EA/BioWare Deal Finalized, Nets EA Ten Franchises 79
Gamasutra notes that the announced deal, where Electronic Arts was to purchase BioWare/Pandemic, has now been formalized. This arrangement will fold ten new franchises into the EA family, from the just-released Mass Effect all the way back to BioWare's classic titles. "EA Games president Frank Gibeau will oversee both studios within his organization, and BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have each been named as vice presidents of EA and co-general managers of BioWare. Similarly, Pandemic's Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick have each been named vice presidents of EA and co-general managers of Pandemic, while Greg Borrud has been named vice president of EA and chief production officer of Pandemic Studios. "
Re:Like Bioware wasn't already stuck in that rut? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What a sad day for gaming (Score:3, Informative)
So I dunno if I'd call that smart, but that could certainly be one reason. Bioware knows firsthand the guy now running EA. Does that mean EA will magically turn awesome? I think EA's problems will continue as long as they think they'll get good work out of slavedriven employees. But it also means Bioware has personal experience that I don't -- so maybe they know something I don't.
Re:What a sad day for gaming (Score:3, Informative)
The short answer - $
The long answer - Bioware was founded by three doctors who wanted to develop medical software. Along the way their priorities got shifted and it became a gaming company; this move probably cause some strife as one of the original partners left back in 1997.
Anyways, for all the success they've had BioWare has always been a pretty small studio, and I can't help but wonder if the thought that they could be much bigger and even that much more successful is what led to them "joining forces" with a private equity fund in 2005.
In the end Bioware wasn't sold to EA by anyone who cares about video games; it was sold by VG Holding Corp, a branch of the investors Elevation Partners. They undoubtedly looked at the deal only in terms of the cash in hand vs potential earnings by holding on to the company.
Considering everything that EA gains from this, it was probably much more valuable to them than to the former owners, and as such EA's offer was likely very sweet from the perspective of the sellers.
Re:I loved Far Cry, but can't buy Crysis (Score:3, Informative)
Something else is wrong. Either the demo had some glitch when you tried it or your system is goofed, because I have the real game and ran it on an Athlon 3000+ w/ the same amount of RAM and a whopping Radeon 9800, and after toning the resolution and settings down, it played just fine. Didn't look bad either - I don't recall having to bottom out every setting or anything.
You have plenty of hardware to play games and make them look pretty good... but the newest games will always try to support the latest hardware features if not a little more than that if you turn all the settings up. If you want gazillions of subdivisions in your curved meshes and a ton of custom shaders, all at 1600x1200 - you're going to need to buy the hardware that can do those things.
What we don't want is for game makers to require such settings for it to be fun and playable (which was not the case with Crysis). For me, to this day, a handful of NES games are still worth playing occasionally; high performance graphics and fun are entirely independent axes of each other, for most anyway.
I now have a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 8600GTS, and IMO BioShock looked a lot more polished and creative than Crysis - I was very happy with the graphics/performance quality I got out of both games considering my hardware. Still - I'm guessing even with twin 8800 monsters, you're going to hit some slow spots if you turn every last setting as high as it goes.
As for Crysis, the game... it was really well done, and a lot of fun to play until you get about 1/3 of the way through it, then a glitch shows up for which you end up on Google looking for a sloution - only to find out that you weren't 1/3 of the way through it, but rather that glitch that prevented you from blowing up the big guy was the very last thing to do in the game.
It was just too short! And the bug at the end COMPLETELY ruined it since (last I checked) they weren't acknowledging it and hadn't made a patch, and the only workaround was to keep reloading and trying not to solve everything the same way until (seemingly at random) it would work.
I still have no idea what the ending was - I was too pissed off to come back to it for a while, and by then I was into another game.