EA Strikes Again

[Husker]

This time it's Maxis, the developers of Simcity and The Sims.

http://www.eteknix.com/simcity-develope ... -closed-ea

[Enlistednut09]

I feel that since EA bought Maxis the quality of the games has gone down, I enjoyed the Sims and SimCity 4 but I feel like almost all of the games that Maxis released in the EA era were rushed, full of bugs and never really complete. Like a lot of EA games just thrown out there to make money.

[Hevach]

I feel that since EA bought Maxis the quality of the games has gone down, I enjoyed the Sims and SimCity 4 but I feel like almost all of the games that Maxis released in the EA era were rushed, full of bugs and never really complete. Like a lot of EA games just thrown out there to make money.

Or limited to better fit some halfassed "vision" that an executive (whose video game expertise extends to maybe having a mid-screen high score on the Pacman machine in his college's student union) handed down to justify draconian DLC or DRM policies, which is what killed the sales for the last two games out of Maxis.

EA's biggest problem (this extends to pretty much all the other big publishers, too, for that matter) is that every employee is temporary except for a handful of "idea people" who are mostly 90's/00's old guard of the industry who haven't done anything outside of a meeting room in the last two console generations, and sometimes story writers (very sometimes - Bioware only had two that they actually kept around despite having upwards of 10-20 on any given game). Everybody else is hired for a game, then laid off when it goes gold (minus the ones kept around for the DLC cycle who get laid off in a couple months when they finish that).

You know how having a shitty job encourages you to only do the bare minimum to not get fired? Well, what if you have a shitty job AND it's right in your contract that you're going to get fired in six months anyway?

[Doug3575]

I feel that since EA bought Maxis the quality of the games has gone down, I enjoyed the Sims and SimCity 4 but I feel like almost all of the games that Maxis released in the EA era were rushed, full of bugs and never really complete. Like a lot of EA games just thrown out there to make money.

I totally agree! The last SimCity game was not as good as SimCity 4.

[Johnny Macintosh]

Thankfully we will have Cities Skylines.

Anyways I think EA cant take all the blame in this sense. As much as people love to hate on EA, some of the key design flaws of Sim City were entirely on the dev team. They couldn't rebound with the Sims 4 and now they are no more.

[Metrikon]

Perhaps not, but how many times have you seen a change in management affect the quality of peoples work. This happens all too often when the accountants move in.

[Hevach]

I think the lion's share is on EA. The thing that killed Sim City was the always-online thing, which the dev team resisted but EA dictated for their DRM policy. EA was also responsible for the servers for the game, not Maxis.

The Sims might not have been killed by the decision to leave out a ton of things that were in pervious Sims games stock in order to expand the DLC cycle, but that was the big controversy around the game, and that was also an EA dictate.

[Johnny Macintosh]

Maxis has admitted that the always online design was entirely their choice. They wanted this weird MMO type Sim City thing.

[Splodeydope]

Was never much a fan of the Sims, but it sucks to see them bite the dust.

EA will be EA.

[cmdraftbrn]

loved sim city 1, 2000, 3. sim farm, sim earth was weird. the sims was interesting was had a leaking shower, called a plumber, plumber fixed it couldnt pay the $60 plumber bill so he repo'd a $600 shower. 11/10.