Activision Hath Become EA, Destroyer of Franchises

We've given a lot of shit to EA in the past, but if you look at their releases over the past couple of years, they've had an impressive roster of launches. (besides the usual suspects of sport franchises and sims games)

EA actually kinda realized last year that their business model ain't healthy, and they're slowly turning things around. Just look on how Activision is fucking up the Guitar Hero franchise...

How are they doing that? GH World Tour is fucking leaps and bounds beyond Rock Band.

Not really. The hardware is, for some reason, worse, and it was their strength before.. The only real difference is the setlist. And the poorly programmed songs, but that's what you get when you have the Tony Hawk guys doing the job musicians were doing. World Tour ain't bad, but it's not really close. GH is a follower, Rock Band is the trend setter. It perfected itself. We can debate setlist all we want, but so far the DLC war has one clear-cut winner. Add those DLC song to your setlist, and Rock Band's will atomize GH.

The Color and the Shape, Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Texas Flood are coming as DLC. Come on!

Texas Flood was announced as Rock Band DLC in August.

As far as Riddick, I read that Atari has picked up the publishing rights.

Does Rock Band 2 have the open string for bass?

Not that I know of, but why would that put GH ahead? That, and the initial World Tour setlist are the things that are better than RB2 in their fields. The rest belongs soul and heart to RB. Look, I was championing GH until GH3, when the game took a turn for the worse. I tried Rock Band, and felt that the same energy that Harmonix put in the 1st game was still present. I'll give props to EA to do just that: let the makers do their things, and support them, as any decent editor should do.

This soul and heart you speak of, what the FUCK are you talking about?

Or you could just talk about it in the Guitar Hero or Rock Band threads?

Rock Band was made by people who makes music, and loves it, and it shows. From the setlist, which why it has some more obscure titles that are still fun to play, to all the goodies found in it.

Guitar Hero is made by Neversoft, and typical videogame company, and Activision. And it's made to milk the shit out of the franchise. And it shows. I had strong doubt about World Tour, but kept an open mind. It's good, but once I played the setlist at hard, I really don't want to remotely try at Expert, unlike Rock Band.

And for the Activision thing.. the only game I'm reeeeeeeally looking forward is Starcraft 2. That's it. If it wasn't for Blizzard, they'd be way less than the juggernaut they are now. It's their main source of revenue.

wait, so what you're saying is that the guy who thinks a paid subscription to access user-created content doesnt want games he can't exploit? i can't say i didnt see that coming.

Activision pisses me off. If it wasn't for Blizzard they wouldn't be a factor for me. COD and GH can go fuck themselves for all I care.

EA really turned around about two years ago. They announced new IPs, they changed the way they were managing a lot of developers, and even admitted that they'd seriously fucked up in the acquisition and subsequent destruction of some good studios. They're not the good guys just yet, but at least they're out of the red and into the neutral zone.

I can almost respect Activision's stance, in that they're very open about being in it for the money. Makes things easy, really -- you know exactly what you're going to get from any disc with their label. For the next two years at least, you really don't have to worry about paying attention to their games.

(That said, I started playing Web of Shadows last night and don't hate it.)

This has been a while coming for Activision. They don't have the management or mindset to push new, original stuff. Properly managed, a game like GUN could have been the start of something new, but they rushed it and went very 'lowest common denominator' and it tanked. They couldn't manage TRUE CRIME into a respectible franchise, and the only reason the Spider-Man and Marvel Universe games keep holding on is that they've got massive character recognition. I may not hate Web of Shadows, but I'd never recommend it to anyone.

Take Infinity Ward off COD for good and that franchise dies, too.

Hasn't Activision pretty much always been this way, though? Even on the PSOne, outside of their NAMCO Classics releases (which they didn't even make), Tenchu, and the first Tony Hawk (another franchise they milked to death), I don't remember any great game that came out of that studio.

More or less, yeah. You've got to go back to the 2600/5200 days to find moments where Activision prized any sort of creativity, and even then the place was a sweatshop and the good stuff was the exception rather than the rule.

The company has a lot of cache simply by virtue of having been around so fucking long.

It's amazing to see that they've been around since my Atari 2600 days or yore...

One thing that really bugs me about the Call of Duty treatment they're doing what they're doing now, which is letting Infinity Ward develop one superb game for a few years, and milking the franchise by making Treyarch put an inferior CoD title between these milestone games using IW engine. What it does is degrading a whole franchise by making half it's titles kinda crap. That's sad, because the IW games are some of the best in the business.

What's weird is how dormant Activision was during the NES years. They had, what? Licenses from Fox and...what else? Couple Ghostbusters games? I don't remember seriously playing any Activision games from about 1987 to 1995 era.

The only Treyarch COD game worth a shit was The Big Red One, which was notable primarily for bringing near-next gen level graphics to the PS2 while IW was making COD2 happen on the 360. But Grey Matter helped out on TBRO, and they might have been what pushed the game over the line into 'good' territory.