Then theres the number one complaint regarding EA games from us, the Geezers. The servers
The God-awful youll join if I want you to join EA servers, some say lorded over by a riddle-asking troll. Personally, I believe that EA simply bought out all the servers left in Russia after the cold war. Games like Tiger Woods 07 are completely broken for some, impossible to play online in any way, shape or form. The Battlefield games released on the Xbox and Xbox 360 are notoriously hard to play online, forget about playing with friends. The same is true of pretty much every EA Game Ive tried to take online. Tiger Woods 06 had lag
Honest to God, it had crippling Lag when the only moving in the entire game was the ball. How ridiculous is that? At a point in time when eight people moving across a map, firing weapons and throwing grenades at each-other is almost always a seamless, lag-free environment, how do you manage to get lag from a single, spinning golf ball.
The same is true of EAs latest Fight Night game. My few attempts to venture online with that title have been disappointing to say the least. The lag was, for lack of a better word, atrocious. In a game depicting the sweet science of boxing, when timing is everything, lag kills you. It kills you dead. You get knocked out before you even know the punch is coming.
EA is building up a lot of resentment, not because theyre underperforming, all game companies fall short of the mark sometimes. Halo 2 felt rushed to many, Dead Rising had an annoying timer that took away from the general experience, Gears of War has limited multiplayer offerings, Call of Duty 3 feels unfinished to many of the people whove played it, and so on and so on. This is the nature of the industry. But when its a question of simply buying better or more servers, for a company the size of EA, with the amount of money they take in from their bestselling franchises, with the amount of games they sell every year, its completely inexcusable. Theres no way to justify this. I dont even know how its continuing to happen. I guess all EA employees live near an EA server or thirty, and generally get solid connections while bug-testing, but still, they should have heard from more than a few of us by now. Maybe if we all got together and sent them letters demanding better servers, but Im pretty sure theyd just laugh at us and roll in some money to forget their problems.
And we, as a community and as individuals, will continue to resent them, and sooner or later, its going to hurt their bottom line. Id love to say that Im not going to buy anymore EA games, but I know I will, because theyre publishing Spore for the PC, which is simply a must-have for me. But after Spore, I think I may actually stop buying EA products. Im an online gamer, I dont play a whole lot of single-player anything, and Im just not interested in buying games that fail to provide an enjoyable experience online. Thats what I buy games for, and EA just doesnt seem capable of delivering on that anymore.
So maybe, sooner or later, EA will get the message, theyll see their bottom line inching gradually towards the red, and well finally get the games we deserve from a company as capable as they are. Then again, theres just as good a chance that theyll go the way of Acclaim, Sega, Konami and Atari, and simply lose their massive market share, forcing them to once again think as a small company and not the corporate juggernaut theyve become.
