In just a few days, the highly anticipated Mass Effect 3 will bring what looks to be an exciting conclusion to the story of Commander Shepard and his mission to save the galaxy from the Reapers. I’ve been looking forward to this game for quite a while now, but a number of things have me worried about the future of video games: I feel that EA has put an enormous amount of pressure on Bioware to produce content from a marketing and profiteering perspective, rather than from a creative perspective.
EA is laying off an unknown number of individuals from across its Battlefield teams, including workers at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, and Motive Studios, IGN understands.
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When logic meets EA it generates anti-matter ..... so try not to apply it in any meaningful way. Entropy is what matters in there !!
cue the apologist saying that these are mostly just contractors hired for this specific project bla bla bla
The free-to-play reboot topped 15 million players in under three weeks, but EA now claims it needs to reshape the development team.
The community warned them this would happen but nope they knew better they continued with the live service push the made the art style cartoonish and this is the result
It's always so bizarre when studios announce something super early in development under the suggestion of forming the game to player feedback, and then they push against all feedback heading straight for the cliff while everyone is warning them along the way
The Congressional Labor Caucus sent a letter to the FTC warning the debt-financed, largely PIF-owned deal could be bad news for workers
lol ya think? they're sending all that work to the cheaper labor market as soon as possible. and FYI, that labor market has exploded in the last 5-10 years. They have enough people to replace every single job. But honestly, EA is over filled with useless upper management as it is. You could probably trim 25% of their staff with no real loss in production. They aren't gamers, they're business execs. Just look at how many AI related jobs they're already starting to post. Its also hilarious that PIF owns Battle field 6
Wait,
The same congress that attacked Lina Khan when she fought the Microsoft Activision purchase.
The same congress that allowed Disney to buy 90% of Fox
The same congress that allowed Liv Golf to buy the PGA
The same congress that sits back while Paramount tries a hostile takeover despite losing the bid for Warner Bros.
NOW, the suddenly cares about doing what's "right" for works? Yeah, right.
EA now owned by The Saudis and Ubisoft to inevitably be owned by China. In hindsight, once EA and Ubisoft started having their financial woes, they should have pulled a Koei Tecmo/Bandai Namco by merging their operations into one.
OK, once and for all since I'm sick of all the "why are the voice commands only on kinect" questions, it's because the kinect has built-in voice recognition software. Bioware had to do next to nothing to implement voice recognition because of this.
I bought Kinect this week, solely for Mass Effect 3.................true story.
Why is Ashley different? Actually, she just got herself a vamp hairdo and a pushup bra instead of a sensible bun and heavy armor. Biological alarm clock? The desire to go out in style? EA wanting to sell an Ashley bishoujo statue? Does it really matter? How hard is it to figure out it's pandering, plain and simple?
Most accessible of the trilogy? Well, sure. Anybody who played the demo or read about it knows you can dispense with all the characterization and get to the shooting without worrying about any character or role-playing. They took a lot of flack over ME2 being a shooter in RPG drag (deservedly so) but they also saw the moolah that the shooter stuff brought in so they architected the game so you can ship the "boring" talkie stuff and don't have to think: just shoot, duck, and blast. They also threw in a few more RPG bones to the gamers who actually bought ME1 so they can say, "Oh, its not just a shooter! It's more like ME1!" Except, the bulk of the demo was... yup: shoot, duck, blast. Talk RPG, but sell shooter. More pandering.
The prothean being DLC? Well, if you expect 70-80% of your sales to go to shooter fans who don't care about the story, then the Prothean squad member is purely disposable. Because the story parts are just cutscenes they expect to be skipped anyway.
As for the Kinect stuff, sure, blame it on Microsoft throwing money at them. It can't be that it cost next to nothing to add to the game, that it actually adds to the gameplay, and that it lets them pander to the 10 million-plus Kinect owners, right? Like the god mode-like "Story mode" they added, right? Gotta make sure casual gamers can give you money, too.
Let's not kid ourselves, it's all about money and all ME3 versions should be subtitled: Pander Edition. Never mind the RPG fans that helped launch the franchise. Pander to the T&A jiggle fans, pander to the shooter fans, pander to the short-and-simple casual crowd, even pander to the multiplayer crowd. It's all about the moolah.
Me, I pre-ordered long ago and I want to be done with Shepard so I won't cancel. I'll pay it through once.
At which point I'll be done with MASS EFFECT (future releases will clearly be GOW-class shooters) and I'll likely be done with BioWare.
Let them pander to somebody else.
All the hullering and screaming about an option that is not required to play and enjoy the game.
I have seen many time, where developers added options to a multi-plat gane that used feature that were unique to each platform. Like was said above: you guys hate on Kinect, but when it is utilized in a core game, you want the developers to screw around with software to try and emulate the feature on you platform of choice.
Mass Effect was played without Kinect in the first 2 releases. People played and enjoyed it using the same gameplay options that the PS3 and 360 (w/o Kinect) versions will have with this release. Just play the game the way you can and move on. We don't all need BMW's to drive on the highway, do we?
I will still buy Bioware games as they are. I will get my deep RPG's elseware. They would have to dumb down a lot more to get me to move on.
Yea microsoft and Ea, You pull them strings.