EA has a long history of excellent AAA games under their belt. They foster the EA Sports franchises like Madden and FIFA that are always good sellers as well as the action-packed titles like Battlefield, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. They just added TitanFall to the mix and, just like all these other games over the past few years, was told to get steppin’ before all of its bags were packed. You won’t hear any of the developers openly criticize EA because people treasure their jobs and the projects they work on, but gamers and analysts both are for once in agreement over the atrocities that EA have allowed in recent years.
Battlefield 4 could have been the shooter to end all shooters. It’s fun, it’s big, it’s bold. The game feasts on large-scale warfare and does a pretty good job of keeping things somewhat focused like Call of Duty does without pigeon-holding you to one section of the map or style of play. The problem came when it launched with all consoles and PC late last year, where the game constantly crashed and glitches ran wild. It was like playing a Bethesda game only there have been a higher percentage of game-stopping glitches rather than just goofy quirks. As a result, Battlefield 4 struggled to steal the show and developer DICE are taking a lot of the burden by having to constantly scramble post-launch to iron out the kinks. At some point they may just stop trying and move on to an inevitable Battlefield 5 title and make sure it’s right before launching.
The same goes for games like Warhammer Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Both games had huge potential and were hailed as World of Warcraft killers. It was totally within reach, especially with The Old Republic. The games both fared pretty well but the big problem was content and depth, especially in The Old Republic’s case. There just wasn’t enough ready to go at launch and developer Bioware have had to push hard to put more viable content in for new and existing players to remedy the situations. World of Warcraft didn’t have that problem as it took several months of dedicated play & work to get to end-game content and beat it. Even when you did, there were great ploys to keep you coming back for more. But EA didn’t want to wait and decided to push each game out the door before the developers were ready. Warhammer Online’s pre-release cycle was actually cut short by EA and pushed straight to release. The result is always an unfinished game.
The latest tragedy falls to TitanFall. The game is outright fun and a huge shift in shooters because of all the little things added in to make it a fresh experience for all players. The biggest pitfall is content variety and replayable hours. You can sink dozen of hours into the game, but it’s a lot like Call of Duty where you really spend all your time online playing against other players competitively. TitanFall benefits from being so good that the misses are almost completely unknown to most gamers at first. For me, I’m currently 2/3 of the way through my 2nd generation pilot progress (basically a prestige, if you’re familiar with CoD’s leveling system) and I still enjoy the game a lot, but I can tell that it’s a game that will best be enjoyed with friends on instead of playing alone frequently, and that all of the game modes aren’t radically inventive, save for maybe Last Titan Standing. Respawn Entertainment are committed to TitanFall’s success and growth over the rest of 2014. There are hints at not just maps being added to the game’s set list, but perhaps new gametypes, “monsters”, better graphics, and perhaps even new titans coming through DLC and free updates over the next few months. One can only hope, but the tone we get from the devs and others close to these companies that EA are creating tension with the developers and are greatly hurting several of the games that players get excited about pre-launch.
The result to all of this has been a lot of EA hate. Jump onto EA forums and online game news site comments sections and you’ll see a lot of EA bashing, which is appropriate. When the games aren’t finished it’s not the developers saying “screw it, lets put this thing on sale”, it’s the publishing studios like EA, Activision, Microsoft Studios, etc. that are making that bad decision to push the games out unfinished and try to begin drawing revenue. Sometimes it’s necessary because there’s no telling when the games will actually be ready for primetime, or there’s been way too much investment already and the studios need to start recouping their investments just to keep working on the projects. But in the examples of TitanFall, Battlefield, and more this is simply inexcusable. These games make money and bring a much higher number of sales than the average game will and deserve completion before launch instead of 2-6 months after launch. In TitanFall’s case the shortcomings are less noticeable because of the quality and speed the game works with, but not all games have that luxury. Going forward it would benefit EA to make better decisions on their new IPs. If a launch date is in jeopardy then give more support to the development staff to work faster ahead of launch instead of right before or after launch because, at this moment, gamers are ready to crucify EA for their indiscretions and crimes against gaming.
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