Oh my god, so much resentment..
You are all forgetting something, the EXACT same reason why blizzard takes so long to update their older character models: People are used to it, and appreciate them. Drastically changing them could upset your buyers, so the changes are coming slow, thought out, tested and tried before risking your new product gets bad reviews. And im talking FIFA here, since i have no experience with madden. But FIFA gets good scores, from all the big sites/magazines, because it improves where it can without upsetting the fans that love the game for so long.
FIFA 12 has deliverd heavily on those changes, great new gameplay, better control over your individual players, new collision engine etc. I love the game, and hope 13 will be better, but not different. Thats the whole deal here, they got the chicken with the golden eggs - they care for it, they work with it, they don't send it out to trance parties and feed drugs hoping the next egg will be a purple gold one. They nourish the chicken and gives it what it needs so the next egg will be a little bit more pure gold, not a chiseled stone.
-disclaimer fifa experience.
I wouldn't call a deeper understanding and insight of how the entire gaming industry works and making conclusions based on that a superiority complex. More like other people simply don't want to look further when they are happy with less than before (with shinier look) and led to believe what should be considered good and what not.
Modern gaming apologist: I once tasted diarrhea so shit is fine.
"People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an excercise of power, are barbarians" - George Lucas 1988
The yearly sports games pretty much are roster updates with some tweaks here and there, but that doesn't make them bad games at all. I'm a big fan of the NHL and FIFA series. You have to remember, there is a section of gamers that just enjoy sporting titles. That's pretty much all they will end up buying throughout the course of the year, so who cares if they drop another 60 each time. They aren't wasting their money at all. Look at it this way, I enjoy shooters, but in the end aren't they all pretty much the same with some tweaks here and there? Is buying the newest Madden any worse than buying... Rage? How about those gamers who spend $15 a month on an MMO. Does Blizzard intentionally make WoW bad so they can keep changing things and milk people out of their subscription fees?
They aren't making things bad on purpose, they just aren't in a hurry to change everything that's been working for them. Progress will be incremental. Little progress does not equal BAD.
I hear they are adding a bounty system in the next Madden
Most people would rather die than think, and most people do. -Bertrand Russell
Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn’t be noticed - nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity - too bad for you -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I don't think it's "purposely"... it's more like they don't know any better... or rather they refuse to know any better.
Best example is the Gamepad-Support for the PC-version of ME3.
Know what's so great about it? It's the fact that it's non-existant.
Why is it non-existant? Well, because the team for the interface didn't have enough time to implement it.
And why didn't they have enough time? Right, it's because EA really pushes the developers to finish a game at deadline. Even if other companies - i.e. Blizzard - would push the deadline back a few months to make some tweaks they deem neccessary, EA doesn't allow that.
There is barely ever a "well, we wanted to release that game on x-uary the y-th, but because of z we can't and have to delay it for q weeks/months" with EA, it seems so much like "Release it! Release it! Release it! Release it!"... think of it like "Fix it!" from Futurama.
Which seems like one of the bigger reasons why people have such a beef with EA...
They don't purposely make their games bad, it's not like they're going to go to extra trouble. They purposely make their games with the minimum resources they can as they are assured of sales anyway. This will lead to the game being "worse than it could have been" which you can view as being "bad".
No, that's why Diablo 3 shipped last decembre.
Wait, it didn't... well, it was shipped in march, right? Or was it february?
See the pattern?
Yes, Blizzard doesn't always keep a game in development until every single thing is fixed - they already explained why they decided to release it without PvP.
To make it short, if you haven't already read about it: PvE is by far the most important part of Diablo and so the fans, who (mostly) want to play the PvE-part, don't have to wait some more weeks/months for something really few actually NEED to have, they decided to ship it without the PvP, because they weren't happy with the state it was in.
Now if it were EA then you might've seen them ship in sometime last year or maybe in february, without the last big changes Blizzard did and with a (maybe) mediocre PvP.
Blizz wasn't happy with it so they tried to find a satisfying solution - EA would've said "Don't care, release it!".
THAT'S the difference.
PS: Nothing with this thread, but I've gotten sick of Blizz-Haters like yourself. You guys are fucking annoying, don't positively contribute to any discussion at all and seem like little whiny brats. QQ Blizz didn't make all my wishes true QQ Blizz is the worst company in the world QQ
No I'm not really a Blizzard-Fanboy, I just like the fact that they do try to make a game the best they can before releasing it, especially since EA is going in a totally different direction and I've gotten kinda sick of it...
You can't honestly believe that. They removed it from the game so they could get it to release. They weren't holding the game back for pvp that much is obvious they just expected to have everything done in may. Since they can't their not willing to hold the game back and their gonna release it. It has absolutely nothing to do with this mythos of quality control. I know I know their PR department would have you believe that. In reality it's the same circumstance in both cases. EVERY DEVELOPER DOES THIS to some extent or another. It's a matter of timing, financing, developments schedules and a plethora of other factors that you and I are not privy to information about. In the case of controllers and mass effect I can at least emulate the controller functionality. Theirs nothing I can do about diablo pvp. To make it short controller functionality on the pc isn't that important and you can emulate it anyway. They decided to ship it without it because it's not that big a deal for pc fans of the game. They would naturally gravitate to keyboard mouse combo. Diablo PVP I can't do shit about though, but that's okay blizzard is a good guy we can't get mad at them. I just find it appalling that we can make convenient rationalizations in one case but since we think EA is ick we just assume it's shit. I know I know Blizzards shit doesn't stink. What if EA/BW removed controller functionality from mass effect because of quality control? Would that sate you? No of course not. If were gonna hold one company to certain standards we should hold them all to it. Simple as that. Blizzard should hold back the release of diablo until their ready to ship the completed INCLUDING THE PVP. Otherwise the same label applies to them.
Incidentally I could care less to bash them or for EA vs ACTI/BLIZZARD debate. Rather what should be noted is that the practice of getting games to release before their finished is very common and I'm not sure why people have decided to focus EA and demonize them when their favourite companies do the same thing. I'll quote Heinlein because its a rare occasion that I find his views to be accurate. "The man who eats meat is brother to the butcher"
Last edited by Leonard McCoy; 2012-03-30 at 12:23 PM.
If Blizz is bad then EA is lower than the deepest depths of hell.
Just take ME3 MP for example. Totally unbalanced classes and weapons, cheating can be done simply by editing local files, real money transactions that are not even guaranteed and a connection system which can make game hosts disconnect itself. It's actually a great game at it's core, too bad only piled under layers of hardened shit.
For the 2 years I played WoW I never ever lost a single item I earned due to disconnects. In ME3, I need more than my fingers and toes for that over the past 3 weeks.