Oh I love these EA blurbs.
"Every game is an RPG now," he said. "You wouldn't make a game without progression and levels and XP."
TRANSLATION: Story and challenging gameplay? Pah! We want none of that! Creating good, challenging content requires WORK and why should we work when we can make the player work for us by introducing grind?
I swear, most RPG systems I see now are less about pacing and more about forcing the player to do repetitive bullshit.
"And I think every game is going to be a social game...good ideas propagate."
So does syphilis but you don't see me singing its praises.
So to summarize: EA is dumbing all their games down even further, adding grind, and turning them into social-entrapment garbage for the purposes of viral marketing.
Basically, EA is becoming Zynga, only with the capacity to produce prettier graphics.
EDIT: Because I keep seeing this..
To all those using "You learned on simpler controls" as a defense: No, that's just plain wrong.
There's one huge mistake everyone that's asserting this is making: You're all forgetting that those of us that learned on simple 2-4 button game systems also grew up in an era where electronics entertainment was maybe 1/100th as prolific as it is today.
If someone is incapable of operating an Xbox or PS4 controller in today's already dumbed-down AAA games (complete with on-screen color-coded prompts and bread-crumbs), I shudder to think of how that person would struggle with day-to-day tech like smartphones and computer inputs (a keyboard has more buttons on it than any console controller ever will).
The only demographic where that argument might hold are those who are older than video games and never played much (if ever) before, but that demographic is constantly shrinking with the march of time.
Meanwhile, newer generations are growing up with early and frequent exposure to tech. I see far more children with smart phones and tablets today than I did kids with GameBoys when I was growing up. Personal computers are practically as universal as TVs and children are uncannily good at picking up the basic motor skills than adults.
With that kind of technical preparation, I seriously doubt that any future generation is going to struggle learning games just because of the controls.
You're scared they're going to be scared off out of frustration? I think eliminating all frustration and holding their hand like babies is even worse, because without (some) frustration, people have no incentive to improve.
All I'm asking of publishers (EA and others) here is for them to just show a little more respect towards their audience's intelligence.