Slashdot Mirror
EA Shuts Down Visceral Games, Shifting Development On Its Star Wars Game (kotaku.com)
Visceral Games, the studio behind games like Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space, is being shut down by EA. The Star Wars game in development at Visceral will be revamped and moved to a different studio. Kotaku reports: "Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe," EA's Patrick Soderlund said in a blog post. "In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design." Soderlund added that Visceral will be "ramping down and closing" and that "we're in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA." "Lastly," he said, "while we had originally expected this game to launch late in our fiscal year 2019, we're now looking at a new timeframe that we will announce in the future."
This kind of thing makes me think that their next step might be to push it to some other studio, give them money, and shut down Star Wars: The Old Republic if it looks like whatever their new vision is might conflict with an existing MMO (not that the new game needs to be an MMO to meet this criteria: anything vaguely close enough would probably count).
A sacrifice of a studio or two is always required to appease the gods.
Their little waffle about game design sounded absolutely horrible. If you do not make games you want to play, don't expect to make games other people want to play. All you end up doing with formulaic game design is play catch up badly. Computer game production is becoming far more competitive and if you do not get gamers to design your games, you will lose.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Loot boxes, that is. Obviously not enough different light saber colours to fleece the loot box buying "gamers" in the single player story game, so had to pivot to a multiplayer, loot box filled extravaganza.
Only $5.99 for 47 Ewok coins! Use 95 Ewok coins to change the colour of your light saber (purple is an extra 95 Ewok coins)...
Please oh please as the last of 8 people who play it still sigh.
I am still geek enough to hope Disney will launch a new Star Wars series based on the old republic era after the next wave of garbage finishes
http://saveie6.com/
I read this as EA saying something like:
"Our head decision maker likes playing first person shooters and doesn't give a toss about games with well thought out storys. This game is being pivoted from the single player story line based game play to online first person shooter team combat"
No Star Wars fan would want to come back to and enjoy a story-based linear adventure for a long time to come.
EA is a great place to work, if you're into the bondage, submission and masochism side of BSDM.
It will be just another First Person Shooter.
Story need not apply for a job here.
Don't ever make anything like those games again. I played them for years after I bought each one, so you should probably make more Star Wars based racing games.
Also, don't make any more games in the KOTOR continuity, cuz, you know, everyone liked those a lot too.
It is still the MMO treadmill BS that most of us are escaping - but combined with the micro transaction most of us abhor - even if you are subbed (I was) it was in your face.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
EA is being EA and snubbing a studio for not doing well at making games outside its expertise, after being bled dry. (Again) Also now the promising new starwars game that has been in development is now 'Call of Duty Starwars Edition'. Seems par for course for EA.
The problem is that when EA uses the word, it means that whatever they're refering to becomes the next COD clone or a racing game.
Is that the name of a new EA game? Because otherwise that's off topic.
You completely destroyed the gameplay of Battlefront that made it compelling.
You limited the maps so it was pay pay pay instead of action action action.
Keep the new graphic engine however go back to the fast moving strategy game that made BF1 and BF2 great in their own right, both still highly playable (if I didn't enjoy EAW so much).
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Can anybody read through the marketing and management bullshit and translate what really happened here?
Redesigning a game does not require scrapping the entire development studio.
Now is it just me, or does the talk about focus group testing sound an awful lot like the publisher decided to convert the game from something designed by professionals to something designed by committee?
I mean the game was being directed by Amy Henning of Uncharted fame and seemed to be much in the same vein as the games she'd worked on before being ousted from Naughty Dog so it's pretty clear that EA's management was originally looking to make a Star Wars themed Uncharted game, but it seems like they decided to go with what the committee said instead.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
... are dead in the eyes of EA.
That is what i make out of this.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Linear games don't offer the kind of customer retention that multiplayer online games do. If you can't make your customer base pay for win, over and over and over again, a game is not considered worth developing any more. Today's publishers don't want good games. They want the equivalent of a Las Vegas casino.
So odn't buy those. There are still lots of great single player games being made. buy those instead. Bonus, you can play them without a network connex for them to phone home.
End users are not capable to play in all available MMO games simultaneously, so don't expect that your brand will stay at the top of the popularity forever. The number of players is limited, so business dependency only on MMO version of the game is not the brightest idea.
Story based games are like movie blockbusters they can make spikes in popularity, bring massive number of gamers for couple of weeks and then diminish.
not Obama, but the Conservatives did. Since by nature conservatives hate change.