I want some Battlefield with my Mass Effect

Back on Valentines day, EA made lonely gamers day (probably gamers that arn't lonely aswell) by not only releasing the Mass Effect 3 demo (which I happened to enjoy except for everything being bound to one key which you couldn't change but I've already had a little rant about that) they also announced that upon pre-ordering Mass Effect 3 through their Origin service they would get a free downloadable copy of Battlefield 3. This offer was supposed to last until the 5th of March, but 2 days after announcing this they decide to pull the offer without a explanation in site. As you may have guessed this has pissed off a lot of punters. The deal was frankly amazing and no doubt would have dragged a lot of new clients over to their Origin service, which if they want to catch up with Steam and for it to be successful they will need to play hard ball which they seemed to be doing with this offer. But for them to suddenly pull it as I said before will piss people off. It's a bad move on their part. What ever the reason behind, this is unacceptable really, it's bad business offering something, getting peoples hopes up then taking it away just because you can. While they obviously have a reason behind doing this, it yet to be announced to the public. If you did happen to get in on this deal during the two days it was available you will still get your code by the 8th of March. Below are a couple tweets for the Origin account pretty much saying what I just did, minus me ranting of course.

EA to expands games on Origin

EA have recently announced that they will be expanding on games available on Origin. Up until now EA have only sold their own titles on Origin, soon they will be seeing the likes of Batman: Arkham City and Saints Row: The Third along with other additional titles promised in the coming months. While it is heavy disliked by a lot of people at the moment, I feel it is a good thing they are widening the variety games available on their platform. Of course they still have quite the road ahead of them if they even want to get remotely near Steam and their popularity but if they keep up adding new titles it will surely help.

I will quite happily use Origin if the price is right, I generally go with where ever is cheaper at the moment it tends to be either Amazon or Steam sales. The fact they have Battlefield 3 priced at £40 for a digital download there is no way in hell I'm buying it for that price especially when you can buy a boxed version of the game for 10 quid less and actually physically own it. They certainly need to lower the prices if they want to tempt folk across to their platform even if it is only on their own games.

'People don't understand that the PC is more powerful'

The guys at DICE have came out with this comment in a interview between themselves and eurogamer, to explain why the PC will be Battlefields lead platform. I call bull shit on this comment. They expect us to believe the majority of people don't get that a platform that is upgradable, and therefore able to keep up with tech as soon as it is released, is obviously going to be more powerful than consoles that were designed what 5 years ago? Granted it's good to see that more companies are developing for PC and I'm not knocking that. I am having a go at the fact this comment implements that we are all to stupid to realise the fact that PCs have the potential to be 10x better than consoles and have been for years. They need to give us some credit. Hell, the majority of people I know even those who aren't computer savvy realise PCs can be upgraded making them potentially better tech wise than consoles.

Battlefield is picking on Call of Duty

So EA has been trash talking about the Call of Duty predicting the game will collapse in 2-3 years and saying they hope CoD will rot from the core. (which probably has been taken out of context). Anyway the CoD guys don't seem to happy about this. I agree with this to a certain extent, from what I got from these comments is that EA is being a bit of a twat. Friendly competition is fine and good for businesses and should push them to be better, look at ATI (sorry AMD) and Nvidia they constantly are trying to out do each other. But they seem to be wishing failure on the Activision product.

At the end of the day Call of Duty isn't all that bad of a game, more than likely why it is been about for like 8 years now. It's one of those games that doesn't take long to get used to, one you can just pick up and play. It is a game for the casual masses I would say. That's right I said it's a casual game, and it is. It is a casual shooter, (granted it does have a competitive side with MLG and all that kinda shibbang), my point being it's one of those games you can kill half an hour before going down the pub or whatever else you may have planned. It is alot easier to get into than say Battlefield. I am talking of my experience of Bad Company 2 here, that game took me ages to get into the multiplayer. Battlefield is a more technical, more realistic game, it's got alot more to it than you just foot soldiering around like CoD, which is why alot of people say BF is a better game than CoD. I can see the reasoning behind that but it's all preference isn't it.

One thing that does annoy me is the amount of flaming and trash talking between gamers, it's not like it used to be alot of it is purely insults and nothing else. Banter is one thing but being a dick is another. You then get all the people who say CoD is killing creativity etc in the industry. Why do they make yearly releases of a game? First off because people buy them, just like they have done with many other, damn near every sport game you can think of, if sports games can throw out a new game every year only with a few minor tweaks why can't other games. And it's not like Cod is the only military shooter out there if you dont like it you have, Battlefield, Red Orchestra, Homefront, ARMA, Americas Army and Ghost Recon to name a few, all of which are good games in there own right. I frankly am sick of seeing reviews of new shooters coming out pretty much saying its not CoD so it must suck. Homefront is an especially good case for this. Yes it had some technical difficulties with the multiplayer on release, (because that never happens with more well known franchises does it now. I do love sarcasm). The game it self was quite good. A slightly futuristic military shooter with a decent story (albeit a bit short). But until the ending of the game I thoroughly enjoyed it and do hope they make another Homefront game. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes of the first game and improve on it if/when they do make a sequel. The game was decent but because everyone compared it to Call of Duty, it kinda flopped on the review side of things making people not want to play it. I bought it purely because of these reviews, if someone says a game is crap I will purposely go out and find some good in it.

Anyway back to my original point: EA are being a dick, like I said before competition and banter is fine being a bonafide twat isn't.