EA CH Follow up.

On Monday EA Chicago held a job fair for their recently released employees. Pretty cool of them, I must say. I don't know if that is a commonplace type of event; I have not heard of such an event in the past. There was quite an assembly of studios there: local outfits upstairs, remote locations downstairs. I had the opportunity to reconnect with a number of good devs I have worked with in the past. Again, I hope things work out for them.

I got to spend a little time with their cancelled Marvel Comics project. I'm not a huge comic fan these days, but it sure looked pretty cool. The world was detailed out well, and the textures and full screen filters lent everything a convincing comic-y look. I chose Captain America, (I believe he was the most complete character,) pitted against USAgent. On first blush the game looked like some sort of open world type experience like GTA, though the guys that had worked on it called it a fighting game.

There was a Chicago-esque looking level complete with L Tracks and a bunch of crowd AI milling about. The player character was capable of some pretty big double jumps and could also do some sort of dash type move by attacking when in air. A very large part of the environment appeared to be destructable, (precomputed I was told,) with the demolition of the L Tracks being particularly impressive. Transitions from indoor to outdoor areas through holes punched in buildings was well done, though I thought I caught a couple of split second glitches I assumed was an artifact of some sort of portaling system. I ran around destroying cars and buildings for a pretty decent amount of time while USAgent was off somewhere else. I'm not sure if it was driven by the amount of damage I had caused to the city, but I noticed that the AI had begun to throw rocks at me. Neat.

Based on my short experience, I would describe the game as Powerstone on steroids. I had heard that one of the reasons the it was cancelled was due to the fact that the whole comics thing is largely played out at this point. I can say for myself that I am personally over it, but I would have thought that with the recent success of the myriad of comic based films of late that there would have been some sort of market for it. It is a real shame the team and technology couldn't be put toward a similar type of game with a different theme.

One last comment: I did not come across too many of the "outside talent" types that the studio head supposedly was going to bring in when staffing the shop, as I mentioned in my previous EA post. As far as I could tell, most everyone there was a vet game developer. So perhaps that really wasn't the reason that particular studio went under, but I stand by my previous statements: this whole notion that "we" have been doing it wrong for so long and that somebody from a linear media background can waltz in make magic happen in games is really puzzling to me. To clarify: I have nothing against the linear media people themselves. I just don't understand the execs that lure these folks into what has largely proven to be a lose/lose situation.