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https://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

Interesting article on Slashdot.

I've read it yesterday after seeing it at the Escapist. Most interesting but not that surprising when you look at EA as a whole.

That's the most depressing thing I've read all week.

I know people say really mean things when they're angry, things that don't always take the bigger picture into considaration. But having worked at a job where sucking up gets you places and having an opinion gets you shunted into a dark corner, I see where this person's coming from.

God, people who aren't passionate about an IP shouldn't be allowed to work on it, especially in management!

Depressing, but not a surprise. Most any company with shareholders is going to make their choices based on pocketbook and butt kissing, not on talent or passion.

It's the curse of EA and it's where Activision is going as well.

Yeah, that was an interesting read while I was at work yesterday.

I'm sure some of what EA Slouse wrote is true, but most just seems like conjecture or office gossip, as alot of the replies on his blog point out. Even one of the persons EA Slouse singles out replies on her blog that, in her case, EA Slouse is horribly misinformed. Dude just makes too many wild claims, involving a number of studios he couldn't possibly have been a part of. His second paragraph pretty much makes it obvious he's in the art department (which of the few things that WAR got right, was the art, it literally inspired me to get back into Fantasy). So I'm not sure how he is privy to the inner workings of upper management and multiple departments of different studios. Just doesn't make sense to me. Unless EA Slouse is actually a collective of disgruntled, soon-to-be laid off employees, I don't put much credence into most of what he/she says, and I take most of what he says with a sizeable dose of salt.

Let me be clear that I'm not defending EA/Bioware-Mythic or denying that WAR was a failure (I gave it a good year of on/off play, and sometimes get an inkling to resub, but its doomed imo. So many possibilities squandered). For all I know, everything EA Slouse states could possibly be true, but I just can't add it up in my mind. Until concrete proof surfaces, I'm doubtful. NDAs will probably ensure the truth is never known.

One thing that I do know for a fact on this rant though, is that Paul Barnett is a huge waste of flesh.

Also, as someone who is most certainly going to get laid off after Christmas, I have no sympathy for EA Slouse. EA Slouse works in the art department of an MMO that been dying since its second month after going live. Did he realistically think he'd stick around til WAR goes offline? If EA Slouse hasn't put together a new portfolio/resume and scheduled some interviews, he/she is as incompetent as the people he calls out. Lucky you had a job as long as you did.

-Nels

What killed WAR for me was the fact that they took GW's nicely done theme and fluff, and turned it into a boring game with stupid & stiff looking characters and monsters.

Its hard to take their word for it when they are just raging about getting fired next month.

A lot of it sounds like standard big corporation stuff - the guy who kisses ass rises to the top, and upper management just wants you to do X, not hear any explanations is pretty much standard. I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of stuff is accurate, and some of the stuff local to the guy, but I agree that the 'inside info' on other areas of the company sounds more like a rumor than solid information.

EAlouse wrote:Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too ……

That was the worst part of it, I had high hopes for that game. I have been following the development movies on you tube and I had high hopes for that one.

I'll admit it didnt sound like the best thing was just the voice overs though. The mechanics for classes seemed pretty good too...?

Guess we will have to wait and see. Very concerning though.

Well, this was an interesting read, but a bit perplexing for me since I don't play MMOs a lot. I had assumed that WAR was doing rather well, but then that may have been just a case of me assuming that "no news is good news."

What really concerns me is the news that Bioware might be wrapped up in this...hopefully this doesn't derail Mass Effect 3!

I like how the comments turned into a huge TOR thing, but I would rather agreet that Mythic/EA realllllly dropped the ball on this one. I never got a second sub because the game was soooo bad....

Ruckdog wrote:What really concerns me is the news that Bioware might be wrapped up in this...hopefully this doesn't derail Mass Effect 3!

Personally, I think they derailed it with Mass Effect 2, by ruining the story at the beginning and end of the game and changing a lot of the mechanics. EA screwed up Command and Conquer, too.

I was concerned by the comments about The Old Republic, I have high hopes for that game.

Well, that was certainly someone's opinion.

MeanGreenStompa wrote:I was concerned by the comments about The Old Republic, I have high hopes for that game.

Its by Bioware, one of the best in game making. Even if its average by Bioware standards, it will still be head and shoulders above its competition. Just don't expect perfection, its an unfortunate accuracy that every MMO ships with flaws and bugs that are fixed later. Just my completely biased opinion though, I think I've played about every Bioware game ever made and they can do no wrong in my book.

-Nels

MeanGreenStompa wrote:I was concerned by the comments about The Old Republic, I have high hopes for that game.

I really wouldn't be too concerned about the comments about The Old Republic. This guy being an employee for EA/Mythic doesn't make him any more privy to the inner workings of The Old Republic, just like if you were to work at a GW retail shop it wouldn't make you any more privy to what the design studio is up to.

NELS1031 wrote:

MeanGreenStompa wrote:I was concerned by the comments about The Old Republic, I have high hopes for that game.

Its by Bioware, one of the best in game making. Even if its average by Bioware standards, it will still be head and shoulders above its competition. Just don't expect perfection, its an unfortunate accuracy that every MMO ships with flaws and bugs that are fixed later. Just my completely biased opinion though, I think I've played about every Bioware game ever made and they can do no wrong in my book.

-Nels

gak, if Bioware's games are head and shoulders above the competition, I'd hate to see the competition to Mass Effect...

Yeah, products and companies go wrong for all kinds of complicated and interesting reasons. Unfortunately, when things go wrong you get bitterness and resentment, so instead of proper examination of what really went wrong, you get people just calling other people idiots and suck ups. None of which is very useful or interesting.


I really wanted to like WAR. I liked a lot of the ideas behind the design, but the final product was too boring, too often. I’m not a fan of WoW style games, and if I was I’d play WoW.

I'm genuinely of the opinion that, as gorgeous as WAR was...it needed the system requirements dumbed down a bit.

That's a huge part of why the game was so barren, and it's something any potential "Warcraftkiller" needs to understand.
Thankfully, Dark Millenium and The Old Republic both seem to have taken heed of that lesson.

I was more concerned when I read on the same page, I have to buy ANOTHER Dota-clone. I can't stop buying them. I don't even want dota 2, that's what HON IS!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Kanluwen wrote:I'm genuinely of the opinion that, as gorgeous as WAR was...it needed the system requirements dumbed down a bit.

That's a huge part of why the game was so barren, and it's something any potential "Warcraftkiller" needs to understand.
Thankfully, Dark Millenium and The Old Republic both seem to have taken heed of that lesson.

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. gak you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?

Wow, I've heard of sour grapes, put that's some fine vinegar that fella has!

As some have already noted, it's rather hard to take this "criticism" of TOR seriously, but moving beyond that, I'm just unclear what the thought process is at work here, beyond a written primal scream.

This guy is deeply, deeply upset with the fact he (I'll presume he) is being laid off. All well and good, but he seems abundantly clear on the fact that the flagship he is working on is going down the drain. So, why is he at all surprised that he's getting laid off?

He's in the art department, but seems to be of the opinion that his department labored under unrealistic, foolish constraints... but the art is one of the few things that WAR is almost universally recognized to have done well. It's high quality and reflects a tremendous fidelity to the artistic scheme GW created in Warhammer. What should it look like, if not the property on which it is based?

I'm not even sure he's saying anything all that damning, except perhaps faulting the marketing... but that's sorta irrelevant, as he himself notes, they had 1 million box sales, and a few months later a small number of those sales had translated into subscriptions. So, he faults the marketing department, even though they were appearance able to convince a fairly large number of people to buy the game? Loss of subscription numbers had little to do with marketing, so why does he even bring it up? It's like mentioning that the Titanic's grand pianos were made of inferior hardwoods; who cares?

To touch, for just a moment on the TOR issue, the validity of the rumors that his guy has access to are almost besides the point: the game will be judged by the players, and what point is there arguing about it? Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 are generally considered to be great games, but just scroll up on this page to find people that consider them gack.

Doesn't seem like a good idea, at least as far as future job prospects go.

Probably one of the more unprofessional things I've seen someone in the industry do.

Ordo Dakka wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:I'm genuinely of the opinion that, as gorgeous as WAR was...it needed the system requirements dumbed down a bit.

That's a huge part of why the game was so barren, and it's something any potential "Warcraftkiller" needs to understand.
Thankfully, Dark Millenium and The Old Republic both seem to have taken heed of that lesson.

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. gak you not. More than $ 300 million! Can you believe that?

I don't think you actually understand what "system requirements dumbed down a bit" means.

You know how Warhammer Online and Age of Conan both required top of the line graphic cards, lots of memory, etc?
That's part of what was their downfall. WoW by comparison can run on stone age PCs.


Also:

Did you actually read his posts?

If you'd actually read what he'd posted, his statement(originally) was that they'd spent over $30 million on voicework and music alone and that "Bioware was unbelievably proud of that fact".

The guy comes off as an artist from another department who's pissed about the other boys getting all the toys.

I lost interest the minute that I saw it was just another WOW-style online mardi gras, with too much structure and yet not enough. IAnd to think that I used to criticize DDO. It's way better, especially now that they're introducing half-Orcs. Crap like this might explain why GW is so tight with their IP.

Warhammer Online, frankly, stayed pretty damned true to the source material aside from a few classes like the White Lions and Marauders.

It's just the fact that they did a shoddy job of making the game accessible to lots of people, then add in Blizzard releasing Wrath of the Lich King not long after and people shift from the game while it's still in its infancy to the newest shiny Blizzard toy.

All I have to say is that I played the game and it seemed to have no personality. It seemed to function moderately well but I only played it for the first or second month. I had planned to come back to it after some kinks were worked out, but they got so much bad press that i dismissed it outright.

I got bored. It wasn't polished. I was disappointed.


NELS1031 - Best Avatar Ever Go Ravens!

I'm laughing at it because this cat thinks that he's really telling some sort of inside information or something. The funny thing about it is that I knew this game was going in the crapper when it first came out.

Played it for an hour and dropped it.

Some of it really impressed me, but in it's metagame, there was really nothing of a "Game" to it. They rallied around the PVP thing like it was the dogs bollocks, then left everything else up to luck. The design team didn't really even have a plan, they just pushed the game out, after the deadline had pased, and hoped for the best.

Best thing about it was walking around the warhammer world and doing warhammer fantasy stuff. Worst thing about it was the constraints that players had, the crap RvR play, and the bad support.


This is the curse of MMO's that they all share- If you arn't making money in the first month, you have a limited lifespan.

You don't make money spouting off at the hole about being a WOW killer, you do it by making a good game.

I like WAR but I really consider it to be a bland WoW clone. It did a lot right and a lot wrong at the same time. What I would really like to see out of a Warhammer Fantasy game is something more along the lines of Dynasty Warriors where you control a hero that has a squad around him and you fight in wars.

Kanluwen wrote:You know how Warhammer Online and Age of Conan both required top of the line graphic cards, lots of memory, etc?
That's part of what was their downfall. WoW by comparison can run on stone age PCs.

This. One of my favorite parts about WoW is that it runs on my netbook. You know, the things without graphics cards, only a gig of RAM, and no CD drive? WAR had no such luck, which severely limited the amount of time I could spend playing the game, which meant WoW kept waving from its nice little chunk of the netbook's hard drive.