apsham said:
I never get the EA hate.
Especially on games like Madden and their other sports series. What does someone get from bitching about that? I mean really, there IS a market for these games and there are people who are going to buy them all the time... the updates and small tweaks are welcomed to these people. I know them.. and for the NHL series, I am one of them. If you don't like it, then you're not going to buy the game.. and frankly, I don't see how its mere existence hurts you? Seriously, if it wasn't EA doing it.. someone else would be. There is a market, a huge one, for sports games.
And as far as other things go... who the hell cares? They put out QUALITY games, and a lot of them. If there are a few buggy releases from the start, that's only odds... it's going to happen. And as far as their business practices go... it works for them. I'm never going to condemn them for offering DLC... people are going to buy it, and for the most part... it's not going to hurt you if they do.
A few?
Of the minority of games that are released under an EA label that interest me, I find that
every single one is bugged beyond the point where I can play it before it has had several hundred megabytes of patches.
-Command and Conquer 3: While it was an all round terrible game, I was still motivated enough to play through the single player campagn...Of course after completing the GDI campagn and most of the NOD campagn, after having multiple restarts due to random game crashes I decided it was time to put it away. Fixed after applying one of the patches that was released a few months after the game (also fixed several other problems)....
NOT impressed.
-Mirrors edge, the physics is broken and the game regularly crashes, has not been fixed yet, although I haven't actively been trying to fix it.
-Crysis, various visual bugs, horrendus performance, broken textures and various glitches with AI and weapons passing through walls/falling through the map. Even with various patches it still didn't have multi GPU support, I had to use a third party mod. That's pretty piss poor.
EA may not directly make all that many games in house, but they largely own the companies that make the EA branded games they publish. They are responsible for rushing games to the finish, as well as money whoring expansions for games like the sims, even spore as extra content you can now purchase...why can they not finish the games to the standard they want it to be played before release? Do they really need to withhold things they see as necissary enough to introduce later? I'm sure nobody cares if they have to wait a few more weeks for a game, especially if it is working out of the box.
The comparison between Activision an EA is completely beyond me, the main man over at activision may not seem to care about games, but I'm yet to be disapointed by a broken Call of Duty game that I put in my machine. I still haven't seen them implement seperate (better) weapons for people who bought the special edition over the regular edition, and there still hasn't been a "Tony Hawks pro skater: Hot Date". I haven't been hit in the teeth by DRM so secure it literally stops me from playing the game I purchased, as I was with crysis, CnC3, RA3 etc.
Sure they do occasionally make a good game, but they seem to hate their customers. When they start finishing games before release I will consider retracting my hatred, however until then,
death to EA
