Electronic Arts: A Comedy of Errors

In fairness to EA, apparently I was not aware that an announcement was made that Titanfall 3 was delayed for later this year:

Is that right? I thought EA said they cancelled it. Anyone have a link to the official announcement on this?

This is the best info I could find on it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidt...edly-not-developing-titanfall-3/#4ce93a895a8a

But this is VERY confusing because Respawn CO also made this tweet yesterday:
https://twitter.com/VinceZampella/status/1092856944199495686

 

Not arguing, I'm just confused; if that's the case, what's the deal with Vince Zampella's tweet?

 

To be fair, from what I've seen Ubisoft is way more notorious with this (Jim shows as much in the video).

 

Summary of the story on Titanfall transitioning into Apex @5:30


I'm not crazy about the game, but it's hard to argue against how successful Apex has been.

 

You haven't heard of it because no one did until about a week ago. EA and Respawn knew that if they publicly announced they abandoned Titanfall 3 in favor or Apex, people would have freaked the fuck out and given the project negative press for months. Instead they bypassed all of that by surprising everyone with a shiny new Battle Royale that no one was asking for, but is very well made and has been an overnight critical success. For the Battle Royale audience, it's basically the hero no one knew they needed.

It's still Battle Royale and therefore I have no interest in it, but by most accounts it seems to be the best "version" of the genre to date.

 

From what I can tell, the evidence shows that EA and Respawn clearly alluded to the idea that another Titanfall title was in the mix, but they were misleading statements. All that talk about "we are still committed to titanfall" was stalling for time while they figured out their next move. I get the feeling like Respawn and EA were trying to get a feel on how viable a titanfall 3 game was given the sales for the last one, but were unwilling (understandably) to make their reservations for the franchise public.

This is just my own opinion, but I feel that it was EA's lack of willingness to properly support Titanfall that was the deciding factor.

 

Not the greatest comedy, but its alright.

 

This is more a reflection on Bioware really than EA, but I think it is important to highlight the general degredation of quality and workstaff of developers that decide to yoke themselves to EA:



To summarize...
Bioware is staying the course with Dragon Age 4 lining up to be what some are claiming now "basically Anthem, with swords"; both in terms of being focused on "games as a service" and also physically built using the same clunky engine (Frostbyte). Unfortunately, the situation now appears even worse for Anthem as lead dev staff is being siphoned off to help with DA4. Not unrelated to this turn of events, much needed updates for Anthem have been delayed significantly. When you consider the fact that Bioware has always been applauded for being a "story-focused" developer, this trajectory does not look promising at all. Generally speaking, the situation is pretty well fucked for Bioware right now.