>EA was brave enough to greenlight a first-person game where you are considered a better player by deciding not to shoot everything up and is the antithesis of the brown and gritty trend at its peakHow the fuck?
>>732191336>EA had an original idea that they had to ruin by adding guns because that was the trendFtfy
>>732191336Ps3 era was the beggining of the end. Last era of original tought
>>732191336EA did greenlight bunch of new games around that time (Dead Space, Mass efect) but the share holders freaked out so doubt we will ever see a major publisher do something like that again
>>732192667>EA>Greenlight Mass EffectZoom zoom.
EA had a sudden streak of wanting to diversify away from doing just big budget sports and brownslop and be known as a more versatile company, so they greenlit and commissioned a bunch of more niche titles. That drive didn't last long, but it did result in Mirror's Edge.
>>732191336Making AAA games wasn't a science just yet, so you could pitch a game to the publisher and have it greenlit on vibes alone. Now you have to go through endless bureaucracy and consultants to even be allowed to make concept art for it
>>732191336>How the fuck?Mirror's Edge is a parkour game and parkour at the time was incredibly popular. I unironically bought it and Assassin's Creed 2 at the same time because I thought they looked cool and remember the cashier asking me if I was into parkour. i didn't even know what that word meant so when I played both and looked into it, I was like "wait, did I buy two parkour games at once? lol"
I said this before on another thread but essentially, people misunderstand EA as a corporate entity and the reasons as to why they had Mirror's Edge and a few other projects in the early mid 2000s. They weren't doing a massive range of things like they were prior to something like 2003, but the licensing was pulling in such a good amount of money and some of the studios were actually relatively happy to keep working on the yearly releases, especially because they ended up doing spin-offs and slight passion projects on the sides. Mirror's Edge is fittingly one of the last games of that early-mid 2000s EA management, where Larry Probst wanted EA studios to be a lot more joined in with a monolithic culture. EA was kind of comparable to Microsoft at the time where Microsoft would send a lot of their own in-house producers out to the studios, but for what its worth, unlike Microsoft, EA had some producers who had experience within video game development and weren't just tech product or marketing producers. Couple that with John Riccitiello's initial vision for EA which was each company having more indepedence (until he changed his mind in 2009). I think one of the developers mention a speech specifically where he outlines that entire philosphy, I think it might've been in direct relation to Mirror's Edge even. The concept of Mirror's Edge was not originally a first-person parkour game. DICE wanted to make something but they really didn't know how to make it and they weren't sure if they could even do it, so EA sends over a producer on said project and he tells them to make it as a first-person game due to their experience.Also favoritism. DICE as a studio is massively favored in EA. Patrick Soderlund didn't become Vice President out of nowhere.
