EA SPORTS FC™ Team@s00zster That story about being two teams... Every time I see that thrown around – and I see that a lot and everywhere, from Discord to Reddit – and can't help but feel a bit sorry for it. Back when people mostly complained about reoccurring bugs from year to year, I made one of those "whatever, have nothing better to do with my life anyway" posts of mine with diagrams and bold and italicized text and all that jazz saying how common it is in the games industry and annualized franchise to have two teams focusing on different features so that every new game has something seemingly fresh to offer.
Call of Duty and Battlefield, FIFA and PES, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc. All are or used to be for a good while annualized franchise. But even then, every game took 2-3 years to make. How do they pull that? By having different studios always working on their respective entries in the case of the big ones, or different teams in the same studio working on different features to always have a constant stream of new headlines for marketing to spiel year on year in the case of "smaller" ones.
When you have such a structure, say you've got a team of devs, animators and storywriters working on a feature like Braking Point. And you've already established that this mode won't feature on every new release. So you can have that team working every day on this project that usually takes 2 years to complete, and be done with it.
Now you want every new entry to feature a new Braking Point volume? Well, you can't/shouldn't cram a 2-years project in a 1-year pipeline, so you hire more people, have someone to spearhead the whole project and oversee a the main thread, and have two teams working so that every year there's one 2-years project being shipped. All those folks are still working every single day, and their output still takes 2 years to ship, but since they're on different timeframes so to speak we've got one brand new volume in the BP saga every year.
Now just expand that for all the different aspects of the game. Everybody is working non-stop, but they have different focuses and different timeframes, and you've got people managing it all from a step or two higher in the ladder.
What happens if a bug is flagged in a string of code that affects a main aspect of the game? It depends. If it was flagged and fixed by a small, focused taskforce that had only to offer post-release support for say the 2022 title, it will most definitely be flagged to all relevant teams, but they're not sitting idly there. They're working on their own list of tasks and goals, so for the 2023 game to ship with that specific line of code patched already whoever is responsible for that part needs to have received the memo from the small post-release team and have worked their way through it.
Shifting environments, I'm a lawyer. All of my firm's documents have a specific, standardized layout with headers and typefaces and footnotes. Say I'm working on this appeal for the last 10 days, it is due in 5 more days, and I'm swamped. Then the people responsible for our branding changes the layout for all our documents today, the 10th day of my 15. No one's going to touch my doc, it's sensitive and it's a work-on-progress. And will I interrupt my workflow to implement those new beauty marks and layout? Heck, no! I'll keep on working my backside off until deadline. If it happens that I complete this project in time, have worked my way through all other priorities and pending tasks, and have finally come across the "adopt new document template" task of my agenda, then ok: from now on all my output will be in the new style.
Bottomline is, no one's going to touch my pending docs to change that for me because it's sensitive and their changes unintentionally affect something, they don't want to take the heat and I don't want to do the necessary rework. Even something as mundane as a highlighted note to myself being reformatted to plain text can mess things up big time.
Yep, the franchise is most definitely a mess. But it is never as simple as Joe and Mike working on different days of the week and simply not talking to each other.
Obviously don't mean to imply that you @s00zster is painting this picture like that, I know you get it and can envisage how complex game development can be 😉
But I often get genuinely baffled by the ridiculous reductionism ad stultitiam people often insist on.
@s00zsterI believe what they claimed to have fixed was the Sprint race tyre strategy bug that they ignored from last year.
They have not even acknowledged the Red Flag tyre bug.
If EA wanted to, they could:
1 Feature freeze F1 24 and work on releasing a quality product.
2 Stop releasing the games with obvious bugs that were clearly known about and just ignored in order to meet a release date.
3 Apologize. (Larian Studios just had to rollback a hotfix that resulted in 18 hours where saves made under that hotfix couldn't be loaded. Upon re-releasing the hotfix, they wrote a post about what happened, why, what they were going to do to prevent if from ever happening again, and issued an apology. That's a company that clearly values their customers.)
4 Release patches to fix critical issues (that shouldn't exist in the first place) on a more frequent schedule that just 'one patch every two weeks is all you get.'
The severity of some of the bugs they shipped this game with make it abundantly clear that they were aware of them, and just didn't care enough to delay the product.
Does anyone believe they didn't know about the force feedback problems? How about the broken halo model/volumetric fog issue? It's immediately visible upon actually driving the car in the literal first race of the season. No possible way it wasn't noticed. The aforementioned sprint race tyre strategy bug? It was known about last year, and not fixed, so.... Poor cross-platform connectivity? (Another bug which is not even acknowledged.)
Those issues could not possibly have escaped a proper QC program without being noticed. One of them literally requires that you simply have eyeballs and drive the car.
EA could turn this around, but that is going to require a shift in their entire culture. I saw these same issues for nearly a decade when I used to buy the NHL games. I've walked away from that series forever, and my experience here hasn't been any better at all. At this point I don't see a realistic chance (without substantial improvements that I know EA won't make) that I ever buy another EA product again. Not a 'sporting' title, not a 'regular' one, not for me, my kids, my nieces and nephews, nobody.
