Adam Jensen said:
Next stop - Bioware.
Fuck you EA. FUCK YOU!
Honestly, at this point it would be a mercy killing.
That said I'm kind of glad to see Visceral being shut down. I knew there were going to be casualties to standing up to the gaming industry, and this is the price that's going to be paid. I'm guessing EA fell short of their sales goal for Dead Space 3, and that's a GOOD thing as it shows that people like me who would have bought the game but didn't due to their microtransactions gimmick seem to have had an effect.
At the end of the day EA is going to close down several studios if people have a zero tolerance policy for their antics before getting the message that it's the garbage they are pulling through the games (day1 DLC, microtransactions, etc...) that are the culprit and it doesn't matter what studio they use, any product that carries this garbage is going to see opposition.
When it comes to Bioware in paticular, they WERE a good studio, but honestly keeping them alive because of what they once were is stupid, that isn't who they are anymore. The Mass Effect 3 ending, and the refusal to change it, the debacle that was "Dragon Age 2", the train wreck that was "The Old Republic Online" probable holder for fastest AAA MMO transition to FTP ever... and this with an epic budget and a crazy amount of dev time behind it (how many years, and they still pretty much forgot the endgame...).
I never really saw Dead Space as a survival horror game to be honest, even the first one was a shooter at it's core. People mostly got onto the hype that it was going to be more horror than they ever really intended. I do not think that them making it increasingly action-centric did the damage so much as the microtransactions did.
To be frank, I do not think we will see any real, successful, horror games developed until the gaming industry grows a spine and stops caring about who they might offend with them. Basically they would need to push the "M" rating as far as the "R" rating gets pushed, and actually fight for it. The modern gaming industry is a bunch of pantywaists that tends to label PG-13 content with an "M" rating, and fears an AO rating for anything that even begins to take advantage of what an M/R rating allows. When you omit the abillity to really freak people out with the material, all that's left is being a bit creepy, and recycling jump scares.
