Amaror said:
I wonder how much money EA paid him to say that.
Kind of a surprise how he says that RIGHT after Ea is named Worst company of America, isn't it?
Pretty much my thoughts. Not to mention you notice that the third entry in the EA/Bioware triumverate of suck wasn't even mentioned... that being "Old Republic Online". Of course that involves a lot of touchy issues, but ones that prove EA meddling. A good example of this would be the whole LGBT issue with the game where Bioware, who has created such characters in the past when they felt it worked, said they had no plans to include them in TOR, EA pretty much stepped in and forced the issue to avoid the complaints they were getting, forcing Bioware to include them in it's first expansion under creative duress, and leading to a lot of the constant "where are our space gays?" whining that plagued the game. It's a direct example of EA meddling with Bioware's creative process, whatever your position on the issue itself. Then you have the whole situation where EA apparently didn't like what Bioware some of what Bioware was doing with TOR, and whether the problems were as deep as implied by "EA Louse" or not, the bottom line is they pretty much crammed Mythic into Bioware's design process, a company which despite some early success with "Dark Age Of Camelot" pretty much ruined EA's last big MMO project... WAR (Warhammer Age Of Reckoning).
As a result this is definatly a PR move, especially given it's timing, and I doubt the endorsement was free.
One also can look at information from the "behind the scenes" app released about ME3 to see some of what happened there and the thoughts/influance on the design process. Ditto for the way how Bioware pretty much went from developing largely stat based RPGs into more of an action game producers who include cinematics and conversation branches under EA's management, their development style just happening to change radically when they are picked up by a company largely known for it's action games in today's market, and trying to shoehorn everything into that demographic. "Dragon Age 2" kind of failed because people loved the first one, and wanted more of the same, just with more depth and stuff added, "Dragon Age 2" represented an entirely differant style of game with the name "Dragon Age 2" splayed on it.
Then there are also side issues like how under EA's control, we saw Bioware caught trying to shill their products to boost metacritic ratings (in response to Dragon Age 2), we had the entire "Hawke" incident where Bioware asked people if it was okay to remove most of the character generation options people would expect, like racial selection, in exchange for having him fully voice acting, to which the community said pretty firmly "no, we don't want that" followed by Bioware not only doing it anyway, but claiming it's what the community wanted by way of marketing promotion. Oh and on top of this a very EA-like attitude towards the fans where a big gesture was made about ignoring what people who complained wanted to aay "OMG, the forums turned toxic based on what we've been doing, I just avoid that". That's a very EA-like attitude when it comes to consumer relations and customer service when you get down to it.
The point here being that I'm not buying this statement, and on top of it there is a lot that isn't addressed.
