Bay 12 Games Forum

There's a lot of knee-jerk EA hate in this thread. Hating on EA has been the cool thing to do for years now. While EA is indeed a terrible company, they're a symptom of the larger problem of what is wrong with the games industry as a whole.

Actiblizz

They're not sinless, but they're pretty much the model of what EA should be.  CoD players seem to be okay with yearly releases (much like Madden fans), and they haven't run Blizzard into the ground trying to standardize that model.  While there goal might be "taking the fun out of video games", if they stick to genres where fans are okay with that and don't destroy otherwise good companies they aren't going to be loathed.

Microsoft

At worst they're incompetent.  Certainly not evil.

Nintendo

Why the hell would I hate Nintendo?  Sure, I've got a lot of nits to pick (too many Mario rehashes, a couple weak Zeldas, Other M, friend codes), but note that those are small complaints about otherwise good franchises/hardware they've maintained.

Ubisoft

Yes, they've been paranoid about DRM.  However, they've responded to people's complaints about it by cutting back the worst of it and still continue to produce good games.

Capcom

They're probably the closest to EA in that they openly express bald contempt for their fans, but they don't seem to be fucking up anything they didn't create.

I'm not surprised by this at all, the most surprising thing is that it didn't happen earlier. It sounds like they are getting out of games for good, which is unfortunate, but maybe they will be back some time with a new company and make games like the old bioware did.

Quote from: hermes on September 22, 2012, 07:33:28 pm

I love many of the games they've worked on, and wish them the best in their luxury retirement     But for the life of me I will never understand why they sold Bioware to EA.  I assume, and hope, that they cleaned up, because if they didn't get anything from the sale then no one did!

They didn't sell bioware to EA. EA bought the holding company that owned bioware (and pandemic) - I'm not sure if the doctors had any say in the matter at all.

Fun fact: the holding company (VG Holding Corp) was brokered by (and for a while run by) none other then..... John Riccitiello, who I'm sure you know is the current CEO of EA. Funny how that works out huh?

I thought they had sold out their employees and fans for a quick cash-out.  It's good to know they didn't have a hand in this.

I am confued as to why people call EA "evil". Evil would be, for example, having children work 20 hours a day at nearly zero pay (sweat shop, for example). They just produce mediocre, overpriced games. This may make them a crappy company, with bad games, but I wouldn't call them "evil".

I think that EA has become the "flagship", or the representitive of crappy game companies. When you ask an "EA-hater" what other companies also suck, they generally will happily list Ubisoft, Activision etc. They just pick EA as the main example. This is my reasoning to why EA is often cited as being crap moreso then Ubisoft/Activision etc. Not necessarily becase they are worse, but because they sort of just became the example of these crappy-publishers. Also Origin.

Now if EA were to collapse, I can't say I would be very unhappy, but there may be a few people out there who might be.

No one is criticizing them for making boatloads of money on yearly Madden games.  The problem is that they decided the best use of this money was to buy out otherwise good companies that they had no idea how to run and crash them into the ground.  This isn't about profit.  This is about a company so badly mismanaged that it has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars charging a scorched path through the game development industry.  If they used their profit to reinvest in their existing IPs, or enter new markets with fresh IPs, or buy John Riccitello another yacht made of cocaine, or even give their overworked, underpayed employees a bonus no one would complain.  Instead they used it to shit in your cornflakes.

In other words, imagine if a rich man bought the Mona Lisa for the sole purpose of setting fire to it.

You might want to post credentials on you blog showing why you're an expert on things like sociology and African geopolitics.

Entire debate == Art majors dropped out of science degrees because they didn't like writing academic papers.

Eh, from what I've seen art majors in academia require a lot more formal writing, especially given how much fiercer the competition for grant money is over there.

To be honest OP, I think your argument is rambling, in-cohesive, and overly simplistic.  You don't analyze how our views of different professions might be affected by media exposure or cultural history (the idea of "scientist" as a dedicated profession really only came about in the last two centuries).  You should probably address your title and how it relates to your argument.  Also, while "whilst" is still a perfectly cromulent word, it has fallen out of the English vernacular in favor of the synonym "while".

You know, whenever I've seen a Kickstarter thread I've told myself there's only three developers I'd seriously consider pledging for: Tarn Adams, Gabe Newell, and Chris Avellone.  As Tarn Adams is fairly happy with his situation and at this point Valve must have a treasure vault suitable for Scrooge McDuck, I've been waiting for the time when Obsidian would resort to this.

I do think Mullet Master has a point.

There is a point where you feel like Kickstarter is just being used so they don't have responsibilities to publishers and producers.

You say that like it's a bad thing.  There has never been a company as consistently fucked over by publishers as Obsidian (Troika comes very close though).  They've had schedules slashed for hasty Christmas releases (in the case of KotoRII they offered to make a free patch on their own time but were denied permission).  Even Bethesda, who were relatively good screwed them out of a lot of money for a very successful game leaving them on the edge of bankruptcy.  Kickstarter tended to get mentioned a lot because of how dire their financial situation is.  I'd rather bet my money on Chris Avellone than let another good company be lobotomized after a sale to EA.  While I have my doubts about Kickstarter, it's certainly more efficient for both the consumer and the developer than buying a pre-order the current publisher-dominated industry.

Quote from: dogstile on September 10, 2012, 02:13:33 pm

In other news, heroes are in the game and recruit-able.

Spoiler: "SIIIIIIID" (click to show/hide)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/09/10/xcom-enemy-unknown-sid-meier-not-the-only-heroic-game-developer-cameo/

I'm betting somewhere, there is a thread on a forum dedicated to bitching about the boobplate.

I've never understood that phenomenon.

Agreed.  I would also enjoy seeing Sid Meier in a boobplate.

We've been posting most of the Greenlight stuff in the Greenlight thread.  If you want to have a dedicated thread you may want to make a megapost with a description and a couple screenshots.  Also, you may want to remove the ttp from the hyperlink.

edit: sorry if I came off as abrasive

Quote from: highmax28 on September 03, 2012, 09:39:41 pm

Ohhhhh... Noob moment And I'm thinking of making a big ass sword monument if we have an overabundance of stone. Anyone able to make it swing, by all means, edit the thing! It'll be blade DOWN this time instead of blade up as I usually do

you could make a massive sword out of constructed walls, held up by a pillar with a lever to drop it down as a cave-in, that could kill anything.

The wiki refers to this stupid dwarf trick as the Hammer of Armok.  Megaprojects and stupid dwarf tricks tend to be encouraged in succession forts, especially if they make for an interesting story.

I'll sign up for a turn, but I won't have time to play until next Wednesday.

Also, OP, if you made that avatar it's pretty kickin' rad.

Quote from: Aklyon on September 01, 2012, 08:50:30 am

You forgot another category, alexandertnt: Things that are there to see how long it take for someone to notice its a hentai (or other category of game you usually don't see in public) game, and probably not by them.

Some are more subtle than others.

I saw one zombie game whose main picture was of a unreasonably well endowed zombie playboy bunny bouncing her cleavage around. I'm not one to rage at childish displays of immaturity on the Internet, but I was kind of shocked. There are places you expect to see tasteless sex appeal, and others that you don't.

There's tasteless sexualization bordering on necrophilia, and then there's the incident Aklyon was referring to.  Considering the average XBLI game I'm surprised we haven't seen more poorly doodled anime tits.

it is strange reusing old sci fi settings because future turned out nothing like how they imagined it.

in the marines era, the squaddie deployed to fight aliens made sense. now, if one were to imagine a xcom setting free from previous influences, it would be a future based on drones and long range precision strikes

(yeah, pretty boring, but I was not making a point for a better game)

Actually, the SHIV has a pretty strong resemblance to the US' current ground drones, Gladiator and TALON.  It's not unthinkable that the SHIV is what unmanned drones might be like in 2015.  As for why they don't use long range strikes, I don't think "10 alien terror squad in New York, better level Manhattan to get them" would be very conducive to winning the war.