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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)
... 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] _
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.)
No, because SOE has yet to actually kill one. EA had Earth and Beyond, was testing Motor City Online, and for a brief while had a Battletech: 3025 game in widespread beta. In addition to those being killed or canceled, they also canceled Ultima Online 2, another Ultima Online spinoff and fucked the Sims Online hard enough to make Maxis walk funny for years afterward.
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
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.
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
Multiplayer Battletech was a freaking awesome concept.
...The game was a freaking blast when it was in beta, but it wasn't at a point where I would pay money for it. Unfortunately, this is true of every EA game I've ever played.
There were territories you had to defend or conquor in matched battletech mech matches.
A few things that would have made it cooler:
-earning cash through wins and holding territories in order to customize the weapons / armor loadout of your mechs
-micropayments for this cash to subsidize the game and the servers (a la Bang! Howdy, or Gunbound)
-better graphics, more varied maps. Unfortunately, it looked fairly pre-mechwarrior4. The user interface for the lobbies was damn nice, though.
-people in leadership positions being able to set waypoints, like you can in single player mechwarrior games
-people in higher leadership positions being able to set daily goals, etc.
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.