Hmmm, well my opinions on this are mixed.
As I've mentioned before I've been playing "The Old Republic" again a bit after hearing how it's improved, and it actually HAS improved. They basically got around to doing things that they should have been working on to begin with, and expanding the endgame to the point where it can sustain a community. The game will live on in infamy as "ToRtanic" for it's record transition to a very greedy, free-to-play game, BUT to be fair it mostly stands as a testement to why to run a subscription based game you need to focus on the endgame and provide things that are both fun and time consuming for people to do to keep them re-upping subscriptions. ToR basically imitated the mistakes of so many failed MMORPGs except on an unprecedently huge budget. That said it did learn, and right now it's pretty close to the game people
were expecting it to be at launch, if you can get past the cash gouging in the FTP version.
On the MMORPG front I've had my eyes on "Wildstar" for a while now because of their whole "building a better endgame" schtick, though it remains to be seen how that will turn out or how utterly greedy it's going to be.
To be honest I think with EA how good the games themselves are will come down to what developers they put on the projects, EA's involvement is mostly going to be in terms of the business aspect of things and how much they limit the deveopers, and what kind of business practices they attach to the game (single player game microtransactions, etc...).
I've also kind of been wondering if EA will attempt to get back up in the saddle and try and do another Star Wars MMO, from a business perspective you can see why they would be scared off, but at the same time one would also think looking at ToR that they are learning their lessons and could apply what they know now to a new project... including the all important lesson than "Mythic" needs to be kept as far away from any kind of game development as possible.
I'll also be kind of blunt in saying that I half expect the next batch of games to be a disaster, because in general working within character-driven properties like the "current" Star Wars time line can be tricky to do. You wind up producing a lot of weak non-canon garbage, and have serious trouble with innovation fitting within the material or characrtization. It's sort of like how they decided to give Obi-Wan sniper weapons in "Trials Of Obi-Wan", cool
gameplay mechanic, but doesn't fit with the character.
At any rate, we'll see what happens, I don't expect a lot, and can see a ton of things to go wrong, but there is at least SOME hope. At the end of the day I can actually see some good games coming from this, but I can also see EA expecting you to pay unprecedented amounts of money for them when all is said and done.
