EA defends it's Game lineup

It's ironic that DA:I won several got awards, while objectively it is an inferior game to ME:A.
No, I'm not saying that ME:A deserved to be GOT, but DA:I Certainly didn't deserve any of it. It was an MMO packaged as a single player game. With terrible combat, terrible grindy collect and fetch quests, and a story completely overshadowed by the eighty hours of grind that the game boiled down to. And the most annoying glitches (I still remember vividly how many times the game froze after I've been hacking away for 20 minutes at a dragon)
 
Mass Effect Andromeda was a great game. It wasn't as good as others in the series necessarily, but they had an opportunity to go further with it after the fixes and get some more sales and coin out of it with DLC as it had with previous games where the DLC did very well. Battlefront II is actually a good game that gets trashed by people who didn't play it and whine about microtransactions. That said, the microtransactions in it were badly implemented. The article linked above called the microtransaction practices in EA's games predatory and I think that's a fitting word for it. The single player game wasn't as good as I had hoped and that's unfortunate. I still enjoyed it, but it really felt pretty generic and wasn't as good as some previous efforts like Republic Commando. Overall, it's a solid game and I think it will only improve given enough time and development. It's highly polished for the most part, which is unusual for DICE and EA as the Battlefield series is usually a clusterfuck whenever they release a new game. It's usually broken as fuck for weeks and takes months to get to a state where you'd want to buy it.

Honestly, Mass Effect Andromeda should have been delayed. It should have been play tested more carefully than it was. Largely, the game was too big for it's own good. It suffers from the same generic, bland and drawn out feeling that I get from all open world games. When played primarily for the main story, it's a tight game that works well for the most part. It's main protagonist is unfortunately, not nearly as much fun to play as Shepard, which is the biggest mistake of all. There were a lot of missteps with the game and I think that comes from a couple of things. BioWare stepped outside it's comfort zone by trying to mimic games like the Witcher and Skyrim which are successful open world games. Use of the Frostbite engine by a developer that didn't know what it was doing with the engine was another problem. The biggest issues were the depature of series veterans like Drew Karpyshyn and even Casey Hudson who, despite being largely responsible for ME3's ending would probably have done some good with the title had he had control over the project and the same five year development cycle. Mac Walters also came onto the project late in the game's development and that's not good either.

EA is fucking retarded. It's got some great money making franchises under it's umbrellas and would reap more rewards if they'd simply handle these franchises with less sweat shop mentality and more reverence for the titles that propelled these franchises to the levels of populairty they currently enjoy. It's pretty telling that EA keeps getting voted as being one of the worst companies in business today. It shouldn't be that way and a little less greed up front would yeild higher returns on the back end if they could just get out of their own fucking way.
 
Dan_D said:
EA is fucking retarded. It's got some great money making franchises under it's umbrellas and would reap more rewards if they'd simply handle these franchises with less sweat shop mentality and more reverence for the titles that propelled these franchises to the levels of populairty they currently enjoy. It's pretty telling that EA keeps getting voted as being one of the worst companies in business today. It shouldn't be that way and a little less greed up front would yeild higher returns on the back end if they could just get out of their own fucking way.
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This is EXACTLY the problem with how big EA is. Instead of doing everything as you say "by the numbers" give the studios some time to properly churn out a great game. Imagine what CD Projekt Red could do with a Mass Effect game? I thoroughly enjoyed Andromeda and am not on my second playthrough, but if they gave their games time to cook and weren't so stuck on shareholders and deadlines and stuff. Bad games stay forever bad.
 
Inquisition was a damn good game and Andromeda was at least above average and a good value.
I am a little sad that there are 2 bad Need for Speed games for every good one, though. Seems like they could just take one of the good ones and just make more content for it every other year.
 
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zamardii12 said:
This is EXACTLY the problem with how big EA is. Instead of doing everything as you say "by the numbers" give the studios some time to properly churn out a great game. Imagine what CD Projekt Red could do with a Mass Effect game? I thoroughly enjoyed Andromeda and am not on my second playthrough, but if they gave their games time to cook and weren't so stuck on shareholders and deadlines and stuff. Bad games stay forever bad.
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Honestly, CD Projekt Red would have made a game similar to what we got. It would have been much more polished, but the final product would have suffered from the same design issues as BioWare/EA's version of the game does. Mass Effect games have always been highly cinematic and very story and character driven. Open world games tend to dillute this by their nature. They have to allow for greater degrees of freedom which in turn makes the content more generic and less enthralling. It would probably have been a good game if CD Projekt Red did it, but I think it would have had some of the same short comings as Andromeda has because the Witcher suffers in the same way.

Some people like that more open world sort of shit but such games lack direction and focus and while they do offer greater freedom, they suffer for it as well.
 
Dan_D said:
Mass Effect Andromeda was a great game. It wasn't as good as others in the series necessarily, but they had an opportunity to go further with it after the fixes and get some more sales and coin out of it with DLC as it had with previous games where the DLC did very well. Battlefront II is actually a good game that gets trashed by people who didn't play it and whine about microtransactions. That said, the microtransactions in it were badly implemented. The article linked above called the microtransaction practices in EA's games predatory and I think that's a fitting word for it. The single player game wasn't as good as I had hoped and that's unfortunate. I still enjoyed it, but it really felt pretty generic and wasn't as good as some previous efforts like Republic Commando. Overall, it's a solid game and I think it will only improve given enough time and development. It's highly polished for the most part, which is unusual for DICE and EA as the Battlefield series is usually a clusterfuck whenever they release a new game. It's usually broken as fuck for weeks and takes months to get to a state where you'd want to buy it.
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I'm waiting for BF2 to go below $20 and then pick it up for the single player only, unless they shut down the servers before that happens. IDK if you can play the campaign offline.
Honestly, Mass Effect Andromeda should have been delayed. It should have been play tested more carefully than it was. Largely, the game was too big for it's own good. It suffers from the same generic, bland and drawn out feeling that I get from all open world games. When played primarily for the main story, it's a tight game that works well for the most part. It's main protagonist is unfortunately, not nearly as much fun to play as Shepard, which is the biggest mistake of all. There were a lot of missteps with the game and I think that comes from a couple of things. BioWare stepped outside it's comfort zone by trying to mimic games like the Witcher and Skyrim which are successful open world games. Use of the Frostbite engine by a developer that didn't know what it was doing with the engine was another problem. The biggest issues were the depature of series veterans like Drew Karpyshyn and even Casey Hudson who, despite being largely responsible for ME3's ending would probably have done some good with the title had he had control over the project and the same five year development cycle. Mac Walters also came onto the project late in the game's development and that's not good either.
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As much as I hate waiting for games I agree they should've delayed it. But I also still believe that if they hadn't made the mistake of providing the free week B4 release then the game would've done much better. That only attracted vultures who were looking to pick the game apart, most of whom never even played the previous games, just wanted to dismantle it because of the hype. And then it became a self-reinforcing process. I think without that blunder the game's reception would've been at least medium warm, but definitely not terrible. Most of the glitches were minor and barely hurt the game. And I think even as an open world game it worked well, I didn't find it nearly as tedious as DA:I was. In fact I think in terms of handling the open world it's no worse than Horizon Zero Dawn which was pronounced GOT by many.The Vault - Cauldron duo are eerily similar in fact, like there was some espionage there. Someone took that idea from one company to the other, it's just too big to be a coincidence.

But really, why did they make that free trial thing a thing? You have to be absolutely damn sure about your game to put it under that kind of scrutiny. Which means the devs either lied to the EA marketing branch, or they were absolutely deluded and really thought this would hold up.

EA is fucking retarded. It's got some great money making franchises under it's umbrellas and would reap more rewards if they'd simply handle these franchises with less sweat shop mentality and more reverence for the titles that propelled these franchises to the levels of populairty they currently enjoy. It's pretty telling that EA keeps getting voted as being one of the worst companies in business today. It shouldn't be that way and a little less greed up front would yeild higher returns on the back end if they could just get out of their own fucking way.[/QUOTE]
 
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Dan_D said:
Honestly, CD Projekt Red would have made a game similar to what we got. It would have been much more polished, but the final product would have suffered from the same design issues as BioWare/EA's version of the game does. Mass Effect games have always been highly cinematic and very story and character driven. Open world games tend to dillute this by their nature. They have to allow for greater degrees of freedom which in turn makes the content more generic and less enthralling. It would probably have been a good game if CD Projekt Red did it, but I think it would have had some of the same short comings as Andromeda has because the Witcher suffers in the same way.

Some people like that more open world sort of shit but such games lack direction and focus and while they do offer greater freedom, they suffer for it as well.
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Very much this. What I liked about Mass Effect was the gameplay balance. Combat portions were fun and just when it was getting a bit stale you would end a mission and enter a sequence of conversations for a roughly equal amount of time. Eventually I would feel like doing something and getting back into combat, and by then the new dialogue would be over. ME1 did have a bad inventory system, but outside of that I liked the lack of messing around scavenging for items. ME2 was far too simple but ME3 hit the perfect balance. These days everything has to be 40 hours with 70 hours of stick collecting and open world, and you end up with ME:A. Okay but just not as good.

As for EA they better hit Battlefield out of the park. None of that server nonsense that BF1 launched with, a better server browser (the BF1 browser is utter garbage), make the PC version inherit the precise shooting mechanics of BF4 and an interesting theme that isn't sci fi.

Their recent games have been "meh" and they need to get this one right.
 
Flogger23m said:
Very much this. What I liked about Mass Effect was the gameplay balance. Combat portions were fun and just when it was getting a bit stale you would end a mission and enter a sequence of conversations for a roughly equal amount of time. Eventually I would feel like doing something and getting back into combat, and by then the new dialogue would be over. ME1 did have a bad inventory system, but outside of that I liked the lack of messing around scavenging for items. ME2 was far too simple but ME3 hit the perfect balance. These days everything has to be 40 hours with 70 hours of stick collecting and open world, and you end up with ME:A. Okay but just not as good.
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Exactly. ME3 did strike an almost perfect balance between story elements and the combat. That said, I did appreciate some greater freedom found in ME1 and even ME2 in the sense that you can do things in ME2 in a more varied order than in ME3. ME2 was too simple but ME3 had a rewarding and fun weapons upgrade system and better customization than we see in Andromeda for the most part. ME3's biggest fuck up was the story from Priority Earth onward.
 
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