Editorial: EA - The First Order of business

EA: The First Order of business

          I think I might be a bit too proud of that pun, to be honest.

          Oh, EA. Not a year seems to go by without one of gaming’s most notorious villains making a blunder. Their recent strategies have proven to be…confusing, to say the least. After attempting for years to shove Activision out of their throne as the king of the November Warfare season, now that they have a fair shot at having one of their many shooter franchises become the industry darling with interest Call of Duty on the wane, they seem to be working overtime to make things unnecessarily complicated and frustrating for both gamers and developers alike.

          I gave them a lot of grief last year for throwing Titanfall 2 under the bus by releasing it in the same week as their own Battlefield 1, essentially destroying any fighting chance the game might’ve had with casual consumers who typically only buy a few games a year and typically go for brands they recognize over something new they might not like. But this year’s Star Wars shenanigans might just make me forget last year’s brainlessness, because what EA pulled this year confirms to me one thing: EA doesn’t care about making quality products anymore. EA just cares about making money.

          I can hear you all right now saying “Well haven’t they always been like that, EA is terrible lol”. Yes, but while this is true to an extent, EA has been known to put out several quality products in the past that gained love from both critics and gamers alike. Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, Mass Effect, and the previously mentioned Titanfall 2 are all great games that came from the house of gaming’s most hated publisher.

          But this is 2017, the year of the loot box and the year of awful publisher decisions. Honestly, when you arrive at the end of the year and Ubisoft of all companies look like one of the good guys, something’s gone horribly wrong in the industry.

          Putting aside the whole Battlefront II loot box shenanigans for now (I’m waiting until I play the final version of the game to talk about that), today I’m here to talk about the tragic tale of Visceral Games and how they hold the key to discovering how EA might’ve already botched the reputation of future Star Wars games as a whole.

          Even if you aren’t familiar with the name of Visceral Games, you probably know their work. In the early 2000’s they were responsible for a bunch of licensed titles, from Lord of the Rings to The Simpsons to even Tiger Woods. It wasn’t until 2008 when things really took off for the company. At the time EA was trying desperately to win back gamer approval by creating new and innovative ideas. This ploy led to the creation of two franchises: one was my beloved Mirror’s Edge, which promptly dropped off the face off the Earth after the first installment before being unceremoniously revived for a sequel last year (I don’t care that your story sucked and nobody else played you, Catalyst! I’ll always love you!). The other was developed by Visceral, as a brand new survival horror series similar in style to the Alien movies. The game came to be known as Dead Space, and became a huge success with fans of horror games.

          Dead Space later spawned an equally successful sequel in the form of Dead Space 2, but when it came to making Dead Space 3 things started to get muggy. A clear victim of publisher intervention, Dead Space 3 inexplicably jumped onto the multiplayer craze that was sweeping the industry, diminishing the intensely scary atmosphere the first two games created almost entirely thanks to the feeling of being all alone.

          EA also had ludicrous expectations for the game. Infamously, EA declared that Dead Space 3 needed to sell 5 million copies in order to be called a success and for them to decide whether or not the series was financially worth keeping around for future installments. Putting this into perspective, Nintendo recently has been especially happy to boast that Super Mario Odyssey sold 2 million copies, calling it the biggest success gaming’s most famous icon has ever seen. Mario is perhaps the franchise with the widest audience imaginable in video games. On the other hand, one of the scariest horror games ever created isn’t going to have quite the same amount of fans as the family-friendly plumber in red.

          Unsurprisingly, Dead Space 3 fell woefully short of EA’s expectations, and that was the end for a franchise once promised to become a multi-media horror juggernaut. The team at Visceral went on to develop the equally unsuccessful Battlefield Hardline, before announcing that they were one of many teams chosen to develop Star Wars games for EA.

          Fast forward a few years, and things fell apart completely. EA announced that Visceral was joining the increasingly lengthy list of companies they’d unceremoniously killed off, and they were taking their Star Wars bounty hunter game with them. In an announcement, the company stated that “due to the fast-paced movement and changing in the game industry” they would be getting rid of the game, so they can “give players an experience they can keep coming back to”.

          Yeah. So basically this means they want to keep making multiplayer games, because Star Wars is one of the biggest licenses imaginable and multiplayer games make the most money with all their loot box and microtransaction garbage EA loves injecting into them.

          So what does this mean for Star Wars as a gaming franchise? Well, I can tell you one thing: 1313 sure ain’t rising from the grave anytime soon. It also means EA thinks we want more Battlefront, despite the loud public displeasure with the first title in 2015 and the fact that the sequel due out later this month has already garnered itself more controversy than most games ever see. According to EA, we don’t want single-player games anymore, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

          I’ll talk more about why single-player games are still the bread and butter of the industry next week since this article’s run on long enough, but I’ll end off by saying this: EA just wants your money. They don’t care about quality products or anything like that anymore. Mass Effect: Andromeda was a monstrous disappointment for franchise fans, and it looks like Battlefront II is going down the same path. My favourite franchise deserves better, but since it’s stuck with Gaming Satan, it likely will become just another moneymaker franchise casual gamers gobble up biannually.

          If all games end up the same, any credibility gaming will have as an art form will be moot. Look at movies. Thor: Ragnarok is nothing like The Godfather, which is nothing like Finding Nemo, which is nothing like IT, which is nothing like Night at the Museum, which is nothing like The Disaster Artist. Each movie gives a different flavour for a different audience. If every game ends up being exactly like Battlefield 1, the industry will be closing up shop quicker than you could imagine.

          Oh well. At least we’ll always have the Lego games.

Song of the Week

Still Alive – Mirror’s Edge