 pretty damn good sequels on Bioware's timeline. What we got were completed games that you could merely nitpick at.

Dragon Age was also in the pipe (even if it was a few years out) when EA picked up BW. It was basically a back-burner project as far as EA was concerned because Fantasy games don't sell (not my words, but what I picked up from an interview years back with an old-hat BW developer). The "problem" was that it managed to sell pretty goddamn well. Not as well as Mass Effect, but it was making good money and had a decent following.

Whereas Mass Effect was left alone, EA forced BW into rushing out a sequel to quickly capitalize on the success of DA:O. What we ended up with was a complete game, but a distinctly mediocre one due to a lot of reused assets, which of course BW is known for, and other issues. "Journalists" ate it up, but the community reacted negatively.

Basically, Mass Effect shows what happens when you keep your developers on a schedule. DragonAge shows what happens when you stick your nose in where it doesn't belong.
Now they almost did the smart thing with CoD, they almost managed to make it yearly by giving it to two studios. But again you need three years to turn out top product. Call of Duty 4 for example had about a two and a half year dev cycle, MW2 had two but benefited from reuse from MW1 while MW3 showed the mess when the talent mostly left and the cycle was cut to 18 months.
A lot of this stems from WaW. A lot of "Tacticool" guys (game reviewers included) who were screaming for another CoD didn't like going back to WW2, claiming the game was a step-back. They ignored the fun, like the addition of co-op campaign and Nazi Zombies because "my sirious narrative!"

It didn't help that a lead dev at Infinity War ratcheted up the asshole by claiming the game was a black mark against the series by adding in the before-mentioning co-op and tanks. Treyarch almost lost their entire gig on CoD, up until they started towing the line with boring shit like Black Ops. While I have actually enjoyed the way IW has handled MP in CoD, people routinely ignore the additions Treyarch has made to the series. WaW might have ended up as another boring WW2 shooter, but it didn't, as much as detractors might like to claim it did. A big part of CoD stagnancy is that you've basically got two separate developers writing and coding the same tired shit.

Either way, what's killing both companies is the idea that a game is meant to push a load of units all to get ready to push the next sequel out as soon as possible without it being a beta. The beta part doesn't apply if you're EA. I just find it hilarious that EA doesn't have the kind of pressure Activision does with "MOAR COD NOW!" and yet they manage to take IPs that are half to full-dead and completely fuck them up even when years are taken to crank them out. Considering that they work their coders half to death, it's hard to find out what, aside from morons with zero experience in video games pushing their bullshit, is constantly fucking their games up.

I honestly get the feeling developers working under EA have to deal with "Pentagon Wars" levels of bureaucracy: "Why don't we put portholes in it so the soldiers can shoot out the windows!?" "Why the Hell would you put portholes on the Bradley!?"
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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TheFeniX wrote:Basically, Mass Effect shows what happens when you keep your developers on a schedule.
But Mass Effect 3 was hardly finished in its original version. It wasn't until the DLC came out that it could truly be called a finished product. They even released the Extended DLC for free because of the backlash about the original ending not really wrapping up the story.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Bullshit. It wrapped up the story just fine. FattyNerdsTM just didn't LIKE it so they bitched and bitched and bitched until it got changed to something they could bitch less about. The other DLC would have just put more hours in the game, but added nothing to the story.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Mr. Coffee »

I'll believe that when they unfuck TOR's billing. Also, Hav, download TOR so we can play Jefi dress-up dolls, ya goddamn Mexican. I miss gaming with ya, bro....
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Adamskywalker007 wrote:
TheFeniX wrote:Basically, Mass Effect shows what happens when you keep your developers on a schedule.
But Mass Effect 3 was hardly finished in its original version. It wasn't until the DLC came out that it could truly be called a finished product. They even released the Extended DLC for free because of the backlash about the original ending not really wrapping up the story.
Nothing I've read or seen about ME3 showed that it's shortcomings were due to being rushed out. Same could be said about Halo 3 and Gears of War 3: the series just became tired and the writers just didn't know how to wrap things up. This is in stark contrast to Dragon Age 2 where multiple BW developers and even EA spokespersons have admitted the drop in quality was due to a push to cash in on the popular of DA:O.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by DaveJB »

It's true that the Control/Destroy/Synthesis aspect of the ending was planned from Day 1, and that it's not like there was some super-complex endgame that was planned but chopped down by EA's meddling. The schedule might have been responsible for the release endings being a little inconclusive and basically all minor variations on the same few scenes, though I've heard conflicting reports about that.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Havok wrote:Bullshit. It wrapped up the story just fine. FattyNerdsTM just didn't LIKE it so they bitched and bitched and bitched until it got changed to something they could bitch less about. The other DLC would have just put more hours in the game, but added nothing to the story.
There were a few quibbles (if the mass effect relays were destroyed all factions are basically trapped on earth, and with limited resources they'll probably fall on each other). Changes like showing that the mass effect relay functioned enough that others could sort of travel and that it could be fixed were minor ones that actually worked. We also get a little more knowledge of what happened to the galaxy.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Darth Yan wrote:
Havok wrote:Bullshit. It wrapped up the story just fine. FattyNerdsTM just didn't LIKE it so they bitched and bitched and bitched until it got changed to something they could bitch less about. The other DLC would have just put more hours in the game, but added nothing to the story.
There were a few quibbles (if the mass effect relays were destroyed all factions are basically trapped on earth, and with limited resources they'll probably fall on each other). Changes like showing that the mass effect relay functioned enough that others could sort of travel and that it could be fixed were minor ones that actually worked. We also get a little more knowledge of what happened to the galaxy.
So no quibbles about 120 hours of game time reduced to three buttons? Was true multiple endings a lost technology like the Mass Relays? I mean even New Vegas with it's "multiple endings" was nothing more than If A run Voiceclip 1 if B run Voiceclip 2 still had more than Mass Effect 3 managed. The reason why people bitched aside from as Yan mentioned was the fact that choices were a big thing in Mass Effect 2 and 3... right up until the ending. At the end you have three buttons, the same thing that got pages of jokes after Deus Ex Human Revolution did it. Three buttons color coded for your convenience, because dumping you in the chose your own adventure room was the height of our imagination.

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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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The essential issue with the M3E ending isn't that the choices were meaningless. The essential issue is that they were made meaningless because every single one of the endings forced you to collaborate with the genocidal monster that was the root cause of all the problems in the first place. This is why the "indoctrination" theory gained so much traction from the beginning - it is a supreme act of narrative stupidity to force the player to work for the bad guy that you've been trying to kill for the past 120 hours for a very long list of war crimes in the last 5 climactic minutes of the game; and the only way to explain it away is that Shep was in fact forced to cooperate by indoctrination magic just like Saren, TIM, and half of the bloody villains in the game.

This is why the only correct and proper ending of ME3 is to shoot Star Hitler in the face, and let him wipe you out to demonstrate what a truly spiteful toad that he is (which he has been for the whole damn game). It's the only one that makes narrative sense. It is a sad ending; but it's the meaningful ending. Everything else was just a hollow and clumsy attempt to make genocide or wide-reaching imposed social+genetic engineering justifiable just because the writers were stupidly wedded to the idea that AIs will supposedly go rampant/technological singularity someday and that makes their attempt to genocide us justifiable and something you should go along with.

In short, no amount of crying about FatNerds changes the moral bankruptcy of the ME3 ending. It was a bad ending, period. The writing staff actually by and large objected to it precisely due to its narrative bankruptcy but the head writer went with it anyway.

===

Deus Ex, for all the scorn heaped on the final four choices, actually makes narrative sense in the context of the whole game. Each ending ultimately reaffirms one of four particular stands that have been presented to the player as moral and ethical dilemmas throughout the game. The only real problem is that the "Kill everyone and let the truth be buried" option jars badly with a no-kill Adam, but that's really easily fixable had they just claimed Pangaea was doomed from the get-go and Adam only had time to send out one final message. The ME3 is completely unsalvageable as soon as Star Child got involved. Nothing can fix it.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Zinegata wrote:...the writers were stupidly wedded to the idea that AIs will supposedly go rampant/technological singularity someday and that makes their attempt to genocide us justifiable and something you should go along with.
Which is itself a problem. In the first game, there were three examples of AI that only became violent because of an environment of mutual fear between organics and AI. In the second game, you gain two AI allies - EDI and Legion. In the third game, you can bring about a peaceful resolution to the Quarian-Geth conflict.

Then the ending shits on all that by claiming anti-AI bigotry was the right way to go all along, because AI are inherently predisposed to try to murder their creators.

But then, maybe Havok's one of those idiots who thought Bioshock Infinite was deep for declaring that the victims of racial bigotry are just as bad as their oppressors, if you give them the chance.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Either way: Mass Effect 3's issues stemmed from poor writing and execution on part of a developer given the time and money needed to create a complete product. Bioware really can't handle complex themes. They can obfuscate pretty well and let the player slay an "ancient evil," but not much else.

Bioshock: Infinite was cut way down to, from what I know, make a release date. AI faction battling is just one example. The game looks fantastic, yet is pretty shallow: What was shown in demos was only visually the same as the released product, but I haven't trusted 2K since the bullshit about Bioshock 2, which they repurposed for B:I with absolutely no comeuppance because I guess they can't do boss fights anymore since fucking up the Fontaine fight in the first one. Also, the writing is bad enough to not even make sense which a lot of people seem to mislabel as "deep."
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

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Havok wrote:Bullshit. It wrapped up the story just fine. FattyNerdsTM just didn't LIKE it so they bitched and bitched and bitched until it got changed to something they could bitch less about. The other DLC would have just put more hours in the game, but added nothing to the story.
As far as wrapping up the story goes, it was perfectly fine, but it tried to massively shift the tone of the story into new territory too late into the game, and in a pretentious way, too. It started with more of a Star Trek vibe but they wanted to end it on a similar note to the movie "AI." Plus, it dramatically ramped up the level of "space magic" in the series. Yeah I know there was SOME of that before, but space magic going from "present" to "determining everything" was too much of a leap.

Also, originally, it wasn't very coherent - we saw things happening that simply didn't make sense. They weren't major but it detracted from the experience anyway. I also dislike that they changed it, but I'm glad the DLC at least made the series of events a little clearer and explained why certain people ended up in certain places.

The build up never gave them a chance to make a good ending, IMO. They wrote themselves into a hole that they could only climb out of with a lot of Deus ex Machina crap and space magic.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Darth Yan »

Grumman wrote:
Zinegata wrote:...the writers were stupidly wedded to the idea that AIs will supposedly go rampant/technological singularity someday and that makes their attempt to genocide us justifiable and something you should go along with.
Which is itself a problem. In the first game, there were three examples of AI that only became violent because of an environment of mutual fear between organics and AI. In the second game, you gain two AI allies - EDI and Legion. In the third game, you can bring about a peaceful resolution to the Quarian-Geth conflict.

Then the ending shits on all that by claiming anti-AI bigotry was the right way to go all along, because AI are inherently predisposed to try to murder their creators.

But then, maybe Havok's one of those idiots who thought Bioshock Infinite was deep for declaring that the victims of racial bigotry are just as bad as their oppressors, if you give them the chance.

I don't think they were saying they are inherently as bad; just that hatred can make you as vile as the ones you hate. It's the old "he who fights monsters". You should absolutely fight injustice but you shouldn't sink to the enemies' level.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Zinegata »

Mongoose wrote:
Havok wrote:Bullshit. It wrapped up the story just fine. FattyNerdsTM just didn't LIKE it so they bitched and bitched and bitched until it got changed to something they could bitch less about. The other DLC would have just put more hours in the game, but added nothing to the story.
As far as wrapping up the story goes, it was perfectly fine, but it tried to massively shift the tone of the story into new territory too late into the game, and in a pretentious way, too. It started with more of a Star Trek vibe but they wanted to end it on a similar note to the movie "AI." Plus, it dramatically ramped up the level of "space magic" in the series. Yeah I know there was SOME of that before, but space magic going from "present" to "determining everything" was too much of a leap.

Also, originally, it wasn't very coherent - we saw things happening that simply didn't make sense. They weren't major but it detracted from the experience anyway. I also dislike that they changed it, but I'm glad the DLC at least made the series of events a little clearer and explained why certain people ended up in certain places.

The build up never gave them a chance to make a good ending, IMO. They wrote themselves into a hole that they could only climb out of with a lot of Deus ex Machina crap and space magic.
That's because the head writer shut out the rest of the team while writing the ending; and when he did finally show it to them the universal concensus (in more polite terms anyway) was "it sucked horribly and doesn't jive with the rest of the series. Why are we doing this?" only for the head writer to push through with it anyway and claim it's "art".

The Destroy-Control-Synthesis portion of the ending wasn't entirely unsalvageable though. If these choices were presented to the player by someone other than Space Hitler (like, say, another Virgil-type AI from the long-dead race that whose clues were helping you all throughout the series), then it becomes a rather "stale" or "let down" ending, but an acceptable one as it at least makes sense - because the "solution" to the Reaper problem, while requiring numerous compromises, at least comes from people who we know have been actively trying to help the whole damn series despite being dead for thousands of years.

Forcing you to collaborate with Space Hitler is really what leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth, because it simply makes no sense for you to suddenly start following whatever the Reapers tell you to do in the last 5 minutes of the game.

Unfortunately, for the revised endings it was clear the head writer was so in love with Space Hitler that the rest of the writing team wasn't allowed to write him out (with the exception of the Reject Ending, which I think is a very stealthy way that the writing team got past the head writer's bloated ego to give a nod to all the people who pointed out how monumentally stupid cooperating with Space-Hitler was).

So what we got in the expanded endings was to just add a lot of post-Space Hitler epilogue that goes back to reaffirming what the majority of the series is about (peace, understanding, we are stronger together etc) that just tries to spray-paint over the fact that you ended up as a collaborator to the galaxy's greatest mass-murderer. It doesn't really work.

Finally, I have to note that this is narrative dissonance problem is a big reason why Dragon Age 2 sucked. Yes, there are gameplay issues and reused assets, which at least don't plague Mass Effect 3. But that could have been saved by having a decent story at least, and the simple, blunt reality of DA2 is that the story sucked especially in comparison to DA:O.

The first game was about uniting everyone under one banner to face the zombie apocalypse, focusing on the efforts of a dying Order of "Wardens" that had been raised to combat that threat. That's a pretty compelling story on its own. The second game completely writes out the zombie apocalypse problem - and the whole Wardens mythology - in favor of... Hawke running around some city where mages and templars decided to be monumentally retarded towards each other in some weird and poorly executed fantasy parody of the mutant-registration laws of the X-men franchise. And why did the story have to involve multi-year time skips in the first place when it actually doesn't do much for the story again?

So really, Bioware is showing a disturbing trend of having writers who simply refuse to follow the groundwork already laid before them, in favor of chasing new (and often less interesting) stories; and Inquisition seems to be doubling down on the very pointless sidetrack into the Mage-Templar conflict rather than realizing that it's not terribly interesting to begin with (especially when most of the bloody characters aren't mages). I don't think that's an EA problem - these are very basic writing mistakes.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Thanas »

You had a bit of that in earlier Bioware games as well. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 for example are very different.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Zinegata »

Thanas wrote:You had a bit of that in earlier Bioware games as well. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 for example are very different.
Yeah, but it's not quite as jarring and BG2 never really dropped the Bhaalspawn angle, and the ending was basically a resolution to the whole "Lord of Murder" thing which the first game explicitly started with Saverok.

The DA series however... It would be like BG2 paying only lip service to the fact that the main character has a piece of the Lord of Murder inside of him (as opposed to being the reason why people keep trying to kidnap/experiment/ally with him), and then ending the trilogy by completely forgetting about the Lord of Murder entirely in favor of fighting some ressurected villain from Tales of the Sword Coast. One can't blame a rushed schedule for something like this I think.
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Havok »

Like I said, it wrapped up the story just fine, FattyNerdsTM just didn't like it. ;)
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Zinegata »

And all we have is a prime example of Bioware's "Our audiences are too entitled and they are WRONG!" argument in a slightly different form.

Namely the elitist "we're better and smarter than other nerds haha!" kind that excuses a turd ending just so they can delusionally pretend to be above the rest of Nerdom.

But sure, next time we get monumentally bad writing let's excuse it as "wrapping it just fine" and dismiss all criticism as just "entitled FattyNErds who can't recognize art." We're sure to encourage much better writing and closer peer reviews that way. :P :wink:
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by bilateralrope »

Havok wrote:Like I said, it wrapped up the story just fine, FattyNerdsTM just didn't like it. ;)
So you like an ending where characters that have been with you the whole way stave to death ?
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Re: EA never wants to be the Worst Company again.

Post by Zinegata »

bilateralrope wrote:
Havok wrote:Like I said, it wrapped up the story just fine, FattyNerdsTM just didn't like it. ;)
So you like an ending where characters that have been with you the whole way stave to death ?
You should let go of your entitled ideas and accept artistic vision! To rail against plotholes like "Why the hell is the Normandy in a jump gate all of a sudden when it's been established it's fighting with the Fleet?" just makes you a FattyNerd unable to recognize true art :D

Edit: I also hope it is blatantly obvious I am being sarcastic here.
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