I did play plenty of them, like Deus Ex HR, Mass Effect 2, Civ 5, Anno 2070 or Skyrim (from the recent games). From those only Deus Ex and Skyrim caught my attention for longer than a week, because other are shallow and repetitive.
Most of the time I spend playing indie games.
I have enough of EA ruining great franchises and studios, forcing DRM and Origin on their games, releasing incomplete games only to sell day-1 DLCs or spill dozens of DLCs, and then saying it, and microtransactions, is what players want, stopping players from giving EA games poor reviews, as well as deflecting complaints with cheap PR tricks.
I'm not going to buy any game by EA as long as they continue those practices.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode...o-ea-marketing
<3 Extra Credits
You make it sound like you need to spend a lot to get anything, but how often do big games that took millions to make by big companies flop? Why does an indie game care if they don't get wide spread sales? Many that are well received can double their costs in sales.
The video game industry has this thing where they have to just keep throwing out more and more money and then the publisher decides they've spent enough and releases the game broken so they can't even cover costs.
It's not sustainable. Can some things take a ton of money and pay off? Sure but pretending it is the norm is not healthy and the industry is showing it. They need to get their budgets under control and focus on making good games and care less about graphics.
Comparing to their predecessors.
Mass Effect 2 had simplified combat and character progress comparing to ME 1. It also had more generic plot. 80% of the game was about recruiting new team members, and sometimes it felt forced. Game was more linear and had almost no exploration.
Civilization 5, at least to me, was a simplified version of civ 4. Features like religion, corporations, hygiene, vassal states were removed for example.
Anno 2070 repeats most of the 1404's mechanics. Single player campaign is shorter and additional missions seem to be all the same - "build city for xxxxx citizens".
On the other hand, Skyrim offered big world, and while many quests were generic, it was interesting to explore it.
Deus Ex HR is very much like DE1, but with many new features and very interesting plot.
There is general tendency to simplify games to cater to larger audience.
My biggest grudge is with Spore. Advertised as revolutionary game, about species evolution, taking from games like civilization, settlers or simcity, it turned out to be 5 minigames of pacman's complexity with creature editor. After this, and Simcity Societies, I am afraid of what will happen with Simcity 5.
Those games sell very well and surely bring a lot of profit. But after almost 20 years of gaming they are too simple to me. By simple I don't mean "not difficult", but "not complex"
I have enough of EA ruining great franchises and studios, forcing DRM and Origin on their games, releasing incomplete games only to sell day-1 DLCs or spill dozens of DLCs, and then saying it, and microtransactions, is what players want, stopping players from giving EA games poor reviews, as well as deflecting complaints with cheap PR tricks.
I'm not going to buy any game by EA as long as they continue those practices.
i think the people here who actually loathe EA are a special demographic. They are real gamers. They know what is going on the industry and more importantly they are. The sad thing is that is a small portion of the target audience, i would bet, that EA goes after. The super casual gamer (ie the bro who plays Madden with friends whilst pounding beers) far outnumber those of us who are real gamers. They gobble up EAs crap because they don't know any better. Those that know don't support their company.
Now if you know better and still went out and gobbled up ME3 at midnight at gamestop for 60 bucks...then yeah you are rather silly.
I don't want to judge a whole company, neither Blizzard nor EA, but offering content as DLC and charging them extra, instead of including that in the game, when it was already done when they released the game, is just a kick in the face of the player. So far Blizzard has not done that. They've still done a lot of questionable stuff. Prices for transfers and name changes could be lower. PEts and mounts should be obtainable in the game, instead of paying quarter to half the price of an expansion for one. They shouldn't try to charge us extra for a feature like crossserver-grouping. But at least they haven't pulled any DLC crap. The pets and mounts don't offer new content.
But in some way I can understand it. In the end they are a big company and they have to make sure they have the right amount of money to finance their projects. I mean I don't know how much money game designers and programmers demand for the job they're doing. None of us really knows much about that stuff I guess. It's always easy to judge someone. And as for the quality of their games. WoW is an MMO. Usually Blizzard would say "it's done when it's done". But their subscriptions would drop if they go too long without new content. The problem about content is, it always takes longer to produce it, than it takes to play through.
I could be wrong, but wasn't the reason for the steep price of server transfers to prevent players from server hopping and causing unbalance?
Do I really need to explain this statement to you? Please, come up with a better example.
Faction changes and server transfers are not core content of the game. Neither are pets or mounts, although I'm a little disappointed that they are not earnable in game somewhere.
Quality of games and bugs? Say what you will of Cataclysm, it was pretty fucking polished when it was released. Sure, some bugs do make it through, but that is to be expected. SC2 and D3 where also pretty polished, with minimal bugs at release.
I'm not happy about the RMAH, but I'm not sure yet that it will really effect my game play. It also not core content of the game.
Looks like every game company out there to me. A lot of companies just call them expansions, not dlc.
People are mad because they are sheep. With just a tiny bit of research I can see if a game is worth $50/$60 or if I should wait until it's in the 14.99 bin at walmart. (which is only ~3 months nowadays).
Brainless zombies have been relieved of their money because they saw 'blah blah 3, now with more pixels' and couldn't wait to throw money at their local shopkeeper. Nowtheymad for something that is 100% their own fault.
From a previous post "EA is a publisher who's main goal is to make as much return on their initial investment as they possible can."
All I or anyone can say to that is.....DUH?!? Don't give me that 'some companies love making great games' if that happens as a side effect of making as much money as they can, as cheaply as they can, then that's great for them. But not one single company on the planet, not even virgin air, isn't in the business of squeezing every red cent they can out of every product.
Apply blizzards model to any other subscription service,you'd be outraged:
Netflix adds no new movies for a year, you click a new movie, there's a $5 fee.
You're in an accident, click your onstar button, but there's an addition $20 fee for them to help.
You turn on your tv only to find all you get are the infomercial channels. Every other show is pay per view.
See how dumb that model is?
The incompetent rule over the ignorant in the corporate capitalistic world of today.
Egotistical Assholes, lol'd. Fitting for a terrible company.