daibakuha said:
StriderShinryu said:
Hmmm..
The name EA in the title? Check.
People basically not even reading the article and jumping to hate filled conclusions? Check.
Me not being surprised? Check.
I really have no issue with this as long as the connected content is thoughtful and well done. While I don't feel that the changes made to Dead Space are good, the always connected nature of a sports title or FPS is great, the multiplayer in ME3 was very fun (though tied into single player in a bizarre way), and having a facebook connected experience to supplement DA1/2 was kind of cool.
You and I have similar opinions on the matter. The title of the article is blatantly nerdbaiting. This is more like something I would see on Kotaku rather than The Escapist.
The market is heading in this direction, whether people like it or not, most games are going to be launching with at least SOME form of multiplayer. This isn't a bad thing. The Mass Effect 3 multiplayer was actually pretty good, and I look forward to seeing how it's implemented in Dragon Age 3 (I hope it's a co-op, like in BG).
More like people reading the article and jumping to obvious conclusions, ones we have already seen play out in reality. Also, the body of your paragraph assumes the very things you just referred to as hate filled conclusions.
The title of the article is descriptive of it's content.
It is a bad thing. They aren't making everything multiplayer or tacking services onto things because they think that's the best possible way to make the best possible game they can possibly make. Giant publishers like EA and Activision are striving to make games less like products and more like services because this takes away control from gamers and gives it to publishers while creating opportunities for monetization. Both EA and Activision are more than willing to make their games worse to achieve this type of control and have demonstrated it many times. It's very possible to contribute added value through these services or merely claim to like Activision. That's usually how you get people to swallow a bitter pill. In the meantime, we end up with games like
Mass Effect 3 where the inclusion of multiplayer probably did hurt the rest of the game, as it usually will. There are only so many resources, there are only so many man-hours, there is only so much disc-space, and most decisions made and directions taken by developers overseeing a single and multi-player project must take both into account, no matter how many times they insist they are separate. There is no such thing. And
Starcraft II doesn't have freaking LAN. Symptom of the same problem. Consumers aren't the only ones who get a vote on what products and services are made available to them. Publishers frequently are not responding to what the market wants them to do, they are herding consumers into doing things the way the publishers want them done. In the land of perfect competition, that may be impossible. But I've never been there, so I wouldn't know.
