EA: They Just Don't Get It

Any dog knows not to bite the hand that feeds it, but EA just can't resist dousing its paying customers in steak sauce and munching away. It seems the overriding concern has been to avoid piracy, and I can appreciate that. Piracy is not good for any of us, gamers or developers alike. But how does one reason that piracy can be beaten by punishing those who choose not to pirate?

The Spore debacle is well documented. Spore should have been a landmark game. It should have been a harbinger of a new generation of games that bring the gamer into the development process in new and exciting ways. Instead, it became one of the most pirated games of all time and spawned a class action lawsuit against the publisher, EA. Now when we think of Spore, we think of rootkits, intrusive digital rights management schemes, and a company that punishes its customers in the name of fighting pirates.

EA learned nothing from Spore. Last week the company proudly confirmed that we will have to be connected to the internet in order to play Command and Conquer 4. The interesting part is that CnC4 is a real time strategy title that will include a large single player campaign. The logic behind requiring gamers to be constantly connected to the internet to play in single player mode? EA has made vague statements about including MMO-esque features into CnC4 that will allow for the tracking of individual player progression. Because goodness knows we all want to advertise to the world that we failed the 9th mission 5 straight times before giving up and looking for strategies online. Other than mentioning player progression tracking, no reason has been given.

It seems far more likely this decision is another misguided EA anti-piracy measure. Not everything must be multiplayer, online, or include social networking features. Nor does everyone do all their gaming in a fixed location, or a location with stable and free wireless internet. By forcing all copies of CnC4 to be online at all times, regardless of what the gamer is doing, EA has simply guaranteed that CnC4 will be cracked and pirated. Offline gaming is a standard feature that many strategy gamers want, and if EA does not provide that feature, the pirates will be more than happy to oblige.

With Spore, if you did not want something akin to a rootkit infesting your computer, you had to pirate a copy of the game, even if you did buy it. With CnC4, if you want to play a truly single player game without being constantly online, you will have to pirate a copy of the game, even if you do buy it. Instead of reducing piracy, these moves simply provide incentives to the pirates. Just like with Spore, the end result of online requirement will not be a reduction in piracy, but an increase. Sadly, the ones hurt most by EA's efforts to punish the paying gamers are the developers who make the games. Gamers can and will turn to the pirates to get copies that are not artificially crippled. But the developers have no where to turn for the revenue they lost when those would-be customers turned to the pirates.

At the end of the day, EA's anti-piracy efforts are only angering their customers and hurting the revenue of their developers. When EA fights pirates, only the pirates win. And that isn't good for anyone. Giving incentives for piracy is no way to get rid of it.

Battlefield for Free

Been wanting to sample one of the free-to-play online titles, but suffer from an allergic reaction to all things anime-ish, including the anime-inspired MMOs? EA has come to your rescue.

Well regarded shooter / role playing hybrid Battlefield Heroes no longer requires a beta key. This game is free to play, albeit with some ad support and with some micro-transaction action on the side. While the artwork may not be what you expect from a title called Battlefield, reviews so far are looking pretty good.

The price is right and it is said to be fun, so check it out. The more high quality non-subscription online games there are floating around, the better.

E3: Much Ado About Dante

Many of us read the literary classic of Dante Alighieri in college. It is the story of a man who is lead through the circles of hell by Virgil. It is not a standalone work, though it is often read as one, but is part of The Divine Comedy. If you have not yet read the entire work, do so. This work deserves its place as a literary classic.

But this is a gaming blog, so enough with literature.

The Dante's Inferno that is drawing attention this week is a Visceral Games title to be published by EA. Basically, take God of War, set it in hell as imagined by Dante Alighieri, and crank the gore to eleven. Interestingly, it also drew protesters.

Yes, protesters. Somewhere EA executives and smacking themselves wondering why they didn't hire enough protesters to make this a bigger deal. As Grand Theft Auto has taught us, nothing sells a game like people sayings its bad.

But the controversy will come, and much of it will be literary. To say the developers took liberties with the story line of The Inferno when making this game is roughly the same as saying that vegetarians take liberties with the recipe for meatloaf when cooking one. From what I can tell from the trailers, if EA didn't tell us this game was based on The Inferno, we would never know. Going to hell certainly isn't a new concept in gaming. Diablo went there in extremely creepy fashion thirteen years ago, and gaming hasn't been the same since ***.

And yet, I'm not sure I can complain. Reviews from E3 seem fairly good. If the game had a different title, I don't think anyone would think twice about it. Besides, we all know by now that no story can survive unchanged from book to movie or from movie to game. Should it come as all that great a surprise that Dante's Inferno the game seems to have only a passing resemblance to Dante's Inferno the book?

What matters is that the flavor the original is kept. The book is an exploration of nature of man (please, literature majors, hold your fire: I'm trying to be brief here). If the game keeps that as its defining metric, I think it will deserve its title.

The horror should be palpable. I don't mean cheap slasher movie kind of horror. I mean Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker, Dante Alighieri horror. Action titles soaked in blood are a dime a dozen. Dante deserves better than that. Give me a title so disturbing I don't want to play, but so addicting I cannot stop. Give me raw despair in digital form, and this game will do its namesake justice. A high standard, but Dante's Inferno deserves no less.


***A related side note: fire up Diablo, the original, and play through it again. Notice the artwork... namely the naked and somewhat dismembered torsos contorted into horrible positions and bound with barbed wire. Could anyone get away with that callous and gratuitous a flogging of our senses in a game today? And is that a bad thing? Thats another topic, I think.