Electronic Arts and the Gaming Community

[Pugbot]

My opinion of EA is very, very, very low.

My personal experience with them is they ruined Ultima Online, they ruined NFL licensed football games, they ruined Nascar licensed racing games, they somehow managed to ruin SW:TOR, and I am imagine there are other games I am not thinking of they also ruined.,

Does anybody have a high opinion of EA's games or even just a single game? Surely there's something I am not remembering?

I am to the point now where I can't even take any games with an EA logo seriously. I was at that point honestly before pre-ordering SW:TOR but how the hell do you manage to mess up a WoW clone with light sabres and wookies was my thought.

I would like to see some discussion about EA, what it is they do wrong, why they do it wrong, and if its going to ever be fixed. Also I am sure at some time or another very good game designers have been under the EA logo before or even currently, I'd like to see some discussion about them also.

[Larath]

the fifa games are imo really good still, since 09 PES couldn't keep up, and I'm not really sure EA ruined SW:ToR seems more like the community ruined ToR.

[Somebodyelse]

NHL games are still great

[medievalman1]

Let me preface this with saying I don't know what EA has done. With that said, you say that they've ruined all these games, but don't mention how. How has EA ruined these games?

[Pugbot]

the fifa games are imo really good still, since 09 PES couldn't keep up, and I'm not really sure EA ruined SW:ToR seems more like the community ruined ToR.

My feelings on SW:TOR is EA put out a deadline holiday season release date. That date came and the game was not ready. Most notably the delayed reaction time from keyboard to character, or the delayed visuals while your character still did what it was told when it was told. It had a sluggish feeling that was complained about in beta, but I guess everybody assumed it would be fixed by release. I still think its not entirely fixed.
What did the community do to ruin it?


I am also a pretty hardcore football fan, don't get me wrong I still like playing Madden, but there is almost no aspects about Madden that can be called simulation. The physics in it are awful. I know it is difficult if not impossible to put real world physics into a video game, but its almost like they don't even try. And I suspect the soccer and hockey games are very similiar.

[SirRobin]

Meh... I may not have a high opinion of EA but I've still ended up Beta testing a lot more of their games than any other company. Then again I don't have a very high opinion of any company lately so its not like EA is in a unique spot on my scale.

[Lancer]

Don't really care for EA. I hate that they killed off Westwood Studios, Pandemic Studios, and Bullfrog Productions. If SimCity 5 has an awful launch then I'm done with them.

[Pugbot]

Let me preface this with saying I don't know what EA has done. With that said, you say that they've ruined all these games, but don't mention how. How has EA ruined these games?

I didn't want to babble on with opinions, but I will try to keep them to the point.

Ultima Online was an amazing role playing game. Today's mmorpgs have taken out the "role". To me the role is to handle yourself like you would if you were in your characters situation. You had responsibility in ultima online, you had a house with a key that could be stolen, a boat with a key that could be stolen, all of your things could be stolen at any time, and only through alert play with responsibility in mind could you keep them all protected. For example, twice I stole enough loot to sell on ebay for $300-$500. Of course I also had been foolish enough to lose that amount as well probably at other times.
I don't remember exactly what happened, but as I recall EA purchased OSI, and the patches after that destroyed the game. They basically took victimization out of the game, meaning you didn't have to worry about your things being stolen or being murdered and looted outside of scams/glitches. They added in a mirror zone where no PvP activity was allowed. This alienated the core players in the game and drove a lot of them off to different games. UO had fantastic PvP, world PvP where hundreds of dollars worth of goods could be gained or lost. And I am using a real life money amount to give you a scale of the consequence, Ebay banned selling virtual goods a long time ago because of the ease of scamming.


Madden sucks because EA cornered the market having the only NFL license so many years. This means they have no competition pushing them to be better. To me Madden has more or less been the same game since 1996, only adding in more player animations and benefiting from upgraded graphics technology. Madden was never the popular game in my circle of friends when it had competition from other NFL licensed games, I can't remember the names of the other games but they had more realistic physics and gameplay.


Nascar games have more invested in wrecking than racing. I know the general public might be more interested in playing a game that way, but they could have a solid simulation mode or something to appeal to gamers who want more. I also assume they are the only ones licensed to put a game under the Nascar logo. In honesty I haven't played a Nascar game since 05-06 at the latest, maybe they have improved, but I doubt it.


SW:TOR had its priorities wrong. The priority should be to always release a game that everyone will enjoy playing. Instead I leveled to 50 only to find out endgame is unplayable if you're trying for any competitive level with the built in lag the game had. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but I believe the visuals would not update as quickly as you pushed the buttons. So you might actually get that spell interrupted, but you can't tell in enough time to take full advantage of it. Same with max level dungeons, hard to tank progression runs without being able to tell what your character is really doing. And if you're not familiar I was not the only person having this problem, everybody did. The game was not ready, and their subscriber count has BOMBED horribly since its release.

[medievalman1]

All right, now I can see the kind of bastard EA as a company is. Thanks for the elaborations.

[Larath]

My feelings on SW:TOR is EA put out a deadline holiday season release date. That date came and the game was not ready. Most notably the delayed reaction time from keyboard to character, or the delayed visuals while your character still did what it was told when it was told. It had a sluggish feeling that was complained about in beta, but I guess everybody assumed it would be fixed by release. I still think its not entirely fixed.
What did the community do to ruin it?


I am also a pretty hardcore football fan, don't get me wrong I still like playing Madden, but there is almost no aspects about Madden that can be called simulation. The physics in it are awful. I know it is difficult if not impossible to put real world physics into a video game, but its almost like they don't even try. And I suspect the soccer and hockey games are very similiar.

the SW:ToR thing I can't really comment on cause I don't have enough info about it myself so kinda pointless, I played and stopped playing tor cause I was more into wow due to friends and all but I enjoyed my time there but couldn't afford 2 sub games.

as for madden, I doubt it fifa keeps getting better and better imo and they do have competition from pro evolution soccer as far as I know, while I'm not really sure why sports game should be about realism and simulation of the sport rather then being a game about the sport, but then I'm not a fan at all of american football (don't understand it and being european football/soccer is my sport of choice.)

[Adam Jensen]

I don't think EA is an "evil" company. I think they just focus too much on their profit margin and don't pay enough attention to their customers.

Which is sad, because EA could be an amazing company and make an even greater profit if they weren't so damn shortsighted.