Gethsemani said:
gyrobot said:
The problem is EA has no qualms doing shotgunned franchises. They would have gladly gave Bioware free reign on the series for an RPG, a proper Podracing game by Criterion and the EA brand making a passable FPS like Battlefront to round it off and provide something to scratch everyone's itch if mediocrely.
Unfortunately Disney has been very hands on and Kennedy is only making things much worse
To be fair to EA, they've been running SW:TOR since 2011. So they've arguably kept Bioware busy with a proper Star Wars RPG for the last 8 years. We should also realize that the first 2 years of EA having the license to themselves was pretty much just prep work for utilizing it, because you can't really put out a good AA or AAA game in just two years (Battlefront (2015) is proof of that). That Visceral's Star Wars game fell through also put another dent in EA's plans for the license.
To be fair to EA, they'd been pumping out Battlefield games regularly for the previous 13 years, a series the original Star Wars Battlefront was little more than a carbon copy of. And that's all it needed to be to become the best selling Star Wars game of all time.
By the time Battlefront EA released, the universally acclaimed Battlefront 2 had been out for a full
decade. A fully-formed template on how to make a hugely successful Battlefront game. A game people still talked about, and hoped one day to get a sequel to, or even remaster of. A carbon copy of this game would have sold like white-hot cakes.
EA had a specially designed large-scale multiplayer warfare game engine (Frostbite) ready to go. It had been tried and tested and refined through many iterations since the release of Bad Company back in 2008.
They also had DICE, for whom Frostbite was in-house home grown software,
begging to let them make a Battlefront game.
EA had everything under the sun going for them when they greenlit Battlefront 2015. And what did they put out?
A tech demo.
A half-assed, empty shell dry-run for the future sequel, released to squeeze any cash they could before starting work on... y'know... an
actual game. After the release of the first Battlefront, Pandemic massively expanded the concept for the sequel, released
less than a year later, with a fraction of the studio size that DICE (and EA as a whole) enjoys. EA had a fully formed engine and a team in place in 2013. It was
their choice to release Battlefront EA when they did, and in the state it was in. There are no excuses whatsoever for EA's handling of Battlefront since 2013.
But let's be honest here, a lot of the Star Wars games prior to Disney were also stinkers. A generous counting puts the ratio at about even thirds of good games, mediocre games and stinkers prior to Disney. EA's track record so far is one mediocre game, one good game (SW:TOR) and one great game hampered by a really nasty monetization scheme (since removed) and one game that had such a troubled development that it got canned after 4 years with almost no progress.
Look at that picture above.
Look at it. There are between 8-10 bona-fide,
undeniable classics in that list, released in 4 years alone. Who gives a crap if there were dud games among that lot? It is completely irrelevant, not to mention downright insulting, to try and defend the woeful EA contribution to the history of Star Wars games by complaining that the others 'didn't have a perfect record either.' Until EA gets 10 critically lauded, commercially successful Star Wars games under its belt, you and I have no business whatsoever picking holes in the 2002-2006 lineup just to try and make EA's shithouse turnout look any better than it really is. EA has not yet put out a single good Star Wars experience. They're keeping SW:TOR online? Good- that's the bare-minimum they
should be doing with it. Doing so doesn't earn them any medals whatsoever.
And considering the extreme rise in complexity in games from 2006 to 2016, we shouldn't be surprised that EA aren't pushing out games at the rate half a dozen companies could back in the early 00's. If anything, we should be thankful that they aren't, because that would be really cynical cash grabs.
This "Extreme" rise in complexity is more than offset by near 200% growth in employee numbers at studios like DICE in that timeframe. Let's not forget that in-house game-making software is FAR more intuitive now than it has ever been in the past. Furthermore, EA can -if it so chooses- get an entire separate studio to come in and work on a whole section of a game. This was done for Medal of Honor 2010, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, MOH Warfighter, and yes, both Battlefront EA titles. Far more expertise, resources, and technology than ever before. Certainly more than
ten years ago. And yet this is the experience all that delivers?
They are
already cynical cash grabs. They do not deserve to have your, or my, or anyone else's gratitude. The only thing at this stage EA can do with the Star Wars license that I'd be thankful for is to admit they've completely wasted it, and hand it over to someone who's got an ounce of sense in how to handle it.
