I gotta give them credit where it's due. When you can make a game so terrible your CEO has to step down that is just extraordinary.
My first gripe with EA came from their handling of Command & Conquer. I don't know how many people are familiar with that series, but it's a RTS (real time strategy) game with what I feel to be an underrated story. If you enjoy RTS games I'd recommend giving it a look see. You can get most of the older games by Westwood from the First Decade on PC. The way it left things off with Firestorm (an expansion for Tiberium Sun) the story looked like it was heading for a very interesting turn of events but then EA takes over, out comes 3 and the story takes two steps backwards and then 4 comes around and kills the whole thing.
As for Mass Effect 3, I'm going to do something different and NOT talk about the ending. Mainly because I didn't even get that far on it and I feel there are more problems with the game as a whole than just the ending, which seems to be what everyone gripes about.
My first criticism is the Reapers themselves. They get hardly any build up in this game, which is bad when you compare to how the villains in the last two games are built up. There was so much suspense in their introduction but with the Reapers I just didn't feel threatened. I know we had two games leading to them, but come on. The Collectors in 2 were more terrifying than them. The only time I felt threatened by a Reaper's presence was on the Krogan homeworld when one was trying to step on me. Cerberus felt more like the main villains of the game than the Reapers.
They also removed a lot of RP elements and replaced them with action. Obviously trying to appeal to the main gaming crowd, which I can understand but like Resident Evil and many others, just kills what make the original games so great in the first place. If Mass Effect 3 was like the previous games, we would have had a chance to explore earth at the beginning, actually talk to Freddy Prince Jr. (=P), the kid, and other lead characters with more dialog options before finally getting to the scene with the council (or whoever they were, I can't remember) instead we get one big clip with a few dialog options and BOOM Reapers. No buildup. And as a trilogy the whole series just falls flat now. What was the point of 2? What was the point of the Collectors or saving or destroying the Collector's base at the end? A lot of allies you lose or don't lose don't even matter as their rolls are just filled by the time you get to 3. There didn't seem to be much point.
Subject: EA Games 
26th March 2013, 9:43 pm
