Will EA Sports rise or fall with this years batch of Sports Games? (Random Thoughts) - bigsmallwood's Blog

bigsmallwood's Blog

Will EA Sports rise or fall with this years batch of Sports Games? (Random Thoughts)

Posted on May 21, 2010 at 03:03 PM.

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EA Sports has spent many years saying "If it's in the Game, Its in the GAME!"

With the 6th year of sports games on the cusp of being released, are we about to witness the rise or fall of EA Sports?

I pose this question because we have witnessed year after year with EA's Basketball and Football games constantly coming up short of expectations. We have been told what can and cannot be done in a one year dev cycle, despite what we have seen from other sports games in the same time frame. We have had games such as NCAA Basketball 10' that despite the great presentation, EA has IGNORED it's gamers by not patching the freezing and buggy game. The lack of community interaction after the games release has also been baffling. It is head scratching moves like this that lead me to ask does EA even slightly care about it's consumers? To the naked eye it seems that EA is more concerned with raking in $$$, buying exclusive licenses and hyping their products. The gameplay (outside of the NHL series) has yet to live up to the hype. Let's examine:

NBA Live 06-10: NBA Live has been largely forgettable this gen with it's poor efforts. Only NBA Live 10 has really changed things up gameplay wise for the better. But in doing so EA took away NBA All-Star Weekend, No true team practice mode outside of Dynasty mode, and many other things are missing that the competition, NBA 2K has had in their game for years.

Madden 06-10: Madden has NOT lived up to expectations that football gamers would like to see in a game. Last year with Madden 10, we had a game that was good in some regards, but mostly insulting in others. The motto was If you See it on Sunday, You will see it in Madden. The quickest way to summarize it is this: We are still waiting to see it.

NCAA Football 07-10: Although this year NCAA looks to deliver finally, for the first part of this gen, EA has neglected even basic options and features for this game, in favor of things such as Season Showdown???

NCAA Basketball: After acquiring the license for NCAA Basketball, EA has now shelved it indefinitely. Just as they have ignored taking action with any community interaction. CH2K8 is laughing at EA's efforts as we speak.

I am writing this blog to pose the question, will EA Sports, with it's huge corporate machine behind it, ever deliver a full fleshed quality Basketball/Football game this gen? Even with competition from NBA 2K, NBA Live has STILL failed to create a strong effort to try and unseat the king.
EA has seemed to give one thing, only to take away two. There can be no progress with this type of business model. Madden 11, from the videos shown so far, looks like a patched up Madden 10. Will we see a leap worthy of purchase?

That brings up my final point, if EA Sports is unable to deliver a fully fleshed out experience in the Football/Basketball department, why release a new game every year? If I play a game and it feels and looks just like the previous version why would we pay full price for it? I hear the arguments all the time that "oh that was an alpha build" only for that to magically end up being the final build.

If EA Sports wants to stop playing 2nd fiddle to 2Ksports and others, they need to seriously reconsider revamping how they develop their games. I watched some videos of Backbreakers DEMO and there are things in there that would greatly enhance Madden...but because the development team is already pushing out their agenda, like Shane Mosely in his fight against Mayweather, they fail to adjust to current events, and thus will end up losing the fight in the end. I realized the devs difficulty with understanding the game of NFL Football when it took John Madden to highlight Gus Johnson's commentary for them to dump Tom hammond's boring disconnected observations. Maybe by Madden 2020, we can have a presentation that will finally rival NFL 2K5's. Just Maybe.

Or Maybe NBA Live will add back in the footplanting tech from NBA Live 08 and marry it with what made the series great back in NBA Live 05...features and all....in the game not as DLC. I'm just saying.

I could go on and on about EA Sports supreme shortcomings this "Next-Gen" but the real question is will they Rise to the Challlenge or will they Fall into obscurity? Have at it!

Ps. It is sad when the PS2/Xbox version play much better and are more engaging than the $60 beta tests we have been subjected to.