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EA Trying to Buy Take2. EA Wants what it wants


The Damned
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As I said above, I don't MIND if a company wants to have a monopoly. That's completely beside the point, because EA is nowhere close to having a monopoly on the games industry. My beef with EA is that they are far and away the largest game development house in existence, but they produce a consistent string of low quality games. They give you the least product they have to to get your wallet open. Honestly, I can't blame them from a pure business standpoint, even if the tactic is lowbrow and morally bankrupt.

Now, they GET AWAY with it because people buy them anyways (myself not included) which is where I would imagine Wingless is taking his line of questioning. Until the consumers boycott the living crap out of EA and hit them in the wallet, refusing to buy badly produced games, it's not going to change. Which means, it's not going to change.

The problem is that we want to see juggernaut companies like EA spontaneously take responsibility and produce better games, but they simply won't do that without a LARGE incentive. The fact of the matter is, most if not all game developers, animation studios, etc, are not doing this for the art. They're doing it because it's a cash cow. I got out of animation school because I realized that if I couldn't push 60 to 70 hour weeks to be the best of the best at whatever company, I would be pushed to the side in favor of someone who could. Top to bottom, the companies do what makes them the most money. It's harsh, and it's capitalism. So I can't blame them.

Bottom line though: If you really want EA to make better games, it would take MILLIONS of people refusing to buy their products on ANY system before they looked twice.

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After NBA live 03, I've been sick with the Live series and prefer the 2K series. Even though the 2K games could be much better, at least they're incredibly less glitchy and more balanced than the last few Live games except maybe the most recent. Haven't played Live 08.

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I don't hate or love EA. They've made good games, they've made bad ones... though I do have to admit they sure have gone patch happy as of late with some games. Perhaps some extra game testing is in order.

Anyway, what I'm not fond of, is the idea of there being fewer and fewer game companies out there that aren't under some larger conglomerate's umbrella. I've always believed that competition is fertile breeding ground, and it's hard to have competition when companies that once fought and pushed each other, are under the same roof. And really, with this move, EA is in the position to literally eliminate one of their biggest competitors (perhaps their biggest?) in the world of sports gaming. That's not a good thing to me. Yes, there's a chance that various aspects of the 2K line may wind up in Madden, but I personally believe that Madden is its own machine, and that nothing of the 2K line will remain should EA acquire Take 2 (be it by hostile or mutual means).

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Perhaps I should also preface this with the fact that I am an EA employee.

That would help, because last time I checked you were a Midway employee. Now I won't have to work off assumptions. Using my newfound source of objective data, riddle me this:

Why do so many of EA's games suck?

Why aren't you their highest paid inhouse composer?

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That would help, because last time I checked you were a Midway employee. Now I won't have to work off assumptions. Using my newfound source of objective data, riddle me this:

Why do so many of EA's games suck?

Why aren't you their highest paid inhouse composer?

Firstly, site some examples

Secondly, there are an infinite number of composers better suited to the task that I

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Explain please, cuz this directly contradicts the amount of fun my friends and I have playing against each other online.

Look, I play Madden 08 with my friends too and still have a blast (sometimes), but I find the overall quality of the series of games to be unacceptable, and I'll give a few examples.

In the latest installment, the passing game is mostly broken. Making complete passes require mostly luck because the receivers are usually off the screen. Defensive backs ae exceptional at breaking up passes but catch the ball worse than school kids on the playground. Tackling is often difficult because only one defensive player can make contact with the ballcarrier at any one time. Penalties are unpredictable, unpreventable, and often make no sense when reviewing with instant replay. As someone mentioned earlier, players run through the stands. I noticed recently that after missing a field goal, the opposing team receives the ball from the spot of the kick, not the yardline the ball was snapped from. The game is also prone to crashing and freezing. These issues by themselves are at worst annoying, but when in conjunction with every other weird glitch in the game series, they become unbearable. The worst part is that 9 out of 10 annoying glitches will still be in the game when you buy it again next year for $50. So will the graphics. So will the game engne. So will the playbook. However, there will be some new feature that doesn't work in practice nearly as well as it should.

In conclusion, the Madden franchise is successful today more because of the success of professional football in America, not because it is a great game. Because 2K Sports or any other company cannot make a different football game with professional athletes, Madden has no competion that threatens to overtake them., and EA will continue to sell 11 million units of Madden every year until nobody watches the NFL anymore (lol).

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I readily acknowledge that I stay 50 feet away from any sports-related game, but there's every Medal of Honor game I've played... you shoot a guy in the chest and he grabs his foot? Crosslink the animations and the collision detection next time please. There's a number of the James bond games... The Lord of the Rings games... all of them just felt choppy and badly executed. It's not that they're downright horrible to the point of unplayability, but they lack a quality that shouldn't be that hard to attain for a company the size of EA.

Now, I have seen some excellent games from companies owned by EA, like Maxis. I loves me some SimCity 4. But those are (or at least were at the time of release) largely separate companies under EA's umbrella.

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What would be the difference in EA buying 2k?

EA want to be the only people making sports titles. EA doesn't like that about Take 2, because that "costs" them millions in profits. EA also has bought other companies and whittled down their quality. EA is evil and sucks donkey dick.

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What would be the difference in EA buying 2k?

The difference would be that EA and 2K are direct competitors for the exact same type of franchise. It wouldn't make any sense whatsoever for EA to buy a company and then continue to allow them to release games that would compete with the Madden franchise. So at the most what you might see is 2K being bought by EA and then put to work on the Madden games.

With the SimCity series EA wasn't offering anything like that, so it was best for them to simply let Maxis go for it and continue to develop the games as they already would have, because it simply gave a better result.

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I've no real beef with EA, but in all seriousness their games aren't as good as they used to be a few years ago. I reckon they should focus like getting their own games sorted out first before they try and buy into someone else's.

Another thing I don't really get is: Why have they nicked Team Fortress 2's graphics? I know they were responsible for the conversion of the Orange Box to PS3 (which had a dodgy framerate compared to the 360 and PC), but now they're using the same cartoon graphics in both FIFA Street 3 (a game that has been dire in all iterations, but people only buy it because Ronaldinho's on the cover) and Battlefield: Heroes.

I study Computer Games Development in college and my lecturer (who likes EA games and plays them on a regular basis, or so he claims) still refers to them as the proverbial Videogame Vacuum. I know though after what happened with NFS: ProStreet, I'll not be buying any more non-sports games from EA without renting first. After Def Jam, Fight for NY, I got Icon, and was also largely disappointed, but then again, I'll give exception as it was a launch title.

But the prospect of them buying 2K Games, and an EA-labelled BioShock 2 cash-in, that would seriously haunt me.

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