http://www.forbes.co...aces-the-cloud/“We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers,” EA Labels President Frank Gibeau said recently. “I have not green lit one game to be developed as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365.”
Gibeau chuckled at his own example and continued to explain what the shape of EA's game-making approach will be moving forward. "What I'm saying is if you're going do it, do it with an open-world game that's a connected experience where you can actually see other players, you can co-operate, you can compete and it can be social. Everything that we do, we see the telemetry coming in telling us that's the best way to build our business and that's the best way to build these experiences and be differentiated from others. Yeah, I'm not suggesting deathmatch must be in Bejeweled. It's just… You need to have a connected social experience where you're part of a large community"
When I mentioned that a certain sort of player still wants an experience that can't be interrupted through social interaction, he stated that The Sims plays that way. "The new Sim City, you can play single-player," he continued. "Mass Effect 3, you can play single-player. FIFA, Madden…"
"I still passionately believe in single-player games and think we should build them. What I was trying to suggest with my comments was that as we move our company from being a packaged goods, fire-and-forget business to a digital business that has a service component to it. That's business-speak for ‘I want to have a business that's alive and evolves and changes over time'"
http://kotaku.com/59...le player-games
Gibeau tries to explain that what he said in the first quote doesn't mean he is trying to remove the single player experience altogether from games released by EA going forward. And that instead what he really meant is that all games would be more socially connected and have better services for the players by being connected online all the time.
However even though he says that, it is pretty obvious that certain EA franchises such as Sim City is suffering from their new design philosophy. Sim City 5 for example, will not be moddable on release and I doubt that it will be moddable to the extent of the previous games when they do release that feature if ever, due to its online nature.
Not only this but the new Sim City 5 game will feature region sizes that are capped at what was "medium" in Sim City 4. Obviously this was a decision they made to save server space since all the data from your games will be stored on the cloud, instead of on your own computer.
My opinion is that while certain games types do benefit from having online components, others do not. And it can be seen from the way Sim City 5 is being gutted to accommodate its new online only status. Its fine if they add multiplayer modes to FPS games like dead space, but when they impose that on games like the Sims or Sim City, its obviously going to detract from the game play/ replayability and thus the experience that everyone has grown used to.
Edited by frostz, 07 September 2012 - 08:34 PM.
