Electronic Arts To Aquire Mythic Entertainment 82
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?"
Doubt of Cancellation.. (Score:4, Interesting)
EA isn't dumb, just careless..
Re:Well (Score:3, Interesting)
Big deal. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Current State of DaoC (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
DAoC (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Confusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Poor Mythic Employees (Score:4, Interesting)
The only people who got any benefit from the changes made because of the law suites were the people who already had a ton of seniority. All the people who were still there on the lower rungs of the ladder or even worse those still considered "temp" after working there for over a year had no improvement at all. In fact some of the minor benefits they had were taken away.
The hours did change at all. In fact the last year I worked there was probably one of the worst.
EA doesn't raise cash cows. They milk them dry (Score:5, Interesting)
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.