5 Key Reasons Why Electronic Arts ISN'T Actually The Worst Publisher Around

4. Some Of Their Games Are Actually Pretty Good

Battlefield 3 As much as we wouldn€™t like to admit it, EA publish some of the most enjoyable game franchises on the market. Shooters Battlefield and Crysis are products from this corporate giant and, while they do partake in a fair amount of copy and paste from CoD titles, almost any gamer would tell you they€™re both far superior to their Activision counterpart in terms of story, gameplay, and even online multiplayer (though obviously this varies on a game-by-game basis). But EA don€™t just pump out dreary shooters (despite what their €˜improvements€™ to Fuse might suggest), as A-list famous racing series Burnout is also one of their publishees, showing sticking with the crowd isn€™t always the mega-corp€™s motif. Burnout is regarded by many as the most accommodating racer on the market, with people who often find the genre unbearable able to learn the tricks fairly quickly and finish somewhere other than last place. Giving players multiple level styles including standard races, destruction tracks where the challenge is to wreck as many other cars as possible, and stunt tracks; the games tend to cater to everyone€™s desired tastes, a technique that rarely works (e.g. Resident Evil 6) and yet made this series unquestionably brilliant. In line with this, strategy giant Command and Conquer is another one of EA€™s sprogs, showing the publisher is capable of diversity when it tries. Unfortunately, the franchise has rarely been ported to consoles of late, so perhaps they do have a rather unfounded lack of faith in the title, yet their continual production of the series in this age where (failing) AAAs dominate the market is surely a point in their favour. And yes, most of these games are of a high quality because of their individual developers rather than EA themselves, so essentially we€™re just praising them for not interfering and trying to make more CoD clones, but the fact that EA didn€™t interfere shows they have at least a little respect for developers and perhaps own a smidgen of business sense. Saying that, I wouldn€™t be surprised if EA end up exclusively commissioning shooters two years from now, but we can€™t criticise a company for something it hasn€™t done yet, so let€™s just screw our eyes shut and tell ourselves everything€™s going to be alright.
Contributor
Contributor

Oldfield is a journalist, reviewer, and amateur comic-book writer (meaning he's yet to be published). He's a man who'll criticise anything, even this biog, which he thinks is a bit crap. For notifications on when new articles are up and game related news, follow him on his Twitter account @DunDunDUH