This year Electronic Arts took a big step forward and managed to pleasantly and unexpectedly surprise me. First, they released a bunch of quality original IPs which, to be honest, is a huge improvement: the publishers simply seemed to live off sequels until now, while every shot they had at new IPs was a huge, embarrassing miss (with a few notable exceptions, of course, like Mass Effect). Second, they sticked to their word and managed to increase those Metacritic ratings which kept going down in the past years, which means that they did manage to bring quality to our consoles, handhelds or PC systems.
2008 was the year when EA released some “franchise-makers” (and they’ll probably take advantage of that, too): Army of Two was well received by fans, Boom Blox was an instant hit on the Wii (and one of the best games of the year!), Mirror’s Edge could mark the birth of a new genre (even though sales-wise it was a flop)
The company also managed this year to take some of the existing franchise to the next level, with Battlefield: Bad Company topping the list, closely followed by an awesomely improved FIFA 09, a FIFA Manager 2009 which finally seems to look and feel like a true management game and, of course, with quality games set in the Command and Conquer universe.
Of course, EA did not change completely. They still did not manage to rise up to the expectations with Spore – a game with a huge potential which was turned into a joke (and actually the list I’ve linked to has an impressive 3 games out of five published by EA), with brand new add-ons for their milking cow we know as The Sims 2, with a pointless Mercenaries sequel and with titles that died hours after birth, like Boogie Superstar or Facebreaker. However, you can’t always do things right and failures are part of the game, too…
What do you think? Did EA change into a better company that at least seems to care, or they’re still the same old publishers and they only had a “surprise” year?