Ea Announces Agreement to Be Acquired by Pif, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners

Its not even that, both Mass Effect and Dragon Age are fantastic series with latest games being mediocre at best. If they did the same thing as before it would be more successful, so they clearly don't know what is the right thing for the customers.

I'd argue indie games exists despite of capitalism, not because of it. But that's my opinion, I won't claim that's some universal truth.

The further they moved away from that, the more generic it became. I don't want to say any one was really the "last good one" but the last one I put significant time into was BF2 but I played all pc versions up to 4 and you're right, it was absolutely broken on launch. It's not why I haven't played one since but I never did go back to BF or even really FPSs since. They all seem like CoD clones now, even (or especially) the CoD franchise and it's tiring.

Shoutout for the Chris Houlihan room.

At a base level, it tells you about abilities that you have from the beginning of the game but don't know the buttons to press to trigger them, but it goes much deeper.

Great game, 100% recommend.

Plenty of my friends who were less than geniuses enjoyed these same games I did.

Games now just focus more on lower engagement players. It's easier than ever to get into a game but, easy come, easy go. Frustration just serves to get someone to move on rather than buckle down and persist. Previously, when gaming was less easy to get into, the population of gamers self selected to people who had already significantly invested in the hobby and were much more dedicated to it.

I think the ability to solve the obtuse puzzles and deal with unexplained mechanics had a lot more to do with lack of alternative options and the sunk cost fallacy rather than superior intellect.

This just isn't true. I was there in the 80s and 90s. To an approximation, everyone played video games. The limiting factor was wealth more so than nerdiness; games cost a lot more in real terms back then.

Some specific games, like CRPGs, tended to be aimed at nerds. But that was about fantasy RPGs more so than video games - it goes along with tabletop RPGs and Dragonlance books. But you also have people who went out and bought a new computer with a CD-ROM drive just so they could play Myst, because that game was legitimately a pop culture fad that summer.

And then in modern media we have some selective retelling because a lot of the history is being told by people who themselves are deep into geek culture and also have a case of main character syndrome.

I enjoyed the exploration, the setting, the cryptic writing. Even some of the more obtuse game design decisions appealed to my tastes, such as the lack of a quest log and a map that is just a geographical representation of the world, with minimal markers. It forced me to pay more attention to the world, recognize the terrain, learn the paths to navigate, etc. It was a game where I really was ready to lose myself in.

But it ultimately failed to have minimal respect for my time, and for that I hated it.

First when I accidentally killed a boss that could be spared. I didn't want to kill him, I just happened to be too strong and failed to react mid combo when he surrendered. The game fucking auto saved and I had to start over from scratch.

Second time when I was in the middle of a conversation when I was interrupted by my wife. I couldn't load a game to watch the cutscene again. It fucking autosaved again. I had to read a transcript online to understand what was going on. Total immersion killer.

Lastly, I remember a boss that took me like 40 attempts to kill. I am okay with the challenge. I am not okay with having to go through a mostly boring gauntlet of enemies for each attempt. It offered no challenge, I just felt like I was filling a form before each attempt. A long, 10m long form.

After killing that boss I uninstalled.

Rant over.

Maybe 4 things in that game are what I would describe as quests and mostly they don't matter if you do them or not

That's why I think novelty and 'old AAA game' richness has a ceiling development_cost : unit_of_content ratio.

There are things that were feasible for Fallout 1 to do that accountants would lose their shit over today, precisely because they were relatively cheap then and astronomically expensive now.

... the real travesty is the corollary of that though: that gameplay/difficulty must ensure a maximum number of players see all the content.

Which has led to the 'impossible to fail' gimmicks that make modern AAA games feel less satisfying.

Honestly, it feels like Rockstar and Valve are the only ones making truly great AAA games these days...

(But mostly because they're on stable financial footing and willing to take as long as it takes)

ME1 is a an excellent story-driven action RPG with clunky combat and issues with environment size/complexity due to technological limitations of the platform it was built for.

ME2 is a very good story-driven third-person shooter with excellent combat and a thin veneer of RPG elements that has overcome a lot of the technical issues with ME1 despite the same platform/engine.

ME1 by far has the better story and I enjoyed it more than ME2 on my first playthrough years ago, but now, already knowing the story, ME2 was more fun to play this time. It's a shame they couldn't have improved on everything good about the first one instead of turning it into a shooter.

Personally, I'd love to see the whole trilogy reimagined and remade as a single giant open-world action RPG, but that's probably never happening.

It does seem like they tried to avoid just becoming the "Mass Effect and Dragon Age" developer but that did not really work that well for them. Maybe that turned out to be a distraction. I think it also did not help that everything they put out was compared to both of those and seemed to have an expectation that it had to be as big or was a failure.

It isn't like they had a constant stream of massive hits. Don't get me wrong I love Jade Empire but how many people actually remember that game exists?

Likely also did not help that their 2 biggest IP's also had gameplay that very different from eachother.

I am (or maybe was until this news) cautiously optimistic about the next Mass Effect.

The weird story absence was due to the studio trying to make it one of those live-service “forever games” that would make them infinite money.

It sounds silly at first but the US military has been doing something similar for ages with Hollywood, at least since WWII. The difference is the armed forces use access to military equipment for filming as the carrot rather than financing the productions directly.

That the message is going to be “Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are tier-1 allies / partners / powers” depends on your perspective. Lots of gamers outside the US these days!

That said, given Saudi Arabia's whole vibe, one can't expect that angle to go all that well for anyone else's representation (Women, Israelis, LBGTQ+ folk...)

I was talking to the GP and P comments in regards to the company's focus. They discussed the problems of current EA and whether future development would be increasingly profit-driven at the cost of quality.

>>I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in the current gaming market.

>I'm not sure the investment group attempting to diversify Saudi oil income is going to be less profit oriented than the stock market in general

I suspect that EA was not purchased with profit as the primary motive, and that decreasing quality further would run counter to their aims.

I think their motives are more sinister and subversive. I'm not sure what the relevant equivalent term to (e)sportswashing is for this. Gamewashing or whatever. I think buying EA is going to be a prominent example of it.

My comment included calling Saudi Arabia's Crowned Prince Mohammed bin Salman by his nickname Mohammed Bonesaw. This refers to his alleged direct order to assassinate and butcher Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

The 15-person Saudi agent hitsquad used a bonesaw to dismember Khashoggi, hence the nickname.

This makes clear from tone and context that I do not feel that the Saudis buying EA is a good sign overall.

I realise that relying on tone and context clues to remove ambiguity is not good accessible writing so I apologise for that.

A “stagnant” company isn’t a failed one. It’s profitable. But perhaps it has saturated its market, or otherwise has no other avenues of growth without handicapping what it excels in. This is fine, as long as it continues to increase with inflation (as it should, if it’s increasing its prices to match so) it will stay profitable and increase your capital at a sustainable and normalized rate.

Or, you can force them to continually increase that profit rate infinitely in a closed system, an impossible ask.

This is literally the concept of “late stage capitalism”. What do you do when there is no more growth to sustain because you’ve saturated the closed system that is earth? You can either go hyperaggressive and eat into other avenues, hoping you can beat their incumbents (but either way, one is going to lose their own profit) or continually increase your profits by lowering quality and production costs. Thus why things like coke “used to taste better” or why Ford’s “used to be built better”.

Private capital isn’t beholden to that requirement. It’s an advantage, not a disadvantage. They simply need to remain competitive and everyone wins: the labor gets a stable job, the owners get a stable income, the industry gets stable (if not increasing, from better technology) products, etc.