Balek-Vriege wrote...
This is a lot of cart before the horse arguments. It seems a lot of people against MP saying they will never buy another Bioware game again or a new Bioware game have already come to the conlusion that:
You're right, but you've got it backwards.
1. MP addition is crap and anything Bioware reveals about it is not true or "suspect," regardless of no contradictory information. That doesn't make a lot of sense to just ignore info in order to complain more.
You're making the assumption that Multiplayer was added to a single player narrative driven game, because it makes single-player narrative driven games better. It does not. Multiplayer in a single-player game is not only useless, but paradoxal.
Further, you're making the assumption that "Bioware" has anything to say at this point. They don't. Mainly because Bioware does not exist any longer. EA OTOH does, and EA's got quite a track record.
Even further, EA's made no secret of Online Pass and it's purpose.
So to be quite blunt, you're making alot of assumptions based on the desire for the feature ot have been implemented for good reasons, in a place it does not belong, because you want it to be good.
But if you actually read the information, and think about the game you're talking about, you'll find that the premise is pretty iffy at best.
A good place to start is "Why is the multiplayer specifically tied to a key element that decides whether or not you get the optimal ending to a 3 game series?".
Paraphrase it. "Why is Multiplayer forced to obtain the optimal ending unless you jump through hoops, that look to be unreasonably difficult to achieve based on what Casey stated?"
It's an easy answer, Online Pass.
2. MP being added has taken away loads of devleopment time from SP even though a whole other team called Bioware Montreal has done the brunt of the development on MP. At most I could see some level designers/programmers etc. working with the other team so they're both on the same page. If people are going to get on their high horses and declare Mass Effect 3 a compromised piece of trash, prove how many hours SP devs and money went to MP and what plans for SP were compromised because of it.
We don't even know how much budget ME3 has and whether or not EA uped it for MP features (which is likely because of the added team). That's something no one will know except the Devs and EA themselves. You would think people have already played ME3 with the reactions on here. Unfortunately for them they will probably never enjoy ME3 SP regardless of how good it is because of such strong feelings towards MP, Bioware and EA.
My turn.
1. EA isn't giving a 2 million unit game an AAA budget. ME sold a little over 2 million units. ME2 sold a little over 2 million units. Since this game is the ending of a 3 game series, simple logic tells us not to expect any more sales than what the first two sold. Simple logic also tells us investing 50 million dollars in a 20 million dollar return is a bad idea.
2. I really don't have to prove anything else, the paragraph right above says it all. It's simple math and logic. I don't need Deve hours, or specific money amounts, though I can give you fair estimations if you'd like, you're going to work out to around 1-2 million extra due to duplication of jobs and the added burden of a second full team.
3. As I said already, EA didn't up the budget out of the kindness of their hearts for a game that isn't going to sell any better than it's predecessors due entirely to the serial nature of the series.
But EA did up the budget because they expect to increase the revenues by forcing the number of people who bought used copies to pay them, and to guarantee return on investment, I promise you they made sure Multiplayer was very difficult to avoid.
feel the need to re-post this.
It's still required to be a natural extension of the bigger picture -- the point of being a marketable item. And the point of marketable items is to be sold. And to do better rather than worse over time.
Scripted television dramas lose viewers over time. Almost always. To avoid death by massive viewer bleed-off they're forced to attract new fans regularly, reinventing themselves sometimes and keeping things identifiable to people tuning in out of curiosity during the fourth season of a complex show.
It's a different situation with gaming but a similar enough concept to draw comparisons. Even trilogies need to do this. "We got most of the people who bought ME2 to buy ME3, yay!" isn't success, after all. Not even with good sales. Companies want more, not less or even the same.
Honestly Jeff, do you really believe that tossing in a handful of co-op missions into a single-player narrative driven game is going to double sales? Or even increase them in any meaningful manner? Do you seriously believe that there's a whole legion of people wishing for a couple co-op missions in the final entry of a 3 game series, before they buy into the series for the first time?
Not going to happen.
But positioning multiplayer to be an impediment to obtaining the optimal ending is seen as a way to force used game buyers to buy Online Passes. That's all this is about. No one at EA thinks "Play a half-dozen co-op missions" is going to bring in double the sales. But EA does think that forcing multiplayer forces people to pay them $10 for Online Passes.
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