EA Talks Franchise Reboots (June 14, 2012)

Aginor said:
That bothers me as well. They can just decide to shut the game down one day and it is gone.
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And even when they don't, the initial version of the game is still long gone; the "FarmVille" that captivated x-million people a couple of years ago is likely completely different today because of ongoing development.

(EA had two fun little browser-based Command and Conquer games... one where you drove a tank around and one a helicopter... and one day they just took them down. Are those preserved somewhere? Not as far as I can tell.)
 
I'll quote Ralph Stanley again (I guess the Americans here know who he is, and I encourage everyone else to look him up, he is great):
"All the good times are past and gone"
 
Bandit LOAF said:
(EA had two fun little browser-based Command and Conquer games... one where you drove a tank around and one a helicopter... and one day they just took them down. Are those preserved somewhere? Not as far as I can tell.)
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As a game developer, I can sorta reassure you on that point, though it's not much of a reassurance. I am virtually certain that every single one of these projects is preserved in a more amazing way than you can imagine - thanks to modern versioning systems, you could not only recreate the final product, but also any intermediate stage along the way. The way versioning systems work is that all files are committed to a central server, which not only preserves the latest version of the file, but also every previous version along the way, together with information on when each new version is added and by what user. If you have access to the server, and a lot of time to waste, you can retrace the entire course of development, the successes, the failures (where bad code needed to be removed, by reverting the file to an earlier version), everything. And generally, game developers these days are far more careful about preserving data than in the 1990s, simply because it's just so incredibly cheap to do it these days.

So much for the reassurance part, now for the less reassuring part: nobody cares. I mean the people working there. Nobody cares about preserving anything. Everyone commits everything to the server, the server is regularly backed up, so in theory everything is there... but in practice, these backups serve purely a technical function: they're not there to preserve things for posterity, but merely... you know, as backups in case of some equipment failure. What this means is that nobody really cares what happens to the backups after they've served their function - a backup more than two weeks old is useless. It's not thrown out, it's not overwritten, it's just... forgotten, dumped in some storage room only to eventually be thrown away when physical space starts running short. And of course, nothing can be simply thrown out or given away (though fortunately, people break these rules all the time, and nobody really cares), because corporations are also more careful about NDAs.

The only pieces of data that are preserved more meticulously are the gold masters - and as you can imagine, that's not a concept that applies to social games. That said, I'm sure that proud developers retain copies of their social games at various stages - I bet that original FarmVille is somewhere out there.

(that said, it's FarmVille, not Shakespeare... we really shouldn't care that much :); studying the hugely influential concept of social games doesn't really require us to see a specific example)
 
Yeah, same in my company (No we don't create games but other web based software). Every file ever comitted to the server is still there. You just can't use it anymore because you'd have to install it on the server and maybe even the server software (apache or PHP version etc.) or data structure of the database behind it changed in the meantime.
So nobody can go and say "Wow, let's plug in the 2009 version and play!" It is sad. Even if I never played Farmville.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Honestly, I think either or both are distinct possibilities.

If Chris Roberts gets his funding in order, then there will be a AAA classic space sim, likely a "reboot." It won't please everyone (for example, it'd have a significant FPS element) but it'll do a lot of things wags insist a Wing Commander game needs (involve Chris, star Mark Hamill, be a PC game, etc.)

... but I can also imagine that at this moment there's some EA mobile division slaving away at a Privateer Facebook game. In fact, this happened a few years back and they went with Ultima Forever instead. But the odds of this really happening go way up depending on the success of that project... (which... where is it, anyway?)
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As long as it has fun story that fits in reasonably with the Wing Commander universe (doesn't need continuity pr0n, but it does need to appear like they actually did the research), and has fun fighter/bomber combat with 4 or more different craft to fly and 20+ fun missions, then I don't really care about bleeding-edge graphics or voice acting. I'd be all right with it as a Nintendo DS (not even 3DS) game if that was what it came to.
 
The problem with social games and part of the reason we don't 'get' them is that they are mostly just... not really games. There's a few that have actual mini games.. like that lame 'I spy' type one but mostly they forgo actual gameplay over the Social aspects. They're basically experiments in interativity between people as opposed to any kind of real reward based system for skill or endurance.

The thing is, it isn't the social aspects that are bad... the bad part is that as a platform, facebook tends to cater to a market that is decidedly not gamers.

If you think about it, actual Social gaming took off on the PC ages ago with the likes of Ultima Online, Quake, starcraft, and Counterstrike... But the real push forward was actually xbox live... You can compare game stats and brag, rise up the leaderboards, chat, talk while playing the games... What is different about facebook games? Well they took out the game for one. There's some exceptions on facebook... basically which are what we once called casual games, like tetris with leader boards.

However the "social games" bypass all of this so that people who don't really game can brag and one-up eachother by showing everyone how much money they wasted on the non game so they could get the rainbow colored magic couch of the week. I don't think it's a suprise that many of the games are basically really dumb bastard step-childs of the sims (do x number of mundane tasks to afford to dress up you house/farm/mall/restaurant/clown nursury.

Facebook as a platform isn't incapable of decent games. Some games even allow you to play between the facebook and mobile phone versions. I'm sure it's tempting for producers and shareholders to push for monetization, but there has to be a backlash eventually.

Could a "social" and or Facebook Wing Commander game work? I would say it could, provided we aren't talking about ship-dealer-ville where you click asteroids so you can dress up your space freighter. I don't specifically need to fight my friends, but that would be nice. A privateer game where I can trade commodities with friends and compare ships? Where I can hang out and "chat" in a dusty watering hole at the edge of the galaxy? Sure! But for me there's a few social game things I think need to go the way of the Dodo. I shouldn't be limited to a certain number of moves or whatever per hour if I don't want to spend a gazillion dollars. Let me pay for the game... once instead. Or if they want to let people pay for equipment packs don't make it impossible for people who don't want to force all their friends to sign up to be able to realistically work towards completing "every" objective or mission (or give people alternatives). Also, if it does let you "dress up" your fighter , these things should be functional. If I get upgrades I should be getting bonuses that make it quicker to work towards the next upgrade or It should make it a hair easier to complete objective. Something like fuzzy dice for your fighter dash should be the odd joke, not the entire set of possible upgrades.

Basically as long as it's a game where you can work with your friends and have fun together as opposed to getting together with your friends and calling it a game, I think the possibilities are there.
 
I agree, the Facebook games and also some social app games on android or something (my fiancee plays some) just aren't games IMO. You don't need skill to play them, only time. Those who spend more time with the game are better than the others. Except they pay real money. Then they are even better than people who spend lots of time.
For me that isn't a game. Also games are supposed to be fun, not boring (I admit that's a personal thing, I also have fun doing things others find boring, like hardcore flight simulations)

The purpose is to be sure that a certain number of people spends a certain amount of time on the site, which means that the people who display lots of annoying ads on those sites give Facebook money. Doing that on Facebook adds some sort of social pressure.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
... but I can also imagine that at this moment there's some EA mobile division slaving away at a Privateer Facebook game. In fact, this happened a few years back and they went with Ultima Forever instead. But the odds of this really happening go way up depending on the success of that project... (which... where is it, anyway?)
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Little late in seeing this, but you don't mean Lord of Ultima, do you LOAF? It's been out for a long time now and has very large active population (at least it was 6 months ago when I gave it a go)- http://www.lordofultima.com/en/

It's an interesting game. I never played Ultima, so I cannot comment on how much it marries up with previous Ultima games, but I suspect "not a lot at all". LoU follows the same formula as Travian, Evony etc. Almost exactly the same formula. You accumulate resources over time, you build cities, form alliances and attack others. You can speed up the resource generation and pay to automate certain management and trade functions and that's where the free-to-play model kicks in - it's a very tempting prospect to dangle such sweeteners in front of a player, even one (like me) who swore they would not pay a cent to play the game.

It's a simplistic gameplay model but the "social" aspect of it - that seems to be so maligned and is definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea - adds nearly infinite complexity. The formula of building cities, collecting resources and invading other cities is quite straight forward, but managing the alliances, the treachery and tangled web of personalities etc is actually pretty amazing to observe. The alliance I was in had members who had forged genuine strong friendships due to a split with the previous alliance - some members stuck by their old leader and shunned the member who tried to take over the alliance - he went off and created a competing alliance and tried to poach members of the old alliance over to join him. The betrayal that members experienced was as real to many of them as it would have been in a real life situation - they had shared resources, taught players and built up trust over time with some of those who left the alliance and the anger and hurt was palpable. Amazingly powerful stuff. Say what you want about it being "just a game" - these people had put a lot of effort into the game - and into people in it - and that creates emotional attachment.

In the end, I got out of it because it was an incredible time sink and I just couldn't dedicate the time to it that it required and, at the end of the day, there wasn't enough gameplay reward to keep me playing. The more successful you are, the more cities you own and the greater amount of time you have to spend just keeping things ticking over. You can buy "ministers" who manage these aspects for you but this just ends up costing you more money.

EA hasn't said much at all about the amount of money the game is making them, but if I had to guess, I'd say "a lot".
 
Little late in seeing this, but you don't mean Lord of Ultima, do you LOAF? It's been out for a long time now and has very large active population (at least it was 6 months ago when I gave it a go)- http://www.lordofultima.com/en/
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No, Ultima Forever is a new game from a team at Bioware Mythic. It's a social/multiplayer remake of Ultima 4. It sounds like an interesting game, really.

Very interesting to see your take on Lord of Ultima, though; the regular Ultima fans seem to hate it with a fiery passion.
 
Ah ok then. My mistake.

It doesn't surprise me that LoU is hated by many Ultima fans - Although I never played Ultima, I never saw anything other than "generic fantasy setting" in LoU. If Ultima had established lore or story, it certainly wasn't acknowledged, respected or even vaguely hinted at in UoL. I fact, it's another decent example of a game using the name for nothing at all other than marketing. :)
 
It seems like Ultima should be used to different settings, though -- they had a whole "Worlds of Ultima" series where the idea was to put the game in other places (Victorian era Mars, dinosaur planet.) And then part of Ultima Online's conceit is that the Ultima world has been splattered into a zillion different 'shards' and they all have a different world in them...

(But I guess the real question is: who the heck is it benefiting to use the Ultima name here? It has to be some producer who liked the series or something, because as I think EA is about to discover there's no particular value in Ultima as an intellectual property at this time...)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
(But I guess the real question is: who the heck is it benefiting to use the Ultima name here? It has to be some producer who liked the series or something, because as I think EA is about to discover there's no particular value in Ultima as an intellectual property at this time...)
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That's true, I don't think there's too many people out there waiting for another game set within Ultima's generic fantasy world.

That having been said, I would greatly love to see an Ultima game that sticks to "Ultima values". I mean, the thing that made Ultima Ultima wasn't the world, but the values. From Ultima 4 onwards, it was all about being good and sticking to the virtues. It was very black & white - if the game wanted to give the player a tough choice, it would present him with two whites, one of which was black in disguise. This is in strong contrast to today's RPGs, where it has become fashionable to present the player with two identical shades of gray and tell him that the consequences will be different, but ultimately it's up to the player to decide which choice is the better in his mind.

It's going to be interesting how they handle this in that Ultima Forever game.
 
I sort of miss the balls-to-the-wall crazy pre-Ultima IV world that was basically just everything Richard Garriott loved crammed together... dungeons and dragons plus space shuttles and lasers and light sabers...

I believe Ultima Forever DOES have the virtue system built pretty deep. But we'll know soon, I think!
 
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