EA Buy Bioware and Pandemic

Hopefully it's too late for them to &$^% up Mass Effect. Pandemic doesn't really bother me, FSW was the only game of theirs I really enjoyed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7041229.stm

I dont like EA because sometime, they are crap making games! no offonce.

Pandemic is such a crap company. They make some decent games, but there is no after sales support of thier games. Starwars battlefront 2 should have been awsome in multiplayer, but they only made 1 patch after release, which actually broke multiplayer more than they fixed it (you have to uninstall the entire program and put it back on for the original version).

heh, only thing I have from pandemic are a bunch of condoms in a folding match packet some booth babe was handing out at E3 a few years ago.

Haha. Classy...

Condoms? o_O

What product were they promoting, exactly?

Many people are outraged about EA buying Bioware, but I don't see why; the talented people will leave and set up a new independent studio. This always happens. You'd think that large publishers would have wised up to this by now.

Hmm i quite don't understand what's all the fuzz about Mass Effect but i'm interested in Dragon Age...

I can't see many people leaving if the incentive$ to stay are good enough. Actually, I'm not just talking about money. If the overall environment/situation is good, why leave? I wouldn't.

Do you think that EA can resist tinkering with Bioware, though? I suspect that the EA suits will eventually worm their way into the studio, bringing their exploitive ways and policies along with them.

Dunno, TBH - I dont know anything about either company. Surely Bioware have 'suits' too, tho?!

Really? I feel the opposite way - I'm looking forward to Mass Effect but I couldn't care less about Dragon Age. And I'd only be really interested if they announced a Jade Empire game for the Xbox 360.

big10p:

it's hard to explain unless you've had the dubious pleasure of working for a major game publisher. Traditionally there's a place for exploitive scumbags in the game industry, and its name is "middle management".

For most commercial devs creating a game is a job. More satisfying than most, but stability and income are still the most important factors.

I'm playing Jade Empire on the original xbox, and I can see why you desire un updated version....

I haven't, no - only a relatively small game devco.

What Evak said is basically the point I was trying to make. :)

Makes me wonder if this will wind up giving the "Destroy All Humans" franchise a bad name now. That was an awesome game on the original Xbox, but man, was it ever challenging. Let's hope that EA won't goof that franchise up too much. Giving that to them is a big, monster mistake, imho.

@JustLuke
What it's interesting about the game in your opinion?

Listen, about 10 years ago (or more) I went to one of those computer trade shows in London and they had a POLE DANCER wearing practically nothing on the Code Masters stand and a Subaru Rally car that you sat in to play the game. All the "suits" watched the pole dancer (and so did I) and all the "geeks" tried to not look and got in the car instead haha :-)

I think I went to that one, too. Actually, they're probably all like that. :P

taumel wrote:


What, Mass Effect? Well, it looks like a much improved version of Knights of the Old Republic crossed with Jade Empire, without the constraints of the Star Wars license. I'm particularly interested in the morality system and how it affects gameplay and I'm also interested in Bioware's implementation of semi-realtime combat. Also, I'm not quite as tired of Science Fiction RPGs as I am of "high fantasy" RPGs that feature elves and wizards, etc.

I would love making/playing a SF adventure but i'm not so interested in this Knights of the Old Replubic or whatever stuff. Too much Halo, too much Star Wars...

I feel the same way about fantasy games at the moment, so I know what you mean.

Sadly no they are not (at least in the UK). The same year had 3 scantily clad women doing a lesbian dance act on the Konami stand, models dressed as nurses in MEGA short skirts, and some dressed as barbarians with metal bras etc. It was ace. Every year after that was crap compared to it, just more suits and more boring stands. In fact that year some of the stands were really creative like one was a castle you went inside and it had suits or armour etc.

This is still ringing a bell. Was it at Olympia, in London?

Yeah I think it was! And there was like loads of Playstation one games on the balcony round the top including Die Hard Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot (early days you see). Oh and I saw Tomb Raider there on a Voodoo1 I think (or that may have been the year after).

I wonder if Bioware will finish the same way as Origin Systems. The owners of a medium-sized game company got blinded by EA dollar signs, though already wealthy by many standards. They naively believed that becoming part of a huge corporation equals better products, higher profits and improved job satisfaction. In the end, Origin Systems was dissolved, their 'key' employees 'driven' away, and their well-respected franchises butchered and/or discontinued… Okay, a simplistic, cynical view, but accurate to some degree, I think.

They resisted tinkering with Maxis. Maybe Will Wright managed to teach them something, by creating the only top 25 selling PC game in history.

Same here. My dilemma is that the game I care least about is the one I'd be most likely to buy (because it doesn't come with the extra price tag that is an XBox 360 and a HDTV).

I'm still thinking "the same way as Maxis". I realise the odds are stacked against it, but I have total faith in Bioware.

I think Bioware will do fine, So long as they keep making KOTOR/Jade empire type games, and more traditional top down neverwinter type games. I don't really see how they can go wrong.

There aren't really many RPG game devs out there that can hold a candle to them, I'm sure EA realise this. EA may be a bloated money grabbing behemoth, but they didn't get there by not giving people ultimately what they wanted. And Bioware have a pretty huge following in the RPG market, only bethseda rank as high for me with their elderscrolls games.