In a rare instance of Electronic Arts dropping the ball, the publisher has come under fire for a tweet that took jabs at people for enjoying single-player games. You know, those pesky games that are almost impossible to get people to spend money in. The ones with worthwhile stories and memorable characters. Those games.
Despite many of its own developers working on single-player games, these aren’t the type of experiences the corporation wants you to play. It would rather you were on the hamster wheel, running around and around, coins falling from your pockets with every rotation. It wants you to play the games where you buy blind bags and loot boxes, tapping into your lizard brain to make you want to play more, to spend more. Single-player games can’t do that in the same way. They have a beginning and an end. With a service game, the money keeps flowing.
Don’t get me wrong – I love the odd multiplayer session. EA’s own Apex Legends is my go-to shooter when there’s nothing else around. It’s only good because it’s Respawn. You could tell Respawn to make a game about driving a bus and the developers would make it compelling. But that kind of game isn’t why I own every console. I do that so I don’t miss anything. I can experience all the new worlds, meet all the new characters, and be surprised by innovative mechanics and systems.
EA, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what it wants.
One minute it has hired Uncharted developer Amy Hennig to make a single-player Star Wars game, the next minute her team has been disbanded and the game canceled. At the time, EA said it was “shifting the game to be a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency.”
Later, we’d get Star Wars Battlefront 2, a game so riddled with microtransactions that the entire gaming community shunned it and developer DICE was forced to make sweeping changes. This game arguably started the entire loot box controversy. Is it gambling? Is it not? Are these the kinds of conversations we should even be having about flipping video games? Absolutely not. Still, there were two news stories on the subject today because things have gotten that bad.
A few years later, Respawn would release Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a single-player Star Wars game that’s similar to Uncharted. That one is getting a sequel! The speed at which the publisher chases and abandons trends will give you worse whiplash than playing Burnout Paradise in real life.
It’s a sad state of affairs. If you look back over EA’s own library, it’s the single-player games that stand out.
Before Apex Legends, developer Respawn casually fired out the best single-player shooter campaign in over a decade with Titanfall 2. The first Titanfall was fun enough, but it was strictly multiplayer. The sequel lives much longer in the memory because of that masterful campaign. It elevated the game to classic status. Every level feels fresh, introducing a new mechanic before throwing it away in favor of something else – who does that last part sound like, eh?
There’s also Dead Space, which got more action-packed as it went on, no doubt under EA’s own mandate. By Dead Space 3, the worst-reviewed game in the series, the series had morphed into a co-op experience. But the rot had already taken hold before that. EA’s direction managed to alienate one of its major creative forces by the mid-point of Dead Space 2. Go back to the start and you can see why. A pure survival horror, tense and claustrophobic – unlike EA, Dead Space knew exactly what it wanted to be. The sequels did not.
Then we’ve got BioWare, which went from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to… Anthem, a looter shooter where you hold down a trigger while numbers (and loot!) pop out of enemies. The genre is aptly named because it’s not really us doing the looting here.
BioWare’s dark RPG Dragon Age: Origins was slightly janky, and clearly developed while thinking about PC players first, but it’s still an all-timer. It was also a western RPG in the traditional sense, taking players from location to location. By Dragon Age: Inquisition, the series had morphed into a quasi-MMO, full of open fields and resources to grind. The original worked so well because it had ambition, but in ways that mattered. It wasn’t open-world, but every choice felt important, including who you decide to even play as.
There’s a similar story with Mass Effect. By Mass Effect 3, you could see EA’s fingerprints all over the project. Most blatantly in a new multiplayer mode that had the audacity to actually affect what outcome of the story. One former BioWare developer claims he saw players spend $15,000 on Mass Effect 3’s microtransactions. BioWare would later go from working on critical darlings such as Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins to Anthem, a game seemingly designed by an accountant.
Now, in the year of our lord, 2022, EA has greenlit remakes for Dead Space (yes, the original) and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It’s taken EA this long to clock on. These are the games we like, yes. Congratulations. Hopefully, the developers get to finish them before the publisher changes its mind to build a metaverse or something.
This is why people are so mad about the EA tweet. It’s not even about what was even said. Clearly, it was a joke. It’s who was saying it. It’s a bit like Martin Shkreli making a joke about the price of prescription meds. Hopefully the company actually listens to the feedback this time, eh?
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
