Electronic Arts' Sequels Questioned (August 15, 2005)

Fenris Ulven said:
it sounds like EA is most interested in making new games that is not realy new, if you understand what i mean. What big diffrence is it from tiger woods 2006 and tiger woods 2005 (if that was the prequel)? very little i would guess: some change in graphic and some new golf courses and names, but not much more, just minor change, ergo: it is very cheap game to produce....

"Aug 18, 2005 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Electronic Arts (Nasdaq:ERTS), today announced that, based on internal data, Madden NFL 06 scored big at retail in its first week in stores and sold-thru more than 1.7 million copies, making it the biggest week one launch of a Madden NFL Football game in the franchise's sixteen-year history."
 
Also, anyone that thinks EA's sequels are cheap to produce is dead wrong. The trouble with a game requiring just "some change in graphics" is that the graphics get more and more expensive to produce every year. Back in the early 1990s, if you had 3d models, you animated them any way you could. Today, you have to go through the expensive process of recording motion capture videos and turning them into computer animations. Similarly, just a few years back, each model was covered with a single texture... today, apart from the texture you have to do bump maps, specular maps, and a bunch of other stuff. So there's no such thing as "some change in graphics" - each year, they have to virtually start over.

...Then, of course, there's the need to actually update the engine to handle the latest advances in hardware. Sometimes this means merely adding support for whatever new special effects the latest generation of graphics cards provides... and at other times, it means rewriting almost everything to handle a brand-new console that none of the programmers have ever touched before.

All in all, making a sequel could have been cheap back in the early 1990s, when you could get away with a sequel that uses the exact same engine and models that the previous game used. It's nowhere near that easy today.
 
Maj.Striker said:
I'd like to address the comment that you need a nice big expensive joystick to play space sims...that's not true. I still play with my $20 Saitek digital joystick that still works like a dream. Never had a single issue with it. It has four buttons and in all games that I've played that's always been enough. (1 button to fire guns, another to fire missiles, one button for afterburners and one other for whatever you deem appropriate). I've had this joystick for pushing 6 years now I believe and it's never failed me. Heck, they're probably so cheap now that they could make a WC game and include one of these joysticks with every game... Would a big powerful awesome joystick be better? Absolutely...is it needed? Absolutely not.

Joystick? I still fly by the seat of my keyboard.
 
No amount of bragging will convince me that flying with 4 digital keys is as good and fun as using a regular joystick. Even if it is possible to do it, it is just not as fun.

When the game is designed to be played with a mouse (like FL) it is great. But all WC games are just more fun to play with a stick. I played with keys for years, and was completelly floored when I got my first real Joystick. It was 13.52 times more fun.

Regarding arcade racing games: They are designed to work well with a gamepad's analog sticks, so no big need for a wheel. I don't know about more serious sims, though.

Anyway, EA's policy might be lucrative in the short run, but I have a feeling that it might be negative in the long. Could cause a burnout. And it is simply bad for people who like gaming.

Stuff like Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts, Katamary, System Shock 2, etc, bolder and more original games, they get less and less likely. And that is sad. MAybe they make more money NOW, but who knows what will happen in 10 years?
 
Edfilho said:
Anyway, EA's policy might be lucrative in the short run, but I have a feeling that it might be negative in the long. Could cause a burnout. And it is simply bad for people who like gaming.

Stuff like Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts, Katamary, System Shock 2, etc, bolder and more original games, they get less and less likely. And that is sad. MAybe they make more money NOW, but who knows what will happen in 10 years?

I do, they're going to make $40 billion between now and then.
 
Edfilho said:
When the game is designed to be played with a mouse (like FL) it is great. But all WC games are just more fun to play with a stick. I played with keys for years, and was completelly floored when I got my first real Joystick. It was 13.52 times more fun.

I utterly hated to have to switch to a stick for Armada (because the keyboard routine is pretty much messed up) because you needed to release the stick too often to type something. I only learned to like a stick with a hotas setup. I also still prefer the keyboard to a 2 axis 4 button stick.
 
:( Gaming design goes out when society focuses on money more than anything else. This includes family, values, and everything else less important like games. :(

:(--at least for American society--:(
 
Yeah, it is the end-of-year budget view.

You will see bigshots from any mass media production: TV, videogames, Hollywood and so on trying to maximize their status at Dec, 31st and taking no care of what would happen in the long run not only with the numbers, but also with their employees, customers and values.

They all will give us crap if crap is what we're asking for.

Everytime there's been any independent quality effort that's taken massive attention, it has been taken by industries and re-designed, re-sold and re-constructed to fit their schemes.


Concerning space sims, yeah, the community grows up, with 25-to-40 year-old old gamers, but the genre takes little attraction among the newbies.
 
I find this discussion very interesting, so I figured I would add my thoughts :p.

Regarding EA... They have been making serious forays into other sectors of the gaming industry. First they bought the NFL license and such, which made a lot of people unhappy. And then they started to acquire other game companies. I don't recall if it ever went through, but there was a possibility that they would buy UBI Soft as well, which is a substantial company with substantially profitable franchises as well (i.e. all the Tom Clancy games). Regardless of the fact there, one thing is obvious: EA is getting bigger every year. With a bigger company controlling more of the market (are they a monopoly yet? :p), chances for innovation and originality in games get lower.

Somone brought up the fact to me that Hollywood went through the same changes in its earlier days. Big studios bought out all the small ones and produced crappy mass market movies. Until small studios were established again and were able to produce indie films etc. So, supposedly the same is likely to happen in the gaming industry.

In the last few years, I have been most attracted by new games that are not of US origin. I have found that there are a number of companies putting out some great games in Germany and other parts of Europe (i.e. Sacred, Gothic, Spellforce, Etherlords, etc.). The makers of Sacred (Ascaron) are working on a WC style space sim now. Not to mention that if we want really original content (and weird content) then we just need to learn Japanese and play games from Japan :p.

Regarding Space Sims... They are indeed down to being a niche genre at this point. That is sad and unfortunate, but it seems true nevertheless. As much as I love them, very few new people seem interested in this genre. I think the last few new space sims to have been released were X2 and Universal Combat, both of which didn't really make big headlines anywhere, and most have never heard of them. Oh and there was Battlestar Galactica for the XBOX, which also fell by the wayside even with its more mass-market approach to make it more "action" focues (though still a good game).

I'm not sure why the genre has faded, but I suspect it has something to do with imagination. The mass market approach tends to present you with all that you need, and great graphics, seamless gameplay and control. So that you have to work as little as possible, both physically and mentally. The older breed of games took a little more dedication in both of these areas. You needed to learn how to play the game more, and yes I think you needed to have an imagination, and that would allow you to immerse yourself in that universe.

Take Universal Combat (or any Battlecruiser game) for instance. It took me at least a month before I was able to sort of get around and be able to do things in my spaceship. Even after six months of playing, I was still learning new things. UC has by far the biggest learning curve of any game I've tried. But dang, when you know how to do it, you have a real sense of accomplishment, and then the rewards of playing the game (with it's infinite complexity) are that much greater. But how many people are going to sit around for a month learning how to fly a spaceship? Most seasoned gaming veterans I know aren't willing to do this.

Regarding controls... I will agree that using a joystick for WC is a lot of fun. Using the mouse, though not great, is still better than using keyboard IMO. But I don't think you need a super expensive programmable joystick for it. It's nice, but using the keyboard for other ship functions adds to the realism for me. I've been using a Saitek Cyborg 2000 for years now, and I find it more than sufficient for my needs.

Other games, such as racing games, give you more control with an analog controller. The steering wheels are just there to make it more fun, but actually take away from the control. This has been my experience, as well as the experience of some pretty dedicated racing game players I know. So, it's not really necessary to purchas additional peripherals for console games. And as far as flight sims go, some of them have pulled off mouse control quite well. Aside from StarLancer that was mentioned earlier, there were also the Descent Freespace games which did work quite well with the mouse (and in some cases provided an advantage in control IMO).

So, if the genre is to be revived, I think that perhaps what is truly necessary is to streamline the controls a little. But not too much, and then provide gradual additions to the controls via a good in game and hands on tutorial. There are still those of us who are willing to learn advanced gaming controls and want an immersive story and universe over the mass-market junk put out by EA :p.

...sorry for the long post, by the way. I guess I got a little carried away :p.
 
BSG was a dreadful xbox game...controls were clumsy and awkward and the gameplay was nothing more then a glorified arcade gauntlet. I liked the premise but when I played the game I couldn't get past the first 10 minutes before I gave up. It was just too boring. Sludge like that won't help revive the space sim industry...it just drives nails into the coffin. Freelancer, though a good game, didn't break any boundaries with it's mouse driven interface. All that hype about groundbreaking approach was a load of crock, Star Trek 25th Anniversary edition from (1994 or 1995?) had the exact same style of control for flying the USS Enterprise and it worked fine then so of course it's going to work fine 8 or 9 years later.

Freelancer was a good game in sales but expensive to produce thus negating itself. No one wants to invest the kind of development time and money that Freelancer cost the studios. EA will likely reach the point where they become a monopoly and congress intervenes by splitting the company up. That will probably be a great move to open up the industry to creative and innovative thinking. I'm not saying I would agree with that move but it wold provide an opening out there.
 
EA will likely reach the point where they become a monopoly and congress intervenes by splitting the company up.

There's no chance of this ever happening.

Electronic Arts will never be a monopoly outside the rantings of Slashdot users. EA is a giant company, but it also has some giant competitors -- including Microsoft and Sony. Yes, it sucks that they buy up mom and pop development houses, but that doesn't make them a monopoly in the legal sense.

And even were some kind of impossible scenario to occur where every other company were to stop making entertainment software, the government wouldn't pursue an case because there's just no compelling interest. Antitrust cases are incredibly hard and expensive to prove, and the government makes use of them when they believe people are being legitimately harmed by a monopoly -- EA forcing people to pay more for football games isn't the same thing as Standard Oil setting the prices of all the gas in the country or AT&T having total control over the phone network.
 
Maj.Striker said:
BSG was a dreadful xbox game...controls were clumsy and awkward and the gameplay was nothing more then a glorified arcade gauntlet. I liked the premise but when I played the game I couldn't get past the first 10 minutes before I gave up. It was just too boring.
Some people did like it though, so I guess it wasn't all that bad. As far as controls, I always found that the basic controls of WC1 for SNES were sufficient. Though they could be improved upon. But getting that type of control into a decent space sim on a console would not be a bad idea I think. However, I am still not sure that there is much that would help to bring back the genre. Not unless you change the minds of the masses, and that's not going to happen ;).
 
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