Tag Archives: EA

Shepard’s last hurrah

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You’d best say your goodbyes to Commander Shepard next March as Mass Effect 3 will be his last appearance in a video game. BioWare ceo Ray Mazuka was asked as this year’s Gamescom by PC Gamer whether Mass Effect 3 will be the last game set in that universe. Echoing comments from previous interviews, Mazuka once again confirmed the company’s desire to further the fiction and world they so painstakingly created:

“We have ambitious plans to continue this franchise going forward. Mass Effect 3 is simultaneously a couple of different things; a thrilling and epic conclusion to the trilogy as we promised our fans we’d provide for Commander Shepard, but it’s also a brand new beginning – it’s an entry point for new fans and it’s also a brand new beginning.”

When asked if Shepard would appear in any more Mass Effect games, producer Michael Gamble said how ME3 will complete the Commander’s storyline and therefore will not be making a comeback.

With the level of detail put into the first two games, following one Commander and their loyal team is just a tiny part of a much larger story. Sure, whether Shepard succeeds or not has greater consequences on the universe as a whole but, like Star Wars, the lesser characters are equally if not more interesting than the one in charge. The loyalty missions from Mass Effect 2 and the franchise’s extensive codex scratch the surface on a vast number of species and personalities all ripe expanding on in someway. I’m curious to find out just how the third game in series can successfully draw in a large number of newcomers but it’s something both BioWare and EA have said a few times now so there’s something going on and I doubt it’s just the optional Kinect features revealed at E3.

Could this latest statement from BioWare add a little more credence to the rumours of a multiplayer co-op shooter set in the universe? It’s been lingering for some time now and was expected to be announced at last year’s Spike VGA’s but never showed up. Some claim it’s an additional mode in Mass Effect 3 whereas others say it’ll be a standalone product. I think it’s safe to say that no one really has any idea. Other than BioWare. And EA. So a couple of people then…

Crysis averted

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When the first Crysis game was released, I didn’t have a hope in hell of playing it. My PC would have probably struggled with Minesweep let alone such a graphically intensive shooter. So the announcement that Crysis 2 was on its way to consoles pleased me to no end. I mean, the hallowed Crytek engine was coming to my platform of choice, what could be better? And earlier this year it did just that, playing brilliantly on my Xbox 360 and looking rather splendid in the process. Aside from the occasional moronic AI and frustrating glitches, I, the console gamer, was happy however some hardcore fans of the first game weren’t so chipper. A supposed dumbing down took place in order for it to run on consoles plus a shift in story and gameplay didn’t help matters. Worst of all for the die-hard crowd was the lack of Direct X 11 and 10 support opting to go with DX9 instead.

That meant Crysis 2 wasn’t the power hungry beast Crysis was and although looking gorgeous on places, it never truly tested GPUs. Crytek ceo, Cevat Yerli spoke with Gamasutra about the change and the upcoming patch saying: “Crysis 1′s intention was, if I were to play it three years later, it looks great. And it does, actually, it fulfilled that. But it made it difficult for entry-level players. So with Crysis 2, we took a different direction, and it backfired a little bit.” It’s unfortunate the a developer making a game more accessible in this way gets their wrists-slapped for doing so but the fans know what they want and it sounds as if they don’t want just any old gamer playing Crysis 2. The patch, coming in a couple of weeks, adds things like HDR motion blur, displacement and parallax occulsion mapping among other things which will no doubt make an already good looking game even more pretty but it really is just a peace offering of sorts to appease a certain crowd. Crytek will make no money by producing the patch as they don’t believe it’ll gin any more purchases. But ironically, the company are again trying to please everyone even though the original changes and omittance of DX11 were made in order to please everyone (my head hurts…)

“This is much more like a gift to the high-end community,” Yerli said. “And I think gamers will appreciate that. It lifts up Crysis 2 and gives a sneak peak of how PC gaming will evolve in the future, if you support a high-end preference.” It’s great that Crytek are tweaking the game so it can last a good few years but the annoyance apparently comes from PC fans wanting an upgrade over the console on release not months after. Which I can totally understand, Crysis 1 gained popularity by being intensive and why shouldn’t the sequel be too? One commenter on Gamasutra pointed out that the mainstream market wasn’t so happy with their rigs being pushed to the limit. He also pointed out a Steam survey which showed only 5% of users had a DX11 card with the majority using a DX10/11 one. That means only 5% would reap the benefits of high-end DX11 visuals and such a small number isn’t one a developer can economically focus all their attention on.

Not being a PC gamer I won’t fully appreciate the significance of the ‘degrade’ of Crysis 2 and subsequently its upgrade to DX11. But, as much as I enjoyed the game, it was the aforementioned questionable AI and bizarre glitches that spoilt Crysis 2, not the graphics.

The retailers’ battlefield

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For better or worse, there are gamers and publishers who want Call of Duty to fail. They want to see the smugness disappear from Activision, they want the ‘dude bro’ gamer to find some other hobby and most definitely want to see some significant change to first person shooters. John Riccitiello and his merry band of EA would love to usurp the FPS thrown from Activision and haven’t been shy about saying so with Battlefield 3 being the best chance they have. It’s coming out before Modern Warfare 3, has a gritty real-world setting that we can relate to but feel equally heroic and features a stat-tracking service, similar to Call of Duty Elite but is free instead of paid-for.

All in all, it’s looking good and EA can’t put a foot wrong with marketing and hype – except for the unnecessarily lengthy tank level shown at their E3 press conference which quickly lost its appeal. But if there’s one thing that pisses off gamers it’s pre-order bonus that give unfair advantages to those who stump up the cash early and Battlefield 3 will be no different (via Kotaku). Customers in the UK who pre-order from either GAME or Gamestation will receive the Physical Warfare pack which includes additional weapons and ammo that are normally reserved for unlocks. This means getting them early could shift the balance from a level playing field to downright unfair for anyone not willing to pre-order.

For the UK, it’s not about money because you can freely pre-order titles without paying a penny until release and even then you’re not always obliged to buy them. But it does get a bit crappy when you think of everyone who would rather pick up the game from another retailer, not the two EA have partnered up with. They won’t be entitled to having a suped-up shotgun or flechette ammo on day one but will likely be pitted against someone who does in multiplayer. And there’s nothing that breaks a decent online mode more than feeling like you’re gimped against the opposition.

So for all the belly aching towards companies like Activision for trying to monetize features, it’s become frightfully clear that there are few companies who wouldn’t. But hey, they’re exactly that, a company so while it sucks for us, it’s now just the unfortunate reality of video games and in the grand scheme of things, will it effect whether you buy the game or not? Or rather, should it?

Mass Effect Wii U. Confirmed?

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As we all come to terms with the name of Nintendo’s new console, developers and publishers are expressing their interests in creating games for it and especially its tablet controller. Kojima Productions, Activision and THQ are all talking about the Wii U and now the head of EA, Frank Gibeau, hinted at the possibility of a Mass Effect game coming to the system. In a recent interview (via My Nintendo News), Gibeau was asked about bringing Mass Effect 3 to the Wii U and practically confirmed something was coming but not necessarily Shepard’s third outing.

“I can’t say we are going to do it on the Wii U, but you can imagine what we could do with that controller in the Mass Effect universe. It feels like a really nice fit, but we’ll announce that when the time is right.” See what I mean? The time may not be right for an official announcement but that sounds to me like something relating to Mass Effect is headed for the Wii U.

Since the second game, BioWare and EA have both spoken about delving deeper into the rich universe of Mass Effect, making new titles following other story lines, not just the troubles of Commander Shepard. But if it were to be Mass Effect 3, I’d be interested to see how the tablet controller is used after Microsoft revealed its version is to have Kinect support. In a similar train of thought, would that force Sony to add Move controls too? And in answer to Gibeau’s question, yes I can totally imagine what they’d do with the tablet. A touchscreen menu and inventory, safe-cracking mini-games, the 6 inch screen acting like an overhead map for strategic combat scenarios. That kind of thing.

Then I saw this trailer, now I’m a believer

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I don’t think I’m alone when I say I enjoyed the hell out of Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and was pretty excited about a sequel, side-stepping World at War due to my fatigue of playing WWII shooters. When Modern Warfare 2 came around the buzz was immense with it going on to break all sorts of records for first day sales and the oodles of money Activision made off the franchise. Then things got ugly. Activision fired two of Infinity Ward’s studio heads, Jason West and Vince Zampella for reasons still not entirely known which caused a great deal of unrest within the develop team behind what are considered the ‘real’ Call of Duty games.

Doubts of the franchise’s future were hushed when Black Ops came out last year and despite feeling like someone’s grabbing you by the shoulders and screaming in your face when playing, Black Ops smashes all previous sales records. But the ill feeling towards Call of Duty as a series and shooters as a whole is seemingly at the highest it’s ever been so with a crippled Infinity Ward expected to release Modern Warfare 3 later this year, I for one doubted whether they’d be capable of producing something to top what I’ve previously played.

The game leaked in almost its entirety not long ago with Kotaku revealing the details of the storyline from start to finish. It’s world war 3, Captain Price will return to kick some mean Russian dude’s butt visiting various locations around the world in typical CoD form. That was pretty much to be expected and to be honest, not all that interesting. I mean, really, is there much love for the main protagonists for the franchise or are they cleverly voiced vessels to continue a Hollywood pleasing storyline? EA’s Battlefield Bad Company series was better at giving personality to its heroes and the big contender for CoD‘s crown, Battlefield 3, is looking stunning and might just come out on top this holiday season.

Or that’s what I thought until I saw the first gameplay trailer for Modern Warfare 3 which debuted last night. It’s big, brash and bold and as you would expect for a CoD game. But something about it has rekindled my desire to play another CoD experience. I don’t know what exactly it is either, I can’t quite put my finger on it but the short snippets of footage do a really good job of winning back some of the hype that Battlefield has won. Modern Warfare 3 takes players to America, England, Germany and France and it was the turmoil in London that roused my interest. Not because I’d wish that level of harm to the capital of England (yeah it’s busy and a bit smelly in places but still a decent place), but seeing familiar landmarks and recognisable features like British Police cars used as cover extends the feeling of realism when playing games like this. American and some European locations are often recreated in video games with a striking level of detail but little old England isn’t aways greatly portrayed and if Infinity Ward – together with Sledgehammer Games who are lending a helping development hand – can do the city justice, UK gamers may get that fuzzy sensation of feeling like really being a part of the action.

I know I’m picking up on one, possibly minor part of a trailer that shows some awesome graphics and summer blockbuster action sequences but it’s a part that stood out for me the most and if that’s all it takes to reignite the flame in a departing fan, the trailer has done its job and more. Modern Warfare 3 is coming November 8th this year and if Activision keep pumping out trailers like this, I may be forced to go to another midnight sale for a Call of Duty game. Something I promised myself last year I’d never do again.

A little birdy reveals Dragon Age III. Anyone surprised?

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As is the norm for modern day reveal, BioWare have chosen Twitter as a good place to coyly announce the development of Dragon Age III. Yep, a third is on the way, hot on the heels of the second which released just a few months ago. Senior director of creative development, Alistair McNally, tweeted the studio’s need for “exceptional environment artists,” purposely using the tag #DragonAge3 to cause all kinds of “OMG”s on the social site.

It’s no surprise that game number three is in the works for a franchise as popular as Dragon Age but it amused me to read the want for more environment artists after the criticisms of DA2. One of its sticking points was how you seemingly visited the same location over and over again, heavily relying on recycled backgrounds. Are BioWare looking to right the wrongs of repetition? It would appear that way.

Lets hope the team get a little longer to work on Dragon Age III than they did with the second though. A famously short development timescale soured more than an ignorable number of gamers but EA boss John Riccitiello has gone on record (via That Video Game Blog) with his desire for annualising the publisher’s top properties. That could very well mean Dragon Age, Dead Space and Medal of Honor (to name a few) would have yearly iterations instead of the 18 month – 2 year breathing space that is good for certain IPs. This may not be a such a bad thing as it clearly works for Call of Duty and sport games so why not for all types? Well we’ve seen the crushing effect of milking a franchise for all its worth with the demise of Guitar Hero and subsequently Rock Band too. Given the breadth and scope of fantasy RPGs like Dragon Age, the more time they have, they better then experience and less likely they are to have you running around a dungeon wondering whether you’ve been there before.

Still, a third Dragon Age huh? Cool. I’d best get cracking on the second one just in case it does appear around March 2012.

Randy’s solo campaign

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Publishers are forcing developers to waste time on multiplayer modes just to plump up a game’s feature set believes Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford, who criticised the practise to Edge yesterday. He states how there’s an obsession within the industry to keep up with the blockbuster releases like Call of Duty instead of treating each game differently depending on their content.

“Let’s forget about what the actual promise of a game is and whether it’s suited to a narrative or competitive experience,” he said. “Take that off the table for a minute and just think about the concept-free feature list: campaign, co-op, how many players? How many guns? How long is the campaign? When you boil it down to that, you take the ability to make good decisions out of the picture. And the reason they do it is because they notice that the biggest blockbusters offer a little bit for every kind of consumer. You have people that want co-op and competitive, and players who want to immerse themselves in deep fiction. But the concept has to speak to that automatically; it can’t be forced. That’s the problem.”

Call of Duty, particularly Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops, may well be the driving force behind a lot of eager publishers nowadays but a forced multiplayer mode is something that’s affected game’s throughout this generation. In the early days of the Xbox 360, The Darkness was an FPS that featured a beloved single player campaign and awkward multiplayer due to this need for online action. Some critics even verbally shook their fists at BioShock because it neglected multiplayer functionality which no doubt brought about the inclusion of one to the second game.

But Pitchford does understand why publishers decide to learn on developers for multiplayer content, casting aside the artistic integrity. It’s because games are a business. Research data suggests adding more features to your game will boost sales and unfortunately review scores. I say unfortunately because to me, if you have a great single player campaign then anything in addition to that is a bonus not a necessity to get say a nine instead of an eight out of ten. A good example that Pitchford uses is the Dead Space series whose first game was purely a solo affair yet the sequel was not: ”It’s ceiling-limited; it’ll never do 20 million units. The best imaginable is a peak of four or five million units if everything works perfectly in your favour. So the bean counters go: ‘How do I get a higher ceiling?’ And they look at games that have multiplayer. They’re wrong, of course. What they should do instead is say that they’re comfortable with the ceiling, and get as close to the ceiling as possible. Put in whatever investment’s required to focus it on what the promise is all about.”

It’s interesting that Pitchford used EA’s Dead Space as it was the same title website Develop used when speaking to EA Games label president Frank Gibeau. He said the company are working towards making their game ‘better connected’ with things like co-op or multiplayer modes. Develop proposed that Dead Space had neither and worked fine with Gibeau and the PR manager clarifying how their studios won’t be forced to include these features but instead educated on how to do so. Like the possibility of Facebook or Twitter interactivity. However even those seemingly harmless additions would take up developers’ time and resources. It’s a debate which will continue for a while yet I’d imagine.

Home is where the cash is

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Despite middling review scores and criticisms for having a short single player mode, THQ’s Homefront has been very successful shipping 2.4 million units which equates to 1 million sold to the consumer since its release two weeks ago. To put that in perspective, some games don’t even sell or ship point four of a million within years so Homefront‘s sales are indeed something to shout about.

And shout THQ have because it was the mediocre Metacritic score which left the publisher a fifth less valuable after its stocks fell 20% when the game first shipped. Contrasting that, Homefront actually sold 375,000 copies in the US on day one, the same time as shareholders were receiving the bad news about their stock. But it’s apparent how the mainstream gamer, to whom the shooter clearly appeals to, cares little about an aggregate score with the rampant marketing for Homefront clearly paying off.

When a game that started off having reviews which praised its gameplay then was hit with a wall of critics displeased at the performance but crediting the multiplayer, all kinds of theories involving dirty dealing begin to surface. But I’m not going there, that just leads into a depressing cul-de-sac and instead am interested in how it managed to sell a further 600+ thousand units after the consensus claims the game is good but not great and how such an achievement is a slap in the face to Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two. He said: “Making good games just isn’t good enough. I believe good is the new bad. … Games need to be great,” adding the importance of sites like Metacritic who have the power to effect game sales.

Homefront didn’t fall into the ‘great’ catagory nor does it have a high Metacritic ranking but still managed to reign in the cash for THQ and crash multiplayer servers which couldn’t cope with the hordes of gamers eager to play online. Maybe these gamers haven’t even touched the single player component, the part that lowers the game’s overall score, instead diving straight into the online squirmishes. If so, then Homefront is deserving of much higher praise. Or maybe it’s the aforementioned marketing that has been its saving grace seeing as you can’t watch TV without one of the high-octane adverts playing out before you. EEDAR analyst Jess Divnich told IGN how reviews aren’t the be all and end all of a game: “Review scores are simply a weight, not an absolute. The impact of review scores on video game title sales are determined by the potential size of the market, direct and retail promotional spend, competition at launch, overall level of interest in the title before release and more. This helps to explain why titles such as Demon’s Souls can achieve 90+ reviews, but produce lower revenues, and why a game such as Medal of Honor from Electronic Arts can get an aggregated review score in the 70′s and surpass nearly 5 million units in sales worldwide.”

Whatever the case, Homefont is selling well and a sequel is highly probable giving the opportunity to address the first game’s issues, potentially becoming a real contender to the might of Call of Duty.

Manually redundant

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In recent years the video game manual, a once prized possession in any young gamer’s back pack has shrivelled into something barely reflecting its former self. Publishers have lost faith in the paper based medium and last year, Ubisoft decided to do away with the traditional manual in favour for an electronic version. EA have just recently announced (via Gamespot) their rejection of printed tree-pulp leaving few companies to either follow suit or maintain the status quo. Those who bought either Mass Effect 2 for the PS3 or Fight Night Champion may have noticed the lack of manual in the box and addition of a virtual one on the discs but if you didn’t notice, it really just proves the point that a paper version is no longer needed.

Younger gamers probably won’t be all too fussed about the loss of an instructional booklet but being a child of the 80s, I remember when manuals were cool, feature rich documents that let you immerse yourself into the game world even when your platform of choice was no where to be seen. The car trips or school lunch breaks would always be a good place to brush up on your knowledge, usually bypassing the very first few pages which showed button configuration and onto those which gave background info on characters and settings. They were for me, the prelude to a game.

But for a number of years the manual is but an afterthought with few publishers savouring the chance to use them as extended fiction for an IP and merely regurgitate information readily available on screen. Rockstar are a newer company who know how to make a good manual though and games like GTA or Red Dead Redemption contain what can easily be imagined as documents plucked from the game itself. Maps on the backs of posters or booklets made to look like tourist guides, these are the kind of manuals that get people looking and talking about your game harkening back to the classic gaming literature found in early Zelda or Mario titles.

EA want to be more green however and along with the removal of paper, they’ll soon be using DVD case that are easier to package games. But doesn’t that suggest that these games are disposable? Maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a hoarder – or collector – that I tend not to think of throwing out my old games but I’m sure there are enough people who treat their games differently, either trading them in or eventually chucking them out after a few years or even months. I can’t really blame EA for wanting to rid themselves of what has become a waste of time and money but I do blame the majority of publishers for letting them get that way. I’ll get over it, I mean I’ll have to when eventually we’re all downloading our games without even a disc let alone paper manual!