Gamer Question: Why does everybody hate EA

Cafe Society
41

Eh, Warcraft and C&C were both based off C&C-maker Westwood’s earlier Dune game engine. Neither is very innovative (especially when you consider WC’s roots as a Warhammer knock-off*). And I think significant changes to the gameplay mechanism or to the story-telling qualify as innovation, or at least substantive development.
What I find really interesting is your assertion about simply making the game more complex/difficult. I feel the exact opposite; the improved troop AI and other changes made WC3 a lot easier for me to manage than the first two, although the missions and multiplayer were balanced to keep the difficulty up. It was one of my favorite things about the game. I was very put off of Starcraft’s multiplayer because I just couldn’t keep up with other players when it came to micromanaging my armies, and WC3’s gameplay developments almost completely eliminated the problem by shrinking the overall scope of battles, improving ai, adding autocast spells and formation movement.
The ability to tab-select all units of a given type in my currently selected group made using special abilities a lot easier as well. Being able to buffer move commands in a chain to direct troops then leave them alone, set building spawn points on my hero so new troops automatically meet up with them, improved hotkey features and being able to set groups of units to be called up by manually set hotkeys (ctrl-grouping) made managing my forces and economy very simple.
To make a long story short (too late), I found WC3’s gameplay design shifted the focus away from how skilled I was at using the interface, to how skilled I was at planning and combat-tactics (you know, the point of a strategy game). Although, not as well as WH40K: Dawn of War has (I love that series).

God, I know. Whatever Will Wright’s doing to keep them from screwing around with Maxis, please let it continue (is it Blackmail? or does he just have the CEO’s balls in a remote-controlled vice?). Did you know that he had to struggle with them to get the first “The Sims” game released, because “no one wants to play a game of real life.” That must have been one huge egg on that exec’s face, am I right?

*Mind you, I am a huge fan of Warcraft’s lore, but I’m not going to pretend that it didn’t get it’s start from a certain franchise.

42

If I had an XBox 360 or a PS3, I would already own All-Pro Football 2K8. I love the idea and just wish they had released a version for PS2 as well.

As for Madden, I can take it or leave it. Generally I leave it–the only Madden game I have is Madden 2005. ESPN NFL 2K5, which I also have, is a much better game and cost me half as much. Hell, for pure fun, the original NFL Blitz from Midway can be more fun than Madden. (I have another soft spot for it because it’s possibly the only football game in existence where the Broncos are one of the best teams to play.) Let’s hope somebody either outbids EA or the NFL decides to go back to a broader license in 2009.

43

I get this feeling a lot more frequently no matter what company makes the game. I paid $50 bucks, I’m not your fucking beta tester.

44

Yes, it’s nice but, not every game can be a whoel genre of its own. We crossed that point a LONG time ago. In fact, these days there may not be many more genres left. We’ve just made so many games.

45

All the nice things I said about him at 3DO really only apply to the initial 3DO console period. After 3DO became a software developer, his attempts at benevolence ceased.
And 3DO’s mistakes as a software developer were many, and included running quite a few franchises into the ground.

46

I’m going to have to side with Martin on this one. You want every game to invent a whole new genre? No way in hell. That’s an absolutly ridiculous standard to hold any game company to. You’d need a company staffed with nothing but clones of Shigeru Miyamoto. And Blizzard is not that company. Blizzard does not innovate. They’re easily the least original major game developer out there. They don’t do “new:” they take concepts pioneered by other companies, and polish them until they work perfectly. That, alongside their incredibly broad-based accesibility, is their hallmark

47

Then again, EA did release one of my favorite games of all time, Zany Golf. So I guess they weren’t so bad 20 years ago.

48

Yeah, but on the other side of the coin…

Look at the many things that slow down the offense in a real game. Bad throws, broken plays, WR drops. These are all things that are included, but would very highly upset players if done at the same rate as in real life. I’m sure I don’t need to illustrate the fury that happens ALREADY when a QB misses an open receiver, now have that happen 3X as often.

If someone loses a game of Madden, they want it to be because they didn’t play as skillfully or as strategically as their opponent. Sometimes players in the NFL just have a bad game. But when people start losing a game of Madden because McNabb had a “bad game” people are going to get pissed off and not play anymore.

Also…most people play with just 5 minute quarters. They have to adjust the stats to where the average person would accomplish a complete game’s worth of stats in the real equivalent of just over a quarter.

So they’re between a rock and a hard place. They either make things realistic and people get upset at how difficult it is to run an offense. Or they make it easier and some people end up scoring a ridiculous amount of points. :smack:

49

What I’ve never understood is that the quarters are five minutes but the time between plays is the standard 25 or 40 seconds. You can kill half a quarter just by running the ball three times and then punting (since running plays generally suck in Madden) and have let the play clock wind all the way down each time.

50

I agree with what your are saying. Some years are worse than others wrt pass defense. IMHO, the way to make the defense better would be to up the skill of the CBs and make the pass rush get there faster.

51

They were great 20-25 years ago, back when they had the EOA (square, circle, triangle) logo. Mail Order Monsters, Racing Destruction Set, M.U.L.E, those were truly great games.

52

What difficulty do you play, what years of Madden are you referring to, and I think you’re talking about the “No Fucking Way” drive. It’s when you can’t stop a quarterback no matter what defense and scheme you throw at them. You could completely dominate them the entire time, but for one drive, you can’t stop them. They’re getting points, dammit.

53

Running plays do not generally suck. Pistols at dawn?

54

I was talking about head to head play in my post, but yeah your right about the “no fuckin way drive.” I was listening to Bill Simmons latest podcast, which is about the new Madden, and he and his guest mentioned that EA told them that they actually built this feature in.

55

Ahem, you forgot Wasteland.

Just Some Guy empties a clip into control-z for 284 points and damage and he explodes like a blood sausage.

56

Heh, I never played Wasteland. But I also forgot stuff like Archon. I meant to add “, etc.” to the end of the list. :wink:

57

When they ate Maxis, the number of bugs in the Sims games and expansions grew in both number and severity. By a lot.

58

Here’s a little story about my biggest gripe with EA.

Madden has always been the 800 pound gorilla of the football game world. It has loads of fanboys and it’s what people associate with console football gaming.

From 2000 to 2004 or so, Sega Sports/2k games put out the NFL 2K series which, in my opinion, was just generally superior to madden. Less buggy, fewer AI gimmicks, better graphics, more realism, better presentation, just more fun overall.

But the market was still dominated by Madden. It had the momentum, it had the fan base.

So in 2004, 2k games tried to mix it up. They put out NFL 2K5 (which to date is still the best football game I’ve ever played, although I haven’t played Madden for a few years) and charged only $20 for it. It was a full quality game, at 40% of a full quality game price. I guess they figured that if people would just try their game, they’d realize it was better and they could really start keeping up with madden.

So what did EA do? Hire better people, demand a better product of themselves, up the funding of the game to make a superior product to the competitors so that people would want to buy Madden?

Nope. They bribed the NFL with 300 million dollars for an exclusive license so that no one else could make authentic football games and hence they’d eliminate their competition.

They saw a better product gaining ground, and they were willing to spend a lot of money… but did they spend it on making their product better? Nope, they spent it on buying a monpoly. And in the process, since they paid out all that money for the license, they had less funding for the actual game, making it inferior to what it could be. They both eliminated a superior product, and made their product inferior in the process, to doubly screw football gaming fans to maintain their market share.

59

The thing is, neither Bard’s Tale nor Wasteland were EA. They were Interplay. EA just had the publishing rights since they were a much more established firm at the time. Interplay was founded in 1983 by Brian Fargo and until 1988 all their games were published through EA since they had all of maybe 10 people on staff. Wasteland was the last game published through EA, I believe.

Now the problem with EA owning the publishing rights was that EA owned the names of the games (although Interplay owned everything else, e.g. the source code). This became an issue when Interplay decided to release Wasteland 2. They petitioned EA for the rights to make the game, but EA wanted a lot of money to sell the Wasteland trademark. Interplay decided to release the game under a different name with a similar but new storyline and called it Fallout.

I don’t know how Fargo, after leaving Interplay when it went under due to a series of missteps, one big one being “Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel”, managed to secure the Bard’s Tale name in order to release a Bard’s Tale console game with a new company he founded, but he did. (And though I haven’t played that game, I hear it was pretty good.)

60

I played 2k5, and it sucked. Madden never had the kind of blatant exploits that 2k5 had, and the Madden team actually understands football.

Example: Visual Concepts clearly does not have a clue what a QB Spy is. They put in a so-called “QB Spy” option, but any player that was spying the QB also had his normal duties of either covering a zone or covering a receiver man to man. Any savvy football fan will tell you that it is not physically possible to cover a man and spy the QB, since the former puts your back to the QB. (And playing a zone takes you out of position to spy.)

Since there was no possible way to spy the QB, you could easily scramble for 10 yards on every single play, even with leadfoots like Drew Bledsoe. Pathetic.

You couldn’t even take control of the spy and spy manually, since that either left a zone or a man completely uncovered. This is perhaps the shoddiest, most ridiculous exploit I have ever seen in any football game ever made.

Superior to Madden? It is to laugh.