What's funny is that I used to say in order to render my co-workers speechless, "My goal is to beat EA..."



The fact that EA DICE and EALA will be sharing code is a good step, similar to the one between two studios like Treyarch and Infinity Ward and helps keep costs down and prevents reinventing the wheel development. The interesting twist is that DICE is working on the MP while EALA is working on SP. How this affects the distributed development cycle is going to be interesting for such a major project but I suppose it will follow the 2K Marin model in some ways from a project dev cycle. Asset wise, art and audio, coordinating between the two is likely to have the most over head in time spent.



More to the point is that 'hopefully' the tech and design (both level and game) work in tandem. It will be interesting to see if the game play is group versus individual based performance as that seems to be the critical design difference between Activision and EA at this point. (Yes yes...before I get flamed I know about destructable environments, dedicated servers, etc...)



This basic choice in the flow of game play and design I think was principle in attracting so many new players to the title and allowed it to persist for so long in the market place. If it weren't for the legal issue, I would of liked to see a review or evaluation of MoDW2 in project life cycle in DLC and updates, issues arising from high volume versus cost to support and maintain.



If wishes were fishes...

Battlefield 3 will be their savior.

@Patrick---Agreed. These Bad Company games are just filler and testing for BF3.

I just hope EA doesn't do to the FPS genre what Activision did to the music genre in terms of oversaturation. They're working on a new Medal of Honor, Respawn will most likely be putting out an FPS, Epic is doing an FPS for EAP and there will be more iterations of Battlefield, both PC and console. They're going to have to be a little creative with their release schedule.

@ Matt

Ive never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but what better way to weaken your opponent than by taking one of their main support system. EA can afford to oversaturate the genre ITS NOT THEIRS!

They get to play psycho boyfriend and say "if i cant have you... no one can"

It's no surprise DICE are doing the multiplayer (MP) for MoH - they are proven masters of MP. DICE turned things on its head and said "you know what we can make a MP game with no single player'. It also shows how games companies are putting larger emphasis on the MP side of things. For example MW2 gamers have clocked 1.75bn hours online. This is making companies like ATVI sit up and think "how do we monetarize this?.... I know subscription!". Do it right and ATVI will have another cash cow like WoW. Historically games had a MP thrown in at the end that was almost an afterthought. Now it's the main thought given how much online time players consume... if only games companies could turn that into revenues. Sure PDLC is good but what you really want to do is tie your clients into a subscription. It's the future.....

@gus-I think the problem is that the console manufacturers aren't interested in licensing their platforms for MMOs. So for now Activision is holding to the model pioneered by the Halo games-to monetize multiplayer you release map packs.