Electronic Arts is not raping your favourite game series. Calm down and carry on.

Throughout the vast and mysterious lands of internetdom there are many games forums and places for the uneducated masses to spout their idiotic ideas about video game production where all can see them. Normally it is fairly easy to ignore them because they are morons and can't even type literate sentences to begin with. However, there are some trends in comments that seem to carry on and on, picked up even by people who manage to spell the words in their posts correctly and who don't have an obsession with caps lock.

One of the most common of these I see is that whenever a company or game series is acquired by EA, there are comments about future games they release having been "ruined by EA", and a heavy insistence that EA has made the game be bad. Even if people think the game is good, flaws in the game are often attributed to the influence of the evil new overlords of the company.

Often these flaws are things which are only mildly annoying glitches or game design choices which the person in question doesn't approve of. Sometimes there really aren't any additional flaws, so flaws that were in the game series before EA took over are attributed to being their fault.

What people don't seem to get is that often these game design choices have nothing to do with EA, or even if they are from them, are part of a wider series of changes in game design in general, which probably would have come into the game eventually anyway.

EA: purveyor of games and harvester of a thousand innocent souls

I'll use Dragon Age 2 as my main example here, as it's still fairly fresh in people's mind and I've had some decent exposure to the horrific amount of ranting about the game. The main problems people have with the game seem to be that it is too easy, that it has been simplified, the removal of some rpg elements and the recycling of areas. Most of these (probably all if you search hard enough) have been blamed on the acquisition of Bioware by EA, and EA's influence on the game design process and the game release schedule (ie/ "EA told them to make it like this" or "EA made them rush the game out")

Hawke does not appreciate being called "dumbed down"

The problem I see with this is that other than the recycling of areas, which I honestly have no idea why they did or thought they could get away with, most of these issues are long-standing trends and changes within both RPG's in general and more specifically Bioware (and their related companies) games. If we look at the differences between Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 we can see this really clearly. Upone each of these games release (except Baldur's Gate, though possibly there was then, I wasn't paying much attention at that stage in my lie) there was moaning from a contingent of fans of the previous game about "dumbing down". Neverwinter was thought of as Baldur's Gate for easy-mode players, Jade Empire was the beginning of the cries from PC gamers of the "console dumbing" of the games made by Bioware. Mass Effect and Dragon Age were both thought of as too "action orientated" and there was a lot of moaning about the lack of rpg elements in both.

Part of this is true, the games have lost some depth here and there. However, the vast majority of it is actually streamlining the games, taking out elements that were trash or horrificly irritating and which served no purpose other than to frustrate or artificially lengthen game play times. For example, while Baldur's Gate is a classic game which I love and will always love, there are hundreds of irritating and pointlessly complex elements to it- like having to pick up dead party members equipment and carry it about on another character until you can resurrect them, and then spend five minutes re-equipping every single item they were using. Or the fact that if your main character died the game was over, despite the fact that you had two clerics with resurrect in the party and your entire party was full health. It also required an ungodly amount of pausing and starting to play it on any difficulty above the lowest setting. Not to mention dialogue trees that were both obtuse and often pointless.

Walls of text: The reason you play video games

People often had a go at the dialogue wheels that were introduced a few games down the line, but I honestly don't see where this sense of nostalgia comes from. The dialogue wheels simply mean that you know what you are selecting when you select it, instead of choosing dialogue branches which often, unless you played with a guide or it was your third play through, gave results you didn't expect at all. Often leading me to think "Oh, I'm evil for saying that?".

Admittedly some of the fun with the older games came from being able to break the game engine or twist what you were meant to do. Going on killing sprees of civilians for no reason could provide some light entertainment, and marking people with junk so you could spam them with spells from off screen provided some good ways around fights. But surely we should be glad that game design now doesn't require us to break the way the game was meant to be played in order to do well.

But anyway, back to the original point. No matter the changes that were made, most of them are to do with overarching trends in game design itself, and not much to do with EA being evil and terrible and "mass marketing" games. Games are getting easier partly because old games were hard for no real reason, and in unsatisfying ways which only crazy tech nerds enjoyed because they could work out how to break the AI to win.

All Dragon Age 2 really did wrong was to continue the trends that had preceded it but with EA as the owners, so not only did the "old-school" come out of their closets to moan about how it was bad because it was dumbed down but the massive EA-hating crowd came out of the woodwork as well. This created some form of evil coalition of morons, and both seemed to merge in order to form some kind of conglomerate "EA is dumbing it down" group.

Some elements of DA2 I would indeed like to see gone, such as I liked equipment whoring for my allies as well as my own character and didn't really find the "hunt for armour plug-ins" to be very satisfying in that regard. But even then, I'm blaming Bioware for that, not EA. Overall I liked the game and found it enjoyable with a great story and some really good companions. It has its flaws, it has bad elements and if they recycle areas like that again in the next game I'll be hunting for blood. But the rants about it being awful and EA being a demonic hell-fiend which rips the soul from any game series it touches? Worse than the nobheads who spell microsoft with a $ symbol while paying £2000+ to apple for a piece of hardware microsoft would let you buy off third parties for half the price.