Exactly. Those are such lazy comments to make. Electronic Arts has done some truly wonderful games in the last year or so. It’s frankly embarrassing when otherwise smart people resort to such low hanging fruit. Evil suits! All they care about is profit! They hate gamers! It’s like spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign. What are you, twelve years old? Did you not play Dead Space 3, Need for Speed Most Wanted, or SSX?
-Tom
jpinard
1962
Yes, those issues are just the tip of the iceberg and have all been confirmed in the last week with the latest build. The problem is trucks just get “lost” when shared between regions even though many types of trucks areduplicated like with recycling. It makes regional play totally unreliable and in fact, pointless when you consider education. If you spent as much time as I do in the game testing you’d see how broken so much of the core game is. It’s not hopeless as some people think, it just needs Maxis to put the resources into it, to get it fixed. The fact they continue to pull resources out of the game when basic functions of 1+1=5 is just wrong. It’s not like this is some indie developer barely scraping by. This is MAXIS. Maxis has done the same thing with the Sims 3. There are bugs people have been screaming about going back 7 DLC/expansions and Maxis still won’t divert resources to fixing it. Sims 3 with all DLC (no user content) is unstable and slower than molasses yet they continue to pump out reams of DLC which only makes the existing issues worse. There is a systemic lack of effort into fixing their primary games. It often appears like they saddle 1 person to fix core game issues while setting 300 on DLC or future projects. I actually like DLC unlike many people, but not when the game it’s built upon doesn’t work right.
I don’t think EA is evil. EA is fantastic when it comes to LGBT rights and other social issues. They appear to treat their employees better than they did when the whole EA spouse debacle happened. But I think they set ridiculous release targets for their developers and they have some of the worst quality control of any company out there.
Their longtime CEO left last year in a hurry and wasn’t replaced for months.
They won “Worst company in America” twice in row against “Bank of America” and I bet they will win the triple later this year!
Battlefield 4 is buggy, Sim City is buggy, Dead Space 3 sold badly and the series is probably dead, NfS Rivals was panned for being impossible to be played on PC with frame rates above 30, Madden sucked according to Madden fans, NBA Live sucked. All they managed to release in an OK state was FIFA and NHL.
All fine at EA for sure.
Edit: Forgot their stake in mobile: Real Racing 3 was full of bad micro-transaction shit (" energy system") and Plants vs Zombies 2 seems to have not generated enough money so they changed the micr-transactions / balance of the game for the worse (see the PvZ 2 thread for details).
Spock
1964
I have trouble with regional play too, but if all I want to do is make my own little town, I find SimCity pretty fun. Yeah, the marketers were less than honest about the reason for the online requirement, but I don’t really care.
As for EA, I have a relative who works there, and he’s a nice, hard-working guy. So not everyone there is evil. :)
It is sad to hear about the region play still being busted, since that is the core of the game. I mostly moved to sandbox play a while ago, because of all of the issues with transferring money between cities (something that basic didn’t work! embarrassing).
All of the criticisms about Real Racing’s micro transactions, the poor Rivals PC port, the bugginess of Battlefield…they are all very legitimate. But why do we have to go from that, to such vitriol against the entire company? The “worst company in America” designation is such obvious and insulting hyperbole that just makes it hard to take these legitimate criticisms seriously. It’s a survey that no one should embrace. Surely, reasonable people can look at Battlefield 4 and see a multiplayer FPS that has made enormous strides, where its competition has remained stagnant? Or they could play Mirror’s Edge, an original, clever game with cool mechanics and tricks that were recently featured on AGDQ? Or play SSX like Tom said, and say, wow, there is innovation even in some of their sports titles? Or they could go meet with some EA employees and realize, hey, they aren’t drones after all, even if upper management has been a bit too heavy-handed.
robc04
1966
It seems so obvious that it is silly to even say it, but my guess is that all of us know that EA’s employees are just like the employees at any company. Some good, some bad, most just trying to make a living. It is some of their public leadership that is the focus of the hate. I mean, Lucy Bradshaw seems like a freakin BS artist. I can’t believe how much crap she kept trying to feed people in her blog after it was pretty obvious it was BS. Some of their policies are consumer unfriendly - like the ‘no modding’ rule. Yes, it is within their rights, but it does seem either misguided or incompetent to most of us knowing how modding has impacted other games. I remember being a bit annoyed when EA bought the exclusive NFL license. They didn’t do anything wrong from a business sense, but it sure wasn’t good for the consumer. I’ve had no desire to buy a MAdden game in many years. I wish they had some competition.
Edit: Jeremy, you aren’t the Brian Greene who worked at EA, are you? I don’t think there is anything bad about it if you are, you would know more about the company than most of us.
Spock
1967
I’m a big fan of EA’s sports titles. FIFA 14 is a really nice game, and I’ve logged countless hours with NHL 14. Sure, there are glitches in both games, but they are marvelous achievements all the same. I’m less enamored of Madden 25, as it seems to have fewer innovations, but I still enjoy it.
Not to continue to take this too far off tangent (and I agree with your assessments) but in FIFA’s case, they’ve got competition from PES, and the best evolutions in NHL when they were going up against 2K. Madden hasn’t had competition since 2004, and sadly it shows.
Catching up on the last two pages it seems like people are being hilariously tolerant of someone whose opinion more or less directly contradicts observable reality and whose arguments are almost entirely constructed out of logical fallacies and corporate wishful thinking. There’s almost no chance that he isn’t some kind of EA shill. The fact that he only has 27 posts isn’t an indictment of him, but it does mean it’s easy to look at his post history and see that when he’s not making terrible arguments in favor of corporate interests in this and the Youtube thread, his only other posts are contentless thread bumps that could be made by a bot. And by “other posts” I actually mean “two other posts.”
In what ways do my opinions “contradict observable reality”? There’s so many insults here. :/
What’s so unfortunate is that, even though you apparently have more than enough time to rummage through my post history and come up with new insults, you do not bother to respond in substance to anything I say – whether it’s my discussion about EA here, or copyright in the YouTube thread. Instead you assume I am a member of some vast EA conspiracy to manipulate the Qt3 forum, which frankly sounds kind of nuts to me.
It seems so obvious that it is silly to even say it, but my guess is that all of us know that EA’s employees are just like the employees at any company. Some good, some bad, most just trying to make a living. It is some of their public leadership that is the focus of the hate. I mean, Lucy Bradshaw seems like a freakin BS artist. I can’t believe how much crap she kept trying to feed people in her blog after it was pretty obvious it was BS. Some of their policies are consumer unfriendly - like the ‘no modding’ rule. Yes, it is within their rights, but it does seem either misguided or incompetent to most of us knowing how modding has impacted other games. I remember being a bit annoyed when EA bought the exclusive NFL license. They didn’t do anything wrong from a business sense, but it sure wasn’t good for the consumer. I’ve had no desire to buy a MAdden game in many years. I wish they had some competition.
Edit: Jeremy, you aren’t the Brian Greene who worked at EA, are you? I don’t think there is anything bad about it if you are, you would know more about the company than most of us.
Nope, I am not that Brian. However, I will say that I agree with your assessment of Bradshaw’s blog posts. I think she was trying to sell unpopular DRM as best she could, but she went a little too far into an alternate universe.
Teiman
1971
I have the position that “banning modding” is the same thing has buying a car, and finding you are banned from painting with other color. Of course, nobody is going to respect that ban.
That analogy is poor, because as I mentioned earlier, there is a huge legal and logical difference between modifying a single legally purchased product the (first-sale doctrine), and making and distributing modifications that can modify a limitless number of legally purchased products. I am free to markup and modify my own purchased copy of “Harry Potter”; I am not free to distribute my modified copies to the public.
The QT3 crowd is older gamers and generally we have less time and more money than your typical game community. I regret both the time and money I spent on SimCity. I really was looking forward to a new version of a much beloved franchise.
It is one thing to take a franchise like Civilization and make Civ V which arguable is worse game than Civ IV. But this game is worse in almost every respect from virtually every game in the series, I guess it is an improvement over the original because of better graphics. The lengths that EA went to make it online only are simply unbelievable and then they massively failed on the execution.
I am not convinced the game is salvageable, but at this it would take a chorus of people say wow the latest version is really great before I’ll spend more time.
That is totally fair. I was just trying to comment on people who malign all devs at EA for things they are not responsible for.
Teiman
1975
You don’t have to include the whole work to make a mod. You normally distribute a few modified files (that is probably still not legal), but if you where forced to be compliant to please the god of lawyers, you could distribute a binary patch so you don’t distribute any copyrighted work.
Pod
1976
You’ve said this before, you’re implying that all mods redistribute the game. Is that actually true? I don’t know about the latest Sim City game, what form do the mods take? e.g. that mod that turns off online checks.
a) downloadable patches applied on the player’s computer that alter the executable game code
a2) instructions on which bytes in a binary file a player can alter
b) new code in dlls that are injected or naturally loaded by the game
c) instructions for people to alter data files.
d) copies of data or executable files that someone has altered and then re-uploaded
e) another distinct fashion that I’ve forgotten?
It’s completely ok, from a legal point of view, for a piece of executable code to use another person’s assets. An example of that is the Doom engine re-implementations. You’re right that you’re not free to re-distribute modified copies of the game, but that’s now what I’m talking about here. For all we know all of the viable Sim City mods don’t actually do this. They could simply be patches that alter things.
‘Reverse-engineering’ and applying modifications to executable code ( a) in this case) is often deemed ‘illegal’ in EULAs and so on. I have no idea of its actual legal status in the US, but I’d imagine it’s in favour of it not happening and enforcing the producer’s will, because that’s basically how all US software laws work. Caveat to everything in this post: IANAL.
Pod
1977
Is a binary patch actually legal though? You’re causing the creation of a derivative work, and all that. It’s different from taking a copy of Harry Potter and drawing on it in pen (or even giving instructions to people on how they should apply the pen), because you physically own the copy of Harry Potter. But software laws, especially in the US, often simply have you as some kind of renter to a copy.
Teiman
1978
Like you say, a binary patch is actually instruction so you modify your copy of the game. Is like instructions to paint your car.
The point “is this legal” is not useful, anyway. Laws can be wrong, and then you have to fight so they are fixed.
rezaf
1979
Out of curiosity, what kinds of mods were you guys expecting?
Strictly visual mods, as were the majority of SC4 mods, might still be tolerated, while meaningful mods (ones that manage to greatly improve gameplay) would require nothing short of source access, something almost no developer has done (Firaxis has with Civ4 and some FPSes had their full source released, which may or may not count).
rezaf
Pod
1980
I agree, but jeremybriangreen’s entire point seems to be “EA have the legal position to prevent mods”, and I don’t think that’s true.
You don’t need a full source release to have functional mods. Many games since Quake manage it with a scripting system and dll support. (e.g. recently KSP and Minecraft follow a similar theme and have a huge number of extremely diverse mods, as well as simple visual ones), which would be B above.
KSP is a very interesting case as it used to have no mod support. The nature of the CLI as a non-compiled and easily decompilable and reflective runtime meant that someone on a forums made a dll that he injected into a running game and it would offer up a crappy API for other people to make mods with. Suddenly people could make some great mods for KSP! Squad liked it so much they made a much better, natively supported solution.
(Then they hired him, I think?)
