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EA/BioWare Deal Finalized, Nets EA Ten Franchises
Gamasutra notes that the announced deal, where Electronic Arts was to purchase BioWare/Pandemic, has now been formalized. This arrangement will fold ten new franchises into the EA family, from the just-released Mass Effect all the way back to BioWare's classic titles. "EA Games president Frank Gibeau will oversee both studios within his organization, and BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have each been named as vice presidents of EA and co-general managers of BioWare. Similarly, Pandemic's Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick have each been named vice presidents of EA and co-general managers of Pandemic, while Greg Borrud has been named vice president of EA and chief production officer of Pandemic Studios. "
Following this announcement, all BioWare and Pandemic developers were ordered to repor t to headquarters for a 10 digit tattoo on their arms and re-EAification. Prepare to learn how to saturate the market with your titles differing by only one digit!
... oh wait, nevermind, competition's been
purchased. Whew! That was close. Ok, everybody
resume average game ideas, and above all nothing
risky or extraordinary! Remember, your ideas
have to be approved through like seventy levels of
command so don't even start with any out of the
ordinary stuff we aren't sure will be an instant
mediocre game netting us an average profit.
Christ, for a moment there I thought EA's Battlefield, Medal of Honor & Crysis games were going to have to step it up a notch to compete with these new
WoW, I can't wait for Mass Effect 2 through 5 and Mass Effect 2010, 2011, 2012 & 2013. Just imagine the rosters!
My work here is dung.
It was as if millions of gamers cried out and were silenced.
Bungie - Was so unhappy working with Microsoft they forced them to let the company become independent and work on any platform they want
Bizarre - Ended their exclusive Xbox development when they went off to Activision
Bioware - Ended their exclusive Xbox development when they went off to EA
That pretty much just leaves Lionhead and Rare as Microsoft's first party Xbox developers. Rare has been a disaster for the money Microsoft paid to acquire the developer. Lionhead has been 'meh'. A decent developer that talks too much about grand plans that continually disappoint in their actual product.
With these rumors of Microsoft looking to license the Xbox to third party manufacturers you have to wonder if Microsoft is ready to turn their focus away from console hardware and back to Windows gaming.
Come on EA, dip into that huge bank account you have and fully fund Baldur's Gate III!
Living With a Nerd
Bioware announced their next game, expected to be released in early 2010, Madden Effect 2k10.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
But Duke Nukem Forever is being reworked exclusively for X-Box!
This is my sig.
You mean Baldur's Gate 2009 (to be released Autumn 2008). Or as it's known internally 'BG2 with facial expressions'. And I've heard rumours of plans for a followup, known only by it's secret codename 'BG2 with facial expressions and realistic grass effects'
Is that the one with the Mohawk class of Night Elves?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Did you play KOTOR? And KOTOR 2? And you can say with a straight face that Obsidian is "the Honda to their GM"?? Jeezus, KOTOR was a terribly fun game, and ran pretty well on the Xbox. KOTOR 2 ran horribly, had major, game ending bugs, apparently used five year olds as the level designers, and left more plot lines dangling than a daytime soap, and made the Sopranos look like a well-thought out, complete ending. To top it all off, they left all the voice acting to a fantastic, unimplemented ending in the final product, rubbing it in for us. Bioware's not the best ever, but if Bioware is GM, I'd suggest Obsidian is Zastava (maker of the famous Yugo).
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
That EA is allowed to buy out all their competition rather than be forced to produce top notch titles in an effort to battle over the market is a farce to me. They did it with Madden as well by scooping up the NFL license just as Visual Concepts' ESPN NFL 2k series was starting to show signs of seriously competing with Madden. They can't be allowed to continue doing this. Why would BioWare want this for themselves? Doesn't anyone inside gaming feel that EA needs less help than anyone? Stay independent! Fight the urge to conglomerate!
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While I agree that the majority of EA games are fuming turds, don't touch Crysis. It's one of the best-looking and most fun games I have played in a long while.
Apparently Crytek has been getting real nice treatment from EA, it is good to see that they are giving the developer's they own some bit of freedom now. Hopefully this will continue with BioWare.
But... I don't know, considering how well Crysis sold, we'll have to wait and see what they allow BioWare.
Does this mean that all of Bioware's titles are going to play like XBOX games ported to the PC, like all of the C&C games now? I'm sure it does.
You people and your slight differences disgust me! - Prof. Farnsworth
Say what you will... Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights were awesome games.
I predict this aquisition will go just as well for them as it did when EA bought out Origin, Bullfrog and Westwood studios!
"We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place your keyboards on the ground, then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Make no further attempt to innovate. Assume the 'Party Escort Submission Position' or you will miss the party."
When someone says, "Any fool can see
The GPP did specify Black Isle (and later Obsidian) and given the people involved it is not unreasonable to view the two development houses as overlapping entities with a shared history. And as the developer of the best adventure-style Infinity engine game (Planescape: Torment), the best hack-and-slash Infinity engine game (Icewind Dale) and NWN2, the Honda:GM analogy doesn't seem too flawed.
This has spoilers, so don't read further if you're still playing the game. It's also opinion so feel free to disagree ;).
Crysis was pretty and the physics were awesome, but I'm not sure if I'd describe it as "fun". The only thing that stopped me from quitting was the fact that I paid for it. Oddly enough everyone despises the alien plot theme, however that was the *only* saving grace for me. Running around the jungle got old. From the helicopter pulled directly from Half-Life that could find you if you were crouched in a bush being completely still at night under a heavy canopy of trees to the human enemies taking *clips* of ammo into them without dying. And when you first explore the alien base in 0G it's one of the most aggravating levels I have ever played in my life and I was constantly confused as to where I was actually supposed to go. It only got interesting after that and even then you had annoying shit like escorting your friend to fires to warm up when sometimes the fires weren't there (nice bug) and flying your airship through a swirling vortex which killed me a number of times. Let's hope the sequel is better.
Valve, id, Epic?
"Gentlemen, you can't have a small worry in here! This is the Crysis room!"
Not necessarily. KOTOR 2 was bug-ridden and had missing plot-lines because LucasArts wanted to rush it out the door in time for Christmas. The Obsidian team left the data files for a much more complete version of KOTOR 2 on the XBox disc, and a group of modders calling themselves Team Gizka http://team-gizka.org/ are trying to restore the lost content. They seem pretty close to completion.
One thing I've heard rumours of, is that they're actually illing to pay a little more to keep the talent that bioware brings to the table. rather than just buying the company out, letting the people go and replacing them with less-talented kids fresh out of school. We'll see how long that lasts, I hope the good Doctors got some good money for it. I'm looking at you Muzyka.
Example 1 - Dungeon Keeper series by Bullfrog:
"Bullfrog had decided not to do any other RTS of any kind. This decision was in effect the end of Bullfrog as a brand; the company had already been owned by EA for several years, and EA laid off some employees and put the remainder onto other projects such as the Harry Potter line."
"2004 met the final end of Bullfrog when Electronic Arts combined their side studios into EA UK."
Lord British - talking about how EA is a ONE TRICK PONY:
"Richard Garriott: The short explanation was, as they say, fundamental creative differences. If you've seen any of the Ultimas, you know they contain very large virtual worlds, deep story lines and they took me each years to develop. But EA's core business is making sports games, and they've got a machine and a process that does that very, very successfully. Frankly, EA wasn't convinced that the MMOG business model was the way of the future and so that ultimately led to my retirement from EA. In fact, when I left in 2000, I fully anticipated that if EA wasn't interested in MMOGs, that Microsoft or some other big company would dive into this bold new world that we'd opened up and then dominate the market segment. After a year of retirement -- and with no one approaching us -- my brother Robert and I decided to put together a company to create MMOGs that we briefly called Destination Games. "
So you toned all of the graphics settings down, for both your drivers and in the game, and with a 2.0GHz dual core and your other specs, you had FPS drops in the DEMO?
Something else is wrong. Either the demo had some glitch when you tried it or your system is goofed, because I have the real game and ran it on an Athlon 3000+ w/ the same amount of RAM and a whopping Radeon 9800, and after toning the resolution and settings down, it played just fine. Didn't look bad either - I don't recall having to bottom out every setting or anything.
You have plenty of hardware to play games and make them look pretty good... but the newest games will always try to support the latest hardware features if not a little more than that if you turn all the settings up. If you want gazillions of subdivisions in your curved meshes and a ton of custom shaders, all at 1600x1200 - you're going to need to buy the hardware that can do those things.
What we don't want is for game makers to require such settings for it to be fun and playable (which was not the case with Crysis). For me, to this day, a handful of NES games are still worth playing occasionally; high performance graphics and fun are entirely independent axes of each other, for most anyway.
I now have a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 8600GTS, and IMO BioShock looked a lot more polished and creative than Crysis - I was very happy with the graphics/performance quality I got out of both games considering my hardware. Still - I'm guessing even with twin 8800 monsters, you're going to hit some slow spots if you turn every last setting as high as it goes.
As for Crysis, the game... it was really well done, and a lot of fun to play until you get about 1/3 of the way through it, then a glitch shows up for which you end up on Google looking for a sloution - only to find out that you weren't 1/3 of the way through it, but rather that glitch that prevented you from blowing up the big guy was the very last thing to do in the game.
It was just too short! And the bug at the end COMPLETELY ruined it since (last I checked) they weren't acknowledging it and hadn't made a patch, and the only workaround was to keep reloading and trying not to solve everything the same way until (seemingly at random) it would work.
I still have no idea what the ending was - I was too pissed off to come back to it for a while, and by then I was into another game.
Oh, and the aliens in Crysis, aside from all looking like the same model, looked like they came straight out of Duke Nukem 3D, except they weren't billboards... even with lots of texture filters you could see huge, ugly, disgusting texture pixels, unless it was the other 7/8 of the alien which was jet black and was more of a silhouette than a model... so if you saw any of that, that wasn't your hardware. ;)
I wholeheartedly disagree. I thought KOTOR 2 was excellent. The plot wasn't as good as KOTOR, but the gameplay was much better (extra levels, extra feats, lightsaber forms were actually pretty damn cool). It ran just fine for me (and on a woefully underpowered system, at that), I encountered no bugs, and the level design was pretty much the exact same damn formula as in KOTOR, so you have no grounds whatsoever to complain on that note. I will agree that the ending sucked the big one, but the rest of the game was pretty damn good, and a worthy sequel to KOTOR.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
What about that game. WHAT? I'm a Sonic fan.
Whilst the 360 is in second place to the Wii, it's still 1st place in terms of software sales by quite a decent margin. That means that no matter what the 1st party support it's still getting a hell of a lot of development attention because it's the console software developers can currently make the most money from.
Seeing as Nintendo and Sony have much greater 1st party software support yet lower software sales for their consoles (despite in the case of Nintendo having a higher userbase) I fail to understand how any perceived collapse of 1st party support is a problem anyway.
Not that Bizarre and Bioware were ever 1st party anyway, just that they simply chose to support only the 360 on certain games, which makes sense when for a large portion of the period they were developing those particular games the 360 was the only console with a sizeable amount of units out there anyway.
Or to put it another way, no you can't have Devil May Cry 4, GTA4, Assassins Creed, Virtua Fighter 5, Beautiful Katamari or Fatal Inertia back for your PS3!