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Electronic Arts To Aquire Mythic Entertainment
Pika writes "According to the Business Wire, Electronic Arts is to acquire Mythic Entertainment, makers of the popular MMORPGs Dark Age of Camelot and the forthcoming Warhammer Online.
With EA being well known for killing MMORPGs, even those with loyal and sizable followings, how does this bode for Mythic's titles?"
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of MMORPG players' voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. ... (if you know how EA destroyed Ultima Online, you know we already cried out in terror)
Well, they can't be all bad then.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
... unless they were about to go under, this has to be a bad thing for every Mythic employee that wasn't also the owner. Despite claims that the "175 member development team will remain in Fairfax" or somesuch in the article, I cannot imagine any situation where, five years from now, any of the current employees will still work for "EA Mythic" in Fairfax. Either the corporate slavedriver pressures will push them out, or they'll quit or move when a "corporate realignment" moves the jobs to California.
There's nothing inherently wrong with working for a big company. There's just something inherently wrong with working for EA.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Sure they say they will let Mythic retain all creative direction, but we know how that worked out for Richard Garriot and Origin Systems.
Execute? [Y/N] _
Why would EA buy a company that does nothing but MMORPGs, just to cancel their projects and kill a profitable asset?
EA isn't dumb, just careless..
Weapons of Mass Analysis
they've learned from their mistakes? Not to be overly optimistic but how many MMORPG's can one company screw up?
(end of post)
Umm... you mean SOE, don't you?
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
I'm sure that's not going to be a problem. It costs too much in money and manpower to convert a studio to the EA image. They probably just wanted the assets, networking code and Intellectual properties of mythic. The studio and employees will probably just be discarded.
Mythic is doing a right fine job of killing their own titles. DAoC was originally a creatively designed, well-balanced game. Since the TOA expansion, it's become little more than a twitch game, where zerging is rewarded far more than strategy and mindless determination to gain levels is rewarded more than any kind of real skill. And lately, Mythic has busied themselves copying the worst ideas from WoW instead of trying to fix their past mistakes -- all the while paying lip service to making the necessary changes. (A 2% increased cast time here, a 0.5% damage reduction there... several orders of magnitude smaller than the fixes that are called for.)
To be honest, for a minute I was in favor of EA acquiring and killing lots of MMOs, simply because I can't stand the current paradigms that most of the MMORPG genre are based on, like level treadmills and timesinks.
Then I remembered that just five short years ago, EA killed my MMO dreams when they shut down Multiplayer Battletech: 3025. I place much of the blame for the tepid and weak pool of current MMO offerings on the axing of MPBT:3025, which was bar none the finest multiplayer 'mech experience I've seen.
Damn you, EA. Damn you to hell for continually working to make MMO games suck forever.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Mythic probably was about to go under. Their game, Dark Age of Camelot, is crap and their players hate them. The only reason DAOC has any players is because they were fairly early to market with a game that had an interesting PvP concept. Unfortunately, they took that concept and pulled a George Lucas. I think very few people will miss Mythic if EA eats them up and excretes something unrecognizable.
If enough employees would rather not work for EA, they can always form their own company. They likely have the talent to do so, and finding financing shouldn't be an issue for people with their reputation.
Yep. EA has destroyed some good companies in their time. Jane's used to make the absolute best military simulations on the market (unless you count DID) before being sunk and long-forgotten by EA, and Westwood, well... Westwood doesn't even exist any more. At least with Red Alert 2, they let them keep the name. Now it's all EA. Maxis survived, I guess (their logo is plastered all over The Sims), but Bullfrog and Origin are, AFAIK, gone, too.
I remember when EA used to present these brands and logos with pride, as though it were simply a representative of them. That was a long, long time ago. I think I was still using my P166 back then, and Jane's Combat.net was still up. Those were the days.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
I know jack about EA, but I've been playing DaoC for 4.5 years. It has been fun as well as frustrating. At times I complain just as much about ToA, the well intentioned patched that is now blamed for pretty much every problem in the game. They've tweaked and rebalanced and patched enough that it shares very little with the original game. But I don't really think that matters even a bit. Did EA buy Mythic to get the DaoC cash cow? I don't think so. I just logged off a few minutes ago because we couldn't find any players to engage. The population has been on a very steady decline, punctuated by blips of interesting new content or events but thats about it. Some time ago they consolidated individual servers into clusters and the next obvious step is to make a super-server to shore up player interest...but even that is a bandAid.
I LOVE DaoC and I wish I could plan to play with my good friends for 4 more years but I will be VERY surprised if I'm still playing in a year.
Acquire.
I seen a couple old Guildies show up from WoW, but the number of guildies leaving or seldom logon is being felt. If DAoC isn't shut down within a year of WAR's relase, I'll be greatly suprised. RVR is sucking on Killibury, battlgrounds are lopsided most of the time, if there is any significant RVR going on. ML/Arty raids are getting fewer, and finding groups for group steps, better have some friendly guildies there to fill in the gaps. I don't know why Mythic is constantly behind the power curve in DAoC. They react to something, usually making it worse by not fixing the problem out right in the first place.
If Sanya is reading this: It's too late for DAoC, but for WAR, please actually use the Team Lead's input instead of blowing them off when they have a valid point. Especially when the team leads can show you where their class is very weak on. If Mythic is planning to deal with Team Leads like they have with DAoC, scrap the plan entirely. It's not fair to the team leaders to waste their time and efforts.
dammy
IceDrakes - Bors - Killibury
They purchased the publisher of my favorite game series of all time (Bullfrog and the Syndicate franchise) and then let it rot. They are worse than Microsoft and Symantec when it comes to buying up the competition and then craptasticizing the product line.
I remember when Electronic Arts was EOA and stood for Electronic Arts. Arts such as Deluxe Paint *, Pinball Construction Set, Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator..
Now it's nothing more than Electronic Sports and goddamn if it has anything that tries to be anything else.
But apparently you can buy up all the naive CIS grads...
There's something about a company laying people off and then making aquisitions, makes one hunger for unions.
Look at their acquisition history and realize it. EA does not build. They only buy a successful idea, milk it dry, toss it away, then buy the next one. They don't know jack about production values, and they don't give jack about their customers.
Examples wanted?
The "Sims" series of games. Maxis created a lot of interesting "Sim XXX" games before the Sims, and even The Sims was a very entertaining game. It was games without a "goal", granted, but that was part of the entertainment value. They were made entertaining by their "what if" factor. You could tinker with parts of it and create new scenarios that way. You could even for most of them create some kind of add ons yourself.
This changed with EA's involvement. Now we get petty little add-on boxes every few months that don't really add jack to the game (save a few new toys that we used to get for free). The Sims Online bombed in a way that you could see the crater from the moon. Since, well, who's want to pay monthly for what is essentially an IRC client (or MUSH/talker) with graphics?
Westwood acquisition and the C&C line? Do I need to say more?
What personally hit me in the Westwood merger was Westwood's MMORPG Earth and Beyond, and how it changed after EA scooped it up. It had issues. It was still very young when EA got its milking hands onto it, and a LOT of effort would have been needed to make it soar. Balancing was still in the making, WW has made a lot of mistakes (understandably, being their first MMORPG pitted against a very experienced player base), but that could have worked out. EaB was one of the few MMORPGs with a VERY good and well developed storyline, that was its strong point, and its selling point.
The first thing EA did when they grabbed it was to strip the voice acting which was "too expensive". Unfortunately, a lot of players considered it critical for the involvement and the "feel" of the game. And it was. Balancing would have been very necessary and critical, and it would not have been easy, but it could have been done. It wasn't done. The Jenquai Explorer and even more the Progen Sentinel were until the very end very useless classes. Aggro management was NEVER fixed (the healer invariably had aggro, no matter what the warriors did). And a lot of other issues that simply were never fixed. EA milked it, without giving back to it. And the worse the game did, and the more player quitted because of it, the less EA was inclined to fix it. They simply let it die. Slowly and painfully.
I switched over to DAoC. And the game rocked back then. That was before the ToA expansion (which is still, IMO, the worst expansion in MMORPG history). But Mythic had the guts and smarts to realize it stinks and opened up new servers without it. Would it have happened with EA? Most likely not. They would've gone and milked the game dry, then toss it.
And my fear is, they will.
Now I'm playing EVE. Should EA decide to ackquire CCP, it will be a sad day in MMORPG history.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I guess it was getting on a bit, still it's sad to see it go.
Why EA do this I don't know, but they're renowned for acquiring online games and shutting them down (sure to happen with this) - too much competition for them perhaps?
EA only did what Mythic wanted someone to do. Over all this is a good thing.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
Just like everyone else, then? The same has happened to pretty much every single SOE game too, for example. Maybe with the exception of Planetside, where it's hard to squeeze in too many WoW ideas since it's a MMO-FPS. I mean, seriously, it's UT-2004 in a persistent world. Though I wouldn't be surprised one bit if anyone tried anyway.
And some WoW ideas aren't even bad, or at least they worked in WoW. What gets my goat is that the people copying them:
1. don't even understand those ideas or why they worked, so they'll implement a grotesque carricature of the original gameplay element. So even if it was a good idea, the copy will often be bad, and if it was bad, it will end up even worse.
2. the result often lacks any coherence. WoW may well be a collection of ideas, some good and some bad, but they're like an interlocking set of cogs forming a finely tuned and coherent-looking whole. (Yeah, you may not like it, but seeing as they milk more money than anyone else from the market, by a whole order of magnitude, it's hard to argue that it's not at least finely tuned to that end.) The copycats most often just copy some disparate elements and end up with a piss-poor heap of cogs that don't even fit together and just are a sore sight when you try to view the whole. It's like trying to make the greatest painting by stealling square-inch sized pieces from Michelangelo's Sixtine Chappel, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, etc. It just won't work that way.
3. as you illustrate, they'll just piss off the existing fan base. People have invested weeks or months in their characters, have learned what works and what didn't, and you were left with the people who actually liked (or at least tollerated) it that way. Making some broad-sweeping changes will just piss off everyone who liked it the old way. Changing it again will piss off those who liked it the new way. And eventually you even piss off people who didn't even have any particular fondness for any flavour-of-the-month along the way, but are getting irritated when their virtual persona keeps being changed by someone else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When are EA gonna rename themselves to GS, like, Game Sematary?
DAOC was built using a third party game engine. EA gets very little if they're buying them just for their enhancements.
DAoC was never balanced. Do the math for how it worked at launch. A 50 warrior type vs a 50 caster type; the caster had the ability to burn the warrior down before taking a single point of melee damage. If I remember the distances and casting times properly, unless the caster was surprised by the warrior, the caster could drop him on the 4th damage spell, with the warrior still several steps away from reaching melee range.
DAoC was a joke. Mythic's stewardship was even worse than their balance. Ignoring pleas and reasoned arguments with backing data, releasing new patches that rendered the already poor balance even more lopsidedly, and dialing up already powerful classes at the expense of others.
Mythic isn't worse than Verant was, but not by much.
Rumor has it that the design doc for MPBT:3025 called for increasing the possible players in a battle to 16v16, as well as fun stuff like a much larger galaxy (kind of a duh, once it's out of beta) and missions more complicated than "wipe out the other 'mechs" as well as more advanced chain-of-command and supply line stuff.
Would have been so sweet... I miss MPBT forever.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin