N00basaurus Inspects E3 Part 2: EA Love and Hate
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EA, also known as Electronic Arts, is a strange behemoth of a company. It topped the consumer charts for worst company of the year two years in a row (2012-2013). They gained this reputation with habits of squashing competition by buying smaller companies and dismantling them (a practice widely used by corporate powerhouses, such as Mattel), releasing games that have limited features full of bugs and glitches, putting out games that block progress until you buy expensive DLC, releasing games that just frankly didn’t work at launch, re-releasing games with limited upgrades as full new games (they changed a number in the title or mixed the sports teams around. That’s what earns a whole new $60 price tag, right?). The best example of what made Electronic Arts a terrible company in the game industry can be seen in this video (all hail Garry’s Mod):
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As they became a monopoly on sports games, by buying out and then dismantling any competition in the market, EA started to set a great deal of “bad habit” trends for the game industry. Those bad habits include games that are entirely focused on micro-transactions and pricey DLC, downloadable content, that nickel and dime a player to death on top of making many EA titles a “pay to win” systems. Players could just buy their way to the finish line (as we see in Dead Space 3 and earlier in Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer). The company gave such short deadlines to developers that the games they were making would suffer massive world shattering glitches (best example being Sim City 5 ), and some of the worst DRM (Digital Rights Management) software in the entire industry. And DRM, for the layman, always hurts the customer and does little to practically nothing about the piracy it’s touted to be stopping.
However, the news of being voted the worst company two years in a row shook EA to its core. Electronic Arts has been trying to turn itself around. Slowly but surely, a corporate whale of this size doesn’t really have the advantage of agility, the company is indeed starting to swim in a much better direction. They started by overhauling their customer service department as well as their proprietary digital distribution service, Origin. I will admit, Origin has probably the best return policy to date in the digital gaming market. On top of everything else, EA suffered a massive consumer backlash in 2008 regarding some of the harshest DRM ever implemented on a title with their game, Spore, which made them start to reverse their decision on using DRM on their products. In fact, the industry as a whole is starting to abandon the DRM love-ship that they had all been piling up on until around 2013. Turns out more and more that DRM doesn’t help, it actually exacerbates the problem in games (thanks in part from the research of the DRM free digital distribution service of GoG).
OK, that’s enough history. Electronic Arts has a troubled past, but they are trying to turn around and win customers over by being a better gaming company. That’s what we need to take away from all that. Moving on to Electronic Arts E3 2015 expo.
To be honest, for me personally, EA’s E3 conference had very little substance that spoke to me. They did have some interesting teasers about what the future might hold, but true to EA’s past traditions, they did focus on sports titles. And I guess that’s good if you are really big into EA’s sports titles, but to be absolutely honest, I wish other companies were making sports games as well. Competition pushes companies to make better products. The genre of sports games are in some absolute desperate need of innovation and creativity… That and I hope, one day, they start paying the college athletes for using their likenesses in the college sports games. That would be nice.
The Good:
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Ever since the end of Mass Effect 3, we knew two things. The first is that there would be more Mass Effect games. The other is that it would no longer be about commander Shepherd. The fact that Mass Effect: Andromeda is coming out so soon after the end of the Mass Effect trilogy, kind of worries me a little bit. Are they really spending the time and care that is required to breathe fresh life into this franchise, or are we just going to get a Dragon Age 2 rushed butcher job in a frantic attempt to bleed money from the fan base? Only time will tell how this game turns out and what it will entail for the Mass Effect fan base.
My first impression is this: I’m very sad that it appears that you play as yet another human. Mass Effect is a world rich with alien life. In the multiplayer mode of Mass Effect 3, some of the moments where I had the most fun was playing non-human races. My favorites were the geth hunter and the krogan warlord. I just loved yelling out to my friends “It looks like you brought a gun to a hammer fight, partner“. I’m saddened that you are chained once again to the human only military (the N7 special forces designation, of course. Been there, done that). You would think the humans would have learned the lesson of “we fight better, all of us, together”, and have some sort of mixed alien coalition. But the one thing I’m surprised that they didn’t do, since they already went down this road in the past, and it’s kind of a big deal: Why isn’t the main character in the trailer female? One of the greatest aspects of Mass Effect 3 is what has been dubbed, and quite lovingly so, “Femshep”. In Mass Effect, you could play as either male or female, but the best part was that you were super hard-boiled as both! Both the male and female Shepherds had a heavy mouthful of grit on their teeth and I soaked it all up!
In the previous games, they even had separate launch trailers for both genders of the main character:
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So it’s just interesting that they didn’t go with female for the original launch of the new Mass Effect title since they already went with human Commander Shepherd-ish character in a mask anyways. I have hope that Bioware will innovate and create a new experience with us, outside of the Commander Shepherd story, like they promised… but from the E3 trailer, showing off the N7 armor, and being human… it’s hard to imagine a totally new character. I guess what I’m saying is, I really hope that they will choose this unique opportunity to evolve and push the franchise forward rather than fall back onto some asinine formula of what they “think” makes them money with the Mass Effect franchise when, in actuality, such formulas ruin perfectly good IPs (Intellectual Properties) due to the greed that such formulas are based on. Milking the precious few dollars and cents from the teats of the fan base that they treat like numbered diary cows filled with cash, while alienating everyone else. This is best described by Yahtzee, a game reviewer and animator for The Escapist magazine and his review of the absolutely awful game (and the reason I have yet to pick up the newest in the series) Dragon Age 2. Caution, strong language.
OK, moving on to the other thing that I really liked and was absolutely something that I never expected to see from Electronic Arts. It is not only some new IP, but it is absolutely and organically original to the company. Usually, when EA gets a new IP it’s some sort of terrible re-hash of something that they’ve done before. Innovation is hard and expensive and when you are a large capitalist company; your bottom line is all that matters. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing… but when it means innovation, research and development, and any other costly venture is avoided because it might impact that bottom line, then it’s a problem… Here’s looking at you Hollywood.
But back on point, here we come to EA’s new property Unraveled.
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I just really like this merge of 2D platforming nostalgia in a 3D world. Only a few games have done that well, like Little Big Planet, and many do that quite poorly. The only major issue I have with the game is that there is nothing new or interesting done as it comes to movement, which is one of the most important focuses of side scrolling 2D platform games. You have the run, the jump, the grappling hook, the climbing rope, what little we see in Unraveled hasn’t really shown us anything that gives us that “Oh wow! I’ve never thought of that before!” feeling that nearly every modern 2D scroller game is lacking.
And really, it isn’t that hard to just take a moment and think of new ways to move about your environment. For instance, in one of my classes, a co-student came up with the idea to use the ability to teleport very limited distances as the main movement. You never walked, ran, skipped, or had any other motion than briefly blinking out of existence and then reappearing a split second later several units of measure from your original position, and Boop! now your a few feet from where you once were. And by doing so, this new movement mechanic opened itself up to a huge possibility of puzzle mechanics through level design itself. It really got you thinking as a player. “What walls could you blink through and how thick or thin do they have to be till I couldn’t teleport through them any more?” You had to time your teleports so that you don’t teleport inside of a moving spike ball and die. You had to teleport around to find the exit and it was a concept so simple, yet so fresh, it was quite delightful. I mean not to keep pointing at the same sources, but Mr. Yahtzee has a slight segment about how movement in 2D platforms is incredibly bland due to a lack of creativity in his review on Ori and the Blind Forest (caution: more strong language but these videos do make very good points in the video game industry as a whole; just saying).
However, like I mentioned earlier, we really haven’t seen much, if anything, of Unraveled. We know the world is modern and realistic but has a whimsical take on a tiny little person made of yarn. Very cute, and if it’s for PC, I’ll absolutely play it.
The Bad:
A couple of Star Wars games have been EA’s punching bag for a while now. Bioware’s half hazard attempt at a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Star Wars: the Old Republic, a game that they try to reap in the cash from the fans of the Old Republic RPG franchises by removing everything about it that was fun and sterilize it into one of the most generic “everybody is special” MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) experiences that they can without dancing around with a big friendly purple dinosaur in a teddy bear Ewok costume. It is a game that I refuse to play until they add a character that isn’t a model from the human 3D modeling software, Poser.
No, adding Oakley sunglasses to your face doesn’t make you a droid. No, changing your skin tone black, red, or blue, adding tentacles or spikes to your head, adding face paint on your nose and eyes doesn’t make you a cat, or adding a blindfold does not make you less than humanoid. I don’t care if it’s “in the lore”, the studio basically cherry-picked aliens that would allow them to do less work by slacking off in the character design department. So until one of their DLCs add something more iconic and truly alien, like a Rodian, or a contraption that couldn’t possibly be anything other than a droid, or maybe even that little bat creature you can find in a tiny bar on Tatooine, I’ve got nothing but ire for Star Wars: the Old Republic.
And don’t get me started on the whole “Gay Planet” debacle. I mean, I’m glad that Bioware, a game company that is usually known for their LGBT options in their bigger titles like Mass Effect and Dragon Age put some non-hetero relationship options into their MMO… but it was after the launch and then segregated on a single planet, away from everywhere else, and barred to players by a level minimum and pricey DLC … it is a little much. In the linked article above, I love the phrase “Pay-to-gay”.
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Speaking of Star Wars games, EA is making a mobile RPG too! And it looks absolutely awful. All aboard the money train! “Whoo-Whooo!” Apparently the game focuses entirely on the nostalgia of the Star Wars universe. The whole premise is that you collect characters and vehicles from the universe and then do… stuff with them… I assume it’s missions and micro-transactions… but for a game that is about being immersed in the world of Star Wars by using the old tropes and characters… they didn’t really pay much attention to their CGI model work. On one hand, I understand that it’s mobile, and on a 3 inch screen, it might not make much, if any difference. I know I’m nit-picking but I’m just kind of tired of bad Star Wars games.
Now we get to the usual trash heap of games that EA slogs out and parades around at every E3 because maybe the company feels like it has to at this point. Like some sort of silly hat they wear once a year because of “tradition” in their strange country.
Sports games. As EA has pretty much an iron gripped monopoly on them and thus no longer allows any room for interesting improvements through corporate competition due to a lot of factors including exclusive licensing with major brands and sports factions as well as buying out and crushing competitors. Most of EA’s sports games just follow a linear progression between titles (and many a time, the update is just re-arranging teams to match real life drafts and sports pics before re-releasing the game for another $60)… here’s a list of sports games EA talks about in their presentation:
Need for Speed, the same racing game that comes out in every press conference in every E3 since 2010 (well, that game and Forza). There are cars that match expensive cars in real life, a few different race modes: race online, race with friends (no mention if that’s local or only online), customize your cars with wheels and paints (that are all proprietary to the title and not user created. No Dodge car for you, player!), “realistic” city race tracks. Absolutely nothing new. Every race car game since 2010 on. You know, come to think of it, what ever happened to racing games like Extreme G 64?
Two different FIFA games coming out… Sadly, neither one of them is Corporate Money Laundering Simulator 2015. There’s FIFA 16 which is soccer, of course, and EA Sports FIFA which is soccer for mobile. Let’s just hope that the players don’t sink through the ground, are missing limbs, and floating about the playing field like this past year’s previous title. I mean, the previous FIFA games barely even worked. If you just type in “FIFA 15 glitches” into YouTube, you get so many video compilations of them! One of my favorite videos of these compilations is FIFA 2015 glitches.
Yet another Madden with Madden NFL 16 and Madden NFL Mobile. NBA Live 16 for basketball and NHL 16 for hockey. Once again, nothing really looked “new” or exciting. It’s just the same sports game but the teams have different people that match more with real life situations.
I’m sorry I’m dispassionate about sports games. I know they have their audiences and some really die hard fans. And that’s great. If you’re one of those who are really excited for the above shorthand list, more power to you. But for me, the re-hashes of titles, just to shuffle around the teams a bit is pointless. Such a thing should be done in a content patch, not a whole new game. When I play a game, I expect it to be a new experience every title. A game should be innovative with new features that make us look at the world differently. A phrase that I say all the time and that I stand by and will be forcing myself to think my experience in both playing and now making games is “Tell me something I don’t already know”.
And I will give EA a little bit of credit, they did kinda sorta do that… although, it’s a kind of minimalist approach to the idea of innovation in sports game. EA Sports Rory Mcllroy PGA Tour does innovate the ever so slightest when it comes to maps… er… “courses” by having some high fantasy versions and floating islands… but even then, it just seems like an odd marriage between Mario Golf and EA realistic golf with all the little fun Putt-Putt style ball puzzles taken out.
There’s a Minions mobile games that looks like a micro-transaction nightmare. Think of any other “build a town/farm/city/____” mobile game. Then add Minions to the slog of franchise based mobile games. That’s Minions Paradise. So… if you are super excited about everything Minions and have giant need for this game… you should probably go find help…
And lastly there’s the Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 2, which is kind of a comical look at EA’s Modern Warfare franchise through the lens of Plants vs. Zombies, a turret defense game. I just simply don’t know what to think about the game. There just seemed to be a large mess of bad design decisions from the trailer. The biggest and most obvious one is that the character models look bad from the camera perspective. You watch the back of their heads, and the entire back side of the models are bland and boring to look at. There was a character (dubbed “The Imp”) that they were very excited to show in gameplay … but he wears a helmet, so you just look at this big ugly orange circle bobbing around without much else to it. From the front, there’s a lot there. But apparently the modelers just forgot to spin the characters around to keep modeling and the designers forgot that the camera points at the one place they don’t have any character designs going on. Oops. It just looked terrible.
And the maybe:
Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst falls into this category of games that make me go “Meh, so what?” The first Mirror’s Edge had an innovative mechanic and world… that they absolutely tossed out the door when they tried desperately to medical staple some really awful cyberpunk story to it. The idea “free running” across the roof-tops of buildings, in hallways, and around a futuristic hyper stylized city was absolutely stomped on, and hard, by extremely powerful enemies either a) were smart enough to bring ranged weapons that never miss (360 no scope) to attack you. You play a mailman armed only with a pair of tennis shoes and a very modern female haircut. B) Some enemies were so strong that they could only be defeated by near impossible quick time events. The “free running” game focused on super linear paths and hallways, extremely tiny roof tops with sections barred by non-climbable fences, and other limiting movement areas. They took the aspect of “Free Running” and chopped and hacked at with the bluntest of cheese knifes until they successfully removed the whole “Free” aspect. It’s one of those amazing ideas that they tossed out the window because it didn’t fit with the generic formula of “action adventure”.
So while I have hope that Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst will be far removed from the first game… I somehow don’t think much has changed, save for the subtitle on the box. If anything, it should be a visually stunning experience… so there’s that at least.
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Star Wars: Battlefront. I am highly on the fence about this game. The old Battlefront games were massive, mind boggling, impressive games that were incredibly complex and still even played today! With E3’s presentation, Battlefront looks like an odd combination of their first person shooter franchise Battlefield layered with Star Wars elements. One thing that I enjoyed a great deal from the trailer is that the game does indeed “feel” like a Star Wars title. You don’t shoot bullets, you shoot lasers and sparks. You fly the aircraft, you pilot the walkers. The ground troops have a point to the game as well as the vehicles.
They even showed that you can be different aliens in the ranks of the rebels (and you might possibly be able to do that with the Empire as well… who knows!). They even had plausible invention to the Star Wars universe. Near the end of the demo, they show somebody throw down a bubble shield. Although that’s kind of standard in most futuristic first person shooters now, it had a very Star Wars tech look to it.
The one thing that I don’t like about the new Battlefront from EA, is that it once again focuses entirely on nostalgia. In the dawn of a new era in Star Wars, with the glorious second coming from the glorious sci-fi god J.J. Abrams coming out this summer, it seems a little short sighted on EA’s part to focus the game’s content entirely on battles and characters held in the first three movies (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). However, knowing EA’s micro-transaction history, they probably are planning on releasing specialized DLC at premium prices to expand your game’s universe to incorporate scenes and characters that should have been available with the game on its launch date.
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It’s a little old as some of the vehicles have been revealed to be playable, but here is a chart that has been composed by Reddit users of the differences between the old Battlefront game and EA’s new Battlefront:
So that’s kinda why people feel a little cheated by EA’s version of Battlefront… it’s just… short sighted in the franchise of Battlefront games. What they should have done, was not use the Battlefront property and start fresh with a new Star Wars IP.
And speaking of Battlefront 2. I don’t care what anyone says: I absolutely want a full Star Wars experience with this character! Story, background, maybe a comic book and merchandising, I’m all for it! A Gungan jedi. Just feature his dialogue and personality like a Samurai in an old Akira Kurosawa film, especially Yojimbo, and yeah, shut up and take my money. But in a way, that is sort of the biggest issue with the new Battlefront by EA.
With the previous Battlefront games, you could do crazy things that. Modding was a large part of the Battlefront experience and encouraged the community of fans to make various and wonderful things for the Battlefront series. In this new one, mods are strictly forbidden and no editor is being supported… which is kind of a big slap in the face to the old Battlefront communities. You would think that allowing “fan made content” letting players build maps, scenarios, campaigns, and then share them among themselves would be a great way for the game to be kept fresh and interesting to players until the next official DLC came out. But you know, doing that, giving players that much control over content might devalue some the proprietary DLC. If EA’s DLC isn’t all that great, then it could be out shined by the player’s free content. The game as it is on its own looks fun, it just really shouldn’t be calling itself Star Wars: Battlefront.
Final Thoughts:
Although not every title is something I’m looking forward to, there are a few that I’m interested in seeing in how they turn out. EA’s transformation from being voted one of the worst companies in 2012 and 2013 to something that might be a little bit more “gamer forward” in the future will be something to see. And personally, I hope they pull it off. If they start innovating again, I’m sure they can do some wonderfully whimsical things.
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