EA Says People Don’t Really Enjoy Linear Games as Much Today

If a game is strictly linear, i.e. you miss one clue or step and you are stuck, then they kinda suck. But a lot of games today follow the model of do these 3 quests 40 times each to progress to the next level where you will do 3 new quests 40 times each. The mindless grinding model sucks as well.

Miss the Diablo 2 type game. New stuff as you progress and while it has several "Must do this to progress" points, they are easy to find. And the replay value was high as well.
 
That's an interesting statement. I just played through HL2 and Ep1, and it was just as fun as the first time around. And then, since Blizzard gave me Heart of the Swarm for free, I played that too. And it was fun. A lot of fun.
 
Maxx said:
Translation: we wanted an open world game that was more receptive to microtransactions
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You mean a shallow online mutiplayer game that had everything behind a pay wall or 100s of hour of grinding.
 
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Dying Light is my GOTY of 2015, DOOM is my GOTY of 2016, and Horizon: Zero Dawn is my GOTY for 2017 so far. EA can get bent.
 
Well, if its a crap linear cop out, yeah it's not going to be received all that well. I'm playing the campaign in starcraft 2 wings of liberty right now and enjoying the hell out of it. No complaints here. However ffxiii was a little too much railroading for me to enjoy a large part of the copy/paste layout choices.
 
Megalith said:
EA CFO Blake Jorgensen has acknowledged that linear games are fading in popularity in the current market, and it is part of the reason why they canned Visceral’s Star Wars game and shuttered the studio. "As we kept reviewing the game, it continued to look like a much more linear game [which] people don't like as much today as they did five years ago or 10 years ago," he said.

EA ultimately decided to close Visceral and significantly shift the nature of the Star Wars game because "it was an economic decision at the end of the day." Jorgensen thought about how many copies the game would have to sell and he determined that EA "probably wouldn't be able to" reach that unspecified mark. "You gotta cut the bridge when you realize you can't make a lot of money on something," Jorgensen said, adding that he is a big believer in sunk costs.
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EA: Bullshit I say, bullshit. You just mean you cant rape enough peoples wallets with them on a regular enough basis.

Staples said:
I am not so sure of this. I don't care much for 100% linearity but you certainly never feel that you can complete a game if it is open world like many are today.
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100% linear can be good if the story is engaging enough.
 
Shaten said:
I think there is the other stuff that he didn't say.

based off interviews and news from the studio, they were very very far behind. Basically it wasn't even a good tech demo at this point.

Which would be his "sunk cost" comment. We have sunk a lot of money into this and it hasn't gotten to the point where it looks like a game yet. Lets see 10 times that to finish it means we have to sell how many copies to break even.....Yhea not happening.

my 2 cents.
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And how much of that was due to EA fucking around? EA is known to micromanage the hell out of games, demanding changes last minute that screw everything up. I'd be willing to bet that EA forced Visceral to change direction mid-development and then used the mess it caused as an excuse to kill the studio.

rezerekted said:
Well, I agree with them. I have never liked linear heavily scripted games. Once you finish them there is no replay value.
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Replay value is entirely up to the end user. Beyond that, is replay value really THAT important these days? Hundreds of good games release every year. No one will live long enough to play everything worthwhile that comes out. I'd argue that someone being a great experience once through is fine because there is no time to go back and replay things anymore.
 
As I've gotten older (re: ancient) large open world games these days just don't interest me. I don't have the time/patience to play these large sprawling games any more and tend to prefer a well crafted shorter experience. For example I really LOVED Witcher 2. Easily in my top 5 games of all time. Witcher 3 on the other hand, I've bounced off it hard the 3 or 4 times I've tried to play it. Reminds me too much of a MMO or something.
 
Yet i would gladly pay 40$ for a nice 8 to 10 hour game play game with a good story, and that plays well enough. Truth is money might be more in making shorter but nicer games... Brains love a story.. you want a brain hack, tell a good story, brains just get hooked on that. This guy is just hacking brains with the gambling part of it, he knows it... Money, just a laziest way possible... There could be equal money in good story games shorter and well made.... But that takes more creativity... Not even necessarily more money though.
 
Wow... They just keep doubling down, don't they? I'm not sure how it's possible to go beyond full retard but they managed it.

I would say that sandbox games can be good, but when it's a huge world void of content then it's going to suck.
 
Derangel said:
And how much of that was due to EA fucking around? EA is known to micromanage the hell out of games, demanding changes last minute that screw everything up. I'd be willing to bet that EA forced Visceral to change direction mid-development and then used the mess it caused as an excuse to kill the studio.
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Working off memory, It was more Visceral's mess not EAs interfering.

This has some details: https://kotaku.com/the-collapse-of-viscerals-ambitious-star-wars-game-1819916152
 
It really depends on the game, the way things are set up, etc.. I enjoy a lot of linear games. They were designed from the ground up that way and if they were open world, they'd be a huge failure. When you create a world with a deep story and a lot of interactions, you want something more open. If you create a nice game with a good back story but not super interactive, linear is a great way to go.
 
Linear games are fine as long as:

1. The story is great.
2. The games has at least 20-30 hours for the story. I will not be playing a linear game more than once, so it needs a long enough story.
3. No required DLC and no loot box garbage.
4. No half-baked single-player mode slapped onto a multi-player game.
 
SighTurtle said:
Different games, different budgets. Visceral was working on a entirely separate game from Battlefront. In fact, they took people intended to work on Ragtag (the project name of this Visceral game) to work on the SP portion of Battlefront.
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This was a comment refuting his assanying assumption. We know this was like Force Unleashed as a BountyHunter. It would of done very well. Many supposedly non-linier games actually are linier. Also given how little it needed to be completed, his accounting assumptions are also bs. They just didn’t want to pickup on a game they didn’t have control of from the beginning. This was a big EA ego trip.
 
Statistically they aren't wrong. MMOs, MOBAs, and PvP heavy games dwarf single player games by sales, playerbase and additional future revenue. That being said, EA can S a big D. I refuse to financially support a dev that looks at games purely from a corporate revenue standpoint. Maybe they should just give up and make VLT machines instead.
 
Translation: If we do MMO games we don't have to worry about programming AI for everything else, we don't have to worry too much about story, all we have to do is make sure people can get connected (and fuck that up too)
 
Vader1975 said:
This was a comment refuting his assanying assumption. We know this was like Force Unleashed as a BountyHunter. It would of done very well. Many supposedly non-linier games actually are linier. Also given how little it needed to be completed, his accounting assumptions are also bs. They just didn’t want to pickup on a game they didn’t have control of from the beginning. This was a big EA ego trip.
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So your saying EA wasted 4 years of development time and millions of dollars for a "ego trip"?
 
Mario odyssey is printing money for Nintendo...

DOOM was a huge win, many other examples of games with linear progression showing that people still pay money for them.

Hmm..

Maybe you should say "bad games are fading in popularity from the current market"
 
Shaten said:
Working off memory, It was more Visceral's mess not EAs interfering.

This has some details: https://kotaku.com/the-collapse-of-viscerals-ambitious-star-wars-game-1819916152
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Everything about Dead Space 3's failure is on EA's head. Forcing the studio to make a game they weren't prepared to do or wanted to do (Hardline), thus tanking moral and studio health for years is 100% EA's fault. The mass amount of people jumping ship due to that moral is EA's fault. EA decided to keep the studio in SF instead of moving it, and the developers, somewhere cheaper. Since Visceral has always been an EA owned studio (starting life as EA Redwood Shores) EA is the one that put them in one of the most expensive cities in the country. So, that's another one that is EA's fault. EA also interfered in development and demanded a multiplayer mode. We can blame Frostbite on EA as well, along with DICE. Almost every single non-DICE studio seems to absolutely despise the engine. It sounds like the engine is a complete piece of shit for anyone outside of DICE. Despite this EA continue to force every internal studio to use it, no matter how much it gets in the way of game development. The crazy scope of the game is definitely Visceral's fault. Given their time and budget constrains they needed to scale that back during the concepting phase, a lot of those ideas never should have made it to full production.

Those two big arguments mention in the article: 100% on EA's head. The second one especially proves how stupid and shortsighted EA can be at times. Demanding a game that can compete with Naughty Dog out of the game. EA is constantly chasing everyone else instead of trying to forge their own path. EA refuses to let their studios do anything except chase what other publishers are doing. The DICE games chase Activision, Anthem and the Star Wars game they gave away after killing Visceral are chasing Destiny, this was chasing Uncharted 4 and Naughty Dog in general, and so on. They're so hell bent on chasing other studios that they lose sight of what made those franchises successful and how to build a solid fanbase. When things don't work out they make lame excuses instead of admitting they were at fault.

EA firing everyone at Motive that was working on Ragtag and taking the studio away from the project was a massive fuck-up. Leaving a small studio to handle a AAA title alone is never going to work. 70 people on a project that demanded, at least, 160. And not allowing them to hire more people that they desperately needed, especially as they fired people and more left. What the holy fuck was EA thinking!?

“She was giving these massive presentations on the story, themes,” said one person who worked on Ragtag. “EA executives are like, ‘FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.’ Where’s your version of that?” Yeah, says a lot about EA's mindset. Who cares about this amazing idea, just throw in some stupid microtransaction card bullshit. Fuck EA.

And bringing in EA Vancouver killed moral even worse. Funny how EA brought them in, had them "help" by taking a lot of roles over and then magically they get a retooled Star Wars project and Visceral is dead. Almost as if EA planned this from the moment they put Vancouver in charge.

After reading that article, no, it was not all Visceral's mess. Some of it certainly was, but 99% of the fault was EA fucking around with them. This is a clear case of a publisher fucking with a studio and project so much that it kills it. Even with internal tensions between Henning and the team the game still could have been done, and probably turned out decently, if EA hadn't prevented them from actually working on it at full capacity. If they had kept Motive on the project I think everything would have turned out a lot better, especially if brain-dead execs had kept their noses out of things they clearly didn't understand.

So, I say again, fuck EA.
 
percydaman said:
Only because you did a shitty job with them. Make a good story, and people are willing to look past a linear game. Make a good game, and people are willing to look past alot actually.
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keywords: good game

good games seem lacking for the PC these days with the exception of Metro Exodus due for release in 2018
 
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Good thing I don't game with EA then. Helps when everything they make is just polished shit.
 
The fault finger always points ea.

They are like a lot of companies. They get in the way of the talent. Hire people who know how to make a game and let them do it.
 
rezerekted said:
Well, I agree with them. I have never liked linear heavily scripted games. Once you finish them there is no replay value.
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There is a difference between Call of Duty and say, Crysis 1. We need more SP games like Crysis 1, which has a linear story, proper missions with real objectives but gives you a number of different ways to approach them. Or more shooters like the recent Deus Ex games or Mass Effect. Heavy story but some leeway when it comes to the combat (Deus Ex) or story (Mass Effect). When it is too heavily scripted it does get boring. But when it is too generic, cut and paste like Borderlands, Ghost Recon Wildlands with massive but empty and pointless maps you run into different problems. You need to find that right middle ground. It shouldn't be hard either...
 
rezerekted said:
Well, I agree with them. I have never liked linear heavily scripted games. Once you finish them there is no replay value.
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There certainly can be, it would be up to the gamer to decide. I like going through without knowledge of the game, then maybe going back through with knowledge to do things differently or find things I may have missed.

But even if you feel you got everything out of it the first time, you just got your moneys worth (hopefully) and you can possibly resell it and move on to the next game, better than being an EA cash cow.
 
Solhokuten said:
Bioshock Infinte comes to mind.
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Well bioshock infinite is actually a bad example of a linear game. I hated it, the constant herding, completely linear corridor levels, where you get into a room, enter 50 enemies, you kill them, then the way ahead reveals itself automatically, only to go trough 2 corridors to arrive at another similar area where again you have a fixed number of enemies to kill.
 
Flogger23m said:
There is a difference between Call of Duty and say, Crysis 1. We need more SP games like Crysis 1, which has a linear story, proper missions with real objectives but gives you a number of different ways to approach them. Or more shooters like the recent Deus Ex games or Mass Effect. Heavy story but some leeway when it comes to the combat (Deus Ex) or story (Mass Effect). When it is too heavily scripted it does get boring. But when it is too generic, cut and paste like Borderlands, Ghost Recon Wildlands with massive but empty and pointless maps you run into different problems. You need to find that right middle ground. It shouldn't be hard either...
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Well Ghost Recon, is far from being empty or pointless. (unless you talk about after completing all the missions), it offers complete freedom on how to do missions, just like crysis 1, only in a vastly larger more realistic open world.
 
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