Mix feelings about EA games?

[Bonifide_C]

Ever since EA bought out Westwood Studio, I have vow to myself to never buy another product from them again. They took a beautiful product like the command and conquer series and completely destroy it into oblivion. Command and Conquer 4 and Red Alert 3 is a disgrace to fans everywhere. I can't help to think that if Westwood was still here, Command and Conquer 4 would give Starcraft II a run for its money. Red Alert 3 would blow every RTS games out of the water by now, and games like Warhammer 40K wouldn't be able to complete. Though that still a bit of assumption on my part. Command and Conquer was the series bought me permanently into RTS gaming and if I'm not mistaken, aren't they the father of real time strategy gaming?

Yet, I just realize the first two games I bought for 2010 are both publish by EA games. Dragon Age Origin and Bad Company 2 and respectively are the best of both genre for now. In fact after the failure that is Modern Warfare 2 and especially IW, EA look like a saint in my eyes. In fact those two that I mention are in fact much better on PC than console game. According to gamerankings, Dragon Age for the PC has a 95% while console only has 85% rating, which seem to be about right. And the rankings for Bad Company 2 may be misleading because there were too many problems when launch but after trying out the 360 version of bad company 2, I can safely say that I'm giving my nod to EA.

Then again this is the same company that release movies game like Harry Potter which is like crap, and it these reason why it hard to even consider EA a serious gaming publisher. You would never see Blizzard release anything that retarded, am I right? Thought it does help explain why EA games is so powerful and they make tons of money of updated version of the same Madden games every year with the addition of a few tweeks. From a business standpoint, these guys at EA are ****ing genius, but as a gaming company they fail big time. It still doesn't excuse them from making a few good games versus the many bad games they produce. With all the powers that EA hold, I doubt these guys can't complete with Blizzard, Rockstar, Valve, NCSoft, Novalogic, Crytec and other great game companies if they wanted to.

I guess in the end, it impossible to boycott EA since they seem to be buying many good games developer and turning it into their own product. You just can't denies the presence of a mighty beast.

What are your opinion about EA game?

 

[Yami]

IMO they've been improving, starting with the release of Mirror's Edge. Don't really have much more to say than that

 

[Bonifide_C]

IMO they've been improving, starting with the release of Mirror's Edge. Don't really have much more to say than that

I think in the end they have to seeing how they own so many game developers. Thought it suck because every games that EA produce, I keep thinking if it was a different publisher, it would be so much better.

 

[iFargle]

They have a few golden series they cling to: The Battlefield games (1942, Vietnam, 2, 2142, 1943, Bad Company, and Bad Company 2), their Need For Speed racing games (Way too many to list... ), and a few lone games (Fight Night, Crysis, FarCry, etc) I realize they didn't fully develop some of the games, but they were a part of it.

IMO The Battlefield games are by far the best games they've produced.
Valve and Blizzard focus all their time and energy into making those two or three games as best they can (StarCraft II, Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, etc) and that works for them.

EA pushes out game after game after game, hoping one will be accepted by the public as a hit, which sometimes works, but most of the time it doesn't. If it does work, it gives them another major game to work with, probably making them more money in the long run than just sticking with their roots.

And it is too bad EA bought out Westwood... Command & Conquer 3 was good, though

 

[murdocsvan]

It's because EA is driven the bottom line and couldn't care less about who buys their games. If games are rubbish, it's because EA cuts down on staff. If they're buggy, it's because they push the developers to release early.

I've hated EA ever since crysis.

 

[Druid]

Even if Crytek (which EA owns by the way. They don't compete with them) did push out Crysis before optimizing it well, you gotta give them props for creating the most visually stunning game of all time. And I don't know about the rest of you, but Crysis's singleplayer is still my favorite fps singleplayer even if it is mainly due to the immersive graphics.

And yeah, cnc3 was good. EA doesn't support their games very well though. In bfme2, all the balance patches were made by a member of the community. They didn't make any. Then, after like a year they stopped putting out his patches and you had to mod your game version to play them. It's ridiculous. They didn't even have to do any balancing for those patches but they couldn't put in the effort to implement them.