Or EA may decide to lock it down even further. Getting the source for an engine being used for multiplayer would expose vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.
I love both Dishonored games but the chaos system kind of ticks me off with those leading to occasional disappointment. So only slight disappointment there. Also Control which I started playing then got bored with it. Again I think I got swayed by flashy reviews and game trailers which are designed to sell the game, not show you what it actually is like in use. The gun is annoying and the gimmick of psychic powers and throwing things gets a bit tiresome after awhile, also the lack of direction with mission objectives and what to do. Is it so bad to ask the game to show you a little bit of where to move next and not just wander a bit? Also if you visit past areas to pick stuff up enemies respawn and it's a fucking pain in the ass.
More likely it might actually get them to abandon their irrational edict that all EA games use that engine, no matter how it might hobble the development process.
I know. Literally every game developed with that engine that isn't an FPS (you know, what it was actually designed for) has had major headaches. So not just the likes of Andromeda and Inquisition but a bunch of the sports games too. No question.
Same reason they used it for open world third person RPGs: Because EA owns the engine and thus, no licence fees to potential competitors (like say; Epic Games.) Also: something-something Live Services something-something Surprise Mechanics.
Yeah, they presumably thought that using the same engine across the board would save them some time and resources, and on paper, it sounds like a fine idea, until you realize it has all sorts of problems. It's not like the Unreal engine which has years of use within different genres, to the point that I often don't notice the Unreal engine unless it's pointed out.
Yeah, the Unreal engine has generally been pretty good. I think I've only had about two games running it that didn't run great, but I blame my PC more than the games. Thing is, one big difference between any other engine like Unreal or either IdTech vs Frostbyte is the decades of experience, both in-house and by licensed developers pushing the engines to do some amazing things. I remember being in awe of what the devs at Ion Storm managed to do with the Quake engine for Anachronox. Things like that can in the end push the in-house engine developers to greater things for their next versions of the engine. Frostbyte on the other hand, unless EA starts licensing it, will never reach the flexibility of these engines the way they think it has.
A PC game called The Regiment. It's a first person shooter based on the SAS and it has some of the worst graphics and gameplay I have ever seen. I couldn't get past the first level because it was so bad. All doors open towards you so you have to open them and then step back every time which is infuriating and to change weapons or equip items you have to bring up a menu and cycle through it. Not ideal for an SAS operative and clearly a console port. I don't mind those types of menus like in Tomb Raider but not in a tense special forces shooter where split seconds count. If you're considering trying The Regiment don't bother and just play/replay SWAT 4.
As I've played a ton of games over the last 30+ years, of course there were a lot of disappointments. I'll just mention a few that may be most contentious because they generally receive such praise. - Mass Effect 2: while it is great at some things it does, I found it disappointing as a sequel to ME1. I loved ME1 for its exceptional world building and that great space Cthulhu main story and how brilliantly this story unfolds step by step. ME2 is all about characters and it does a great job at that, but the "main story" (as in, the part that's supposed to develop Mass Effect's main story further) is just a poor tacked-on afterthought that doesn't really advance that storyline in any way and leaves it to ME3 to basically start where ME1 left. Also, ME1 felt like "serious" sci-fi (in a sci-fi novel sense) whereas ME2 felt much more comic book in nature. After the wealth of ME1's sci-fi world building, the few new things ME2 brings to the table is stuff like comic book monsters (Vorcha, Shadow Broker) and lots of badass characters, with an emphasis on lot and on badass. And everytime I hear "tough sonsofbitches" or "watch your asses", I die a little inside. - Mass Effect 3: now this is shunned by many, but mostly for the ending. I didn't mind the ending much, I was glad when it was finally over, because narrative-wise I found it poor from start to finish. Many characters had a lot of depth in ME2, but in ME3 I found they were reduced to one-note caricatures. It had good action though. - Witcher 3: I'm kind of in a love/hate relationship with this one. When it's good, it knows no match. It tells some of the greatest, most engaging stories, especially in side missions. However, true to the series, it's also riddled with infantile machismo that make my eyes roll so hard it hurts, and the action is pretty poor. If Skyrim has better combat than your game, you're doing it wrong. - Hollow Knight: I appreciate the atmosphere, but gameplay-wise I think it's marred by frustrating design decisions. Most of all, how excessive visual effects obscure what's going on during combat. Whenever I hit an enemy, for a moment I can't see what they're doing or even where they are. To some extent, you can predict where the enemy is after hitting them, but if there's a second enemy obscured by the visual effects, I have no way of telling where they are or what they're doing, more often than not resulting in being hit because well, I have no way to tell what's going on. The game seems to think it has great action, enough to sustain long challenging boss fights, but in my opinion it's just... not good. I like a good challenge, but HK's boss fights feel bog-standard made harder via excessive visual FX and giving them a trillion hit points. - Shovel Knight: it feels like I should love this game, being a fan of old 8/16-bit games. But I think it's pretty mediocre, stage gimmicks are meh, most boss battles are just chaos, and I find the soundtrack very annoying because it's just so hyper-hyper excited and caffeinated. Apparently it's meant to be a nostalgia fest, but honestly I'd rather play original 8/16-bit games that are just... better.
The only thing I didn't like about ME2 relative to ME1 was I preferred the longer worldbuilding missions of ME1 to the linear corridor walks of ME2.
At least it wasn't the first game. I hated the combat in the first game. It can be best described as clunky timing based combat. I was so glad that they changed it for the second game and improved it even further with the 3rd.
Cyberpunk 2077 just recently disappointed me. I played the first couple of hours, and I just couldn't get into it at all. Maybe my tastes are changing, or maybe I expected a futuristic version of GTA V, but regardless, it was not at all what I was hoping. The interface felt clunky, the story didn't really interest me, and while the animation was pretty solid, it didn't wow me like I thought it would considering all of the money and manpower CD Project Red put into it. So I managed to get a refund. I am currently playing Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition and loving the hell out of it.
They sometimes don't. One of my favorite games of all time was Deus Ex. The sequel, Invisible War, was a complete reworking of the way the game was played. I watched a fascinating interview with one of the game developers and he said the reason the sequel got so messed up was that they listened to industry insiders and programmers who didn't like the way the first game did things like inventory management, skill building and the like. They wanted a more simplified system. So, they completely redid the system and Invisible War flopped. Honestly, what makes a good game isn't always know to the developers and why people have fun isn't known either.
The first game was so brilliant, and I never played the sequel, only watched a playthrough years later, but I was almost shocked to see how linear it was compared to the original. Thankfully, Human Revolution was more like the original in terms of freedom of choice, and I loved that game.
Trying to follow trends or "industry standards" or whatever is more often than not a recipe for disaster, they often forget that there's a reason why people were fans of a particular game for what it was, not for what it wasn't. They were thinking about making the next Doom game some sort of military shooter in the vein of CoD/Battlefield, but they scrapped the idea and decided to start from scratch to make a game that's actually Doom. The result, the 2016 reboot, was met with universal praise for being that and not another military shooter people would have instantly forgot about. Edmund McMillen thought of Binding of Isaac as "career suicide", but it turned out that by making the game he wanted to make--as opposed to the game he might have thought the market demanded--he created one of the most successful indie games, and now it is one of gaming's big classics.