EA Sports chief Peter Moore is no doubt proud of his team’s “Madden” and “Tiger Woods” games this year.

But when I asked him what the highlights and lowlights were for EA Sports this year during a quick sit-down interview in New York last week, the first positive thing that came to his mind was … a Korean version of “FIFA.”

Why?

“You hate to point to certain franchises, but I can’t overstate the importance of ‘FIFA,’” he told me while his PR handler was getting him a coffee. “Not only because, of course, we can sell ‘FIFA’ in just about any country in the world — particularly here in North America we’re selling very, very well. But the opportunities to iterate off our ‘FIFA’ franchise into a mid-session game [like] we gave you an example of with Asia [are] important.”

Moore was referring to a presentation he gave earlier in the day at the BMO Capital Markets Conference, during which he said that the “FIFA Online 2” game in South Korea has been a rousing success. The game is free to play on PC but, like many Asian multiplayer online PC games, offers players a bevy of cosmetic and gameplay items for small fees. Moore said that most people don’t buy any items, but those who do have bought an average of $28 of goods since the game’s launch.

It wasn’t just the Korean version of “FIFA” that has pleased Moore. It’s also the success EA has had in challenging Konami for soccer/football game dominance: “FIFA” vs. long-time global leader “Pro Evolution.”

“Three years ago, we were the second-place guy,” Moore said. “You may recall we took a big risk of jumping right in and spending on a new engine before Konami did…It’s one of those examples where we simply swallowed hard and said we have to go to a new engine. All of the grief, it costs you. And sometimes you don’t get it right the first time… I’m very proud of “FIFA.”

Thriving because of spirited competition? Some might see irony there, given that EA notoriously faces no formidable challengers in the making of American football games.

How could he say fitness games are the new music games?

However, EA will be facing tough competition next year in fitness games. The morning of Moore’s presentation in New York was also the morning EA announced “EA Sports Active,” a Wii-exclusive workout game designed to be used with specially packaged leg bands that can hold the Wii remote or nunchuk.

Moore maintains that the game is “complementary” to, rather than competitive with, Nintendo’s runaway hit “Wii Fit,” primarily because he characterizes “Wii Fit” as espousing a more balance-oriented fitness routine compared to EA’s emphasis on heart-pumping physicality. What was most striking in his presentation was Moore’s declaration that fitness games are the next big market, the new hot genre following the rise of the music game category exploding with “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band.”

How could he say fitness games are the new music games? Moore feels it in his resume. He was a physical education teacher 30 years ago and then worked for nearly two decades at Reebok. Fitness, he said, is what people want.

“There are a huge number of people that need to work out, that want to work out, that recognize that they have some health challenges but are not comfortable, don’t like running, don’t want to go outside, are perhaps not comfortable in the gym and perhaps most importantly, don’t have time,” he said. “We looked at some stats: 61 percent of the U.S. population is overweight; 89 percent of all women in surveys say they need to lose weight. Whether they need to or not, their perception is they need to lose weight. We’re also looking at time compression. We’re looking at the cost of working out. Gym memberships and things of that nature. And then when you look at how many Wiis are embedded in homes around the world, and you do the correlation, it’s a strong business opportunity.”

But really, are these the new “Guitar Hero”s? “I’m bullish,” he said. “Do I have any basis for knowing what this market is? I really don’t. My only basis is having been involved with this market for 30 years in one way or the other. Seeing the innovation. We have driven this hard for the past 12 months.”

In our survey of highlights and trends, Moore also said he was proud of his division’s attempts to try new intellectual property this year, despite what he called “mixed results in some cases.”

So EA Sports sounds like a different division than the “Madden” factory some casual observers might take it to be. Is it a division headed in the right direction? Moore’s highlights, if nothing else, shows the track they’re running on.

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46% of people surveyed plan to head out Black Friday for a console purchase. As long as you are willing to hunt, you should find some deals. With Wiis in good supply for the holiday season, Nintendo could see their best month ever.

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Recently, That VideoGame Blog conducted an interview with Steve Schnur, EA’s Worldwide Executive of Music and Marketing and President of Artwerk (EA music publisher), to discuss how EA is expanding their involvement in bringing new music into games. Artwerk signs new talent and brings their songs into EA while also delivering master recordings, film and TV sync deals, advertising placement and distribution that goes far beyond games. If it has to do with music in many of EA’s games, he’s the one to talk to. So we did. And he had some pretty interesting stuff to say about how big the music world is getting within the gaming world.

Of course even an EA man has to attribute a lot of that success to Rock Band and Guitar Hero (though Madden was making artists famous before that). Those two games are making big bucks right now and as Schnur points out, “a recent survey shows that among all boys and girls in the 8-17 year-old age group, the upcoming Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 are the ‘most wanted’ games this holiday season.” So without a doubt, there is high demand and big bucks there. And we were curious if Schnur knew anything about an EA rhythm game in the works.

“We have some pretty awesome things in development. Naturally, they’re all top-secret. In the meantime, keep your hands on a controller and your eyes and ears open!,” he said after asked if EA and Artwerk had any plans for music style games in that vein. Definitely sounds like EA might be entering the plastic guitar scene some time soon — they couldn’t let Activision have all the fun could they? Of course not.

Bethesda were part of the story. Fallout 3 previews, between explaining VATS and the Megaton dilemma, made sure to note the long-standing concerns over whether Bethesda could pull this off.

Bethesda had inserted themselves into the history of someone else's series: Fallout, ardently mythologized as a classic, although its commercial cachet had declined. After Bethesda cultivated their house franchise into a well-received cross-platform hit with Oblivion, they suddenly had everything to prove.

Their motivations find parallel in the story Fallout 3 tells about the player character's father, James. One day and without any specific impetus, James abruptly leaves home and the security it provides. He risks everything on resurrecting a certain project commonly thought to be untenable after some recent failures.

Why'd he leave, and why did Bethesda decide to do this? Fortunately they did, because at worst, Fallout 3 would have been an undetermined game; a cautious compromise between the varying design sensibilities of Bethesda and Black Isle and a half-hearted and restrained remake of the original Fallout.

That's not Fallout 3. Here's why it mattered to the post-apocalyptic, profanity-laden, morally vague wasteland that Bethesda make it this time.

The Hopelessness After The Explosion

Game worlds which exist in their fiction as monumental achievements -- like Rapture and Liberty City, grand and exhaustive -- can reflect their developers' real-life dedication to building a quality game.

Instead of vicariously crafting in-game opulence, Bethesda recreated Washington, D.C. as a blasted shithole devastated by nuclear war and depressingly rendered in decrepit detail. BioShock was a toast to failed ambition; Fallout 3 a toast to failure.

Given Fallout 3's timing, reintroducing the series' conceit of war beginning with an Alaskan invasion is faintly hilarious. Now that the resultant wasteland exists in one of Bethesda's open and persistent worlds, you're forced to survey the full extent of the destruction.

You can't ignore all the bombed-out highways, the bridges to nowhere, the irradiated waters, the torn-apart schools, the abandoned cars, the skeletal remains embracing on the beds of shattered houses, or the random and meaningless firefights and explosions. That's the world, and you have to deal with it even when it has no quest relevance.

No previous Fallout game has actually felt so plausibly Post-Nuclear. If Fallout 3 doesn't seem as funny as its predecessors, it's because there's really nothing funny about that. A video game has never been so appropriately painted in brown and gray; the thematic prerogative of Gears of War wasn't hopelessness.

Why Washington DC Works

The decision to set Fallout 3 in D.C. was ostensibly made to further distance Bethesda's game from the West Coast adventures of Fallout 1 and 2, and because the Maryland-based developer were more familiar with the Capitol. This is workmanlike reasoning, which doesn't hint at the massive implications the decision would have on the creative direction of the game.

It's not until after the player leaves the pristine sanctity of Vault 101 in search of his father -- and makes it to Washington proper -- that you remember what's specifically important about D.C.

Not until you march down the Mall, through the wrecks of the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building, the Museums of History and Technology, the National Archives and the Lincoln Memorial to the tune of the America the Beautiful, ducking the street-gangs and mutants further blowing apart the ruins, can you can tell that this is the dismal coda to American history.

America as it was conceived in 1776 is in gradual decline. While some civilians still go about their lives, it seems inevitable that the light will blink out sooner rather than later. When you're able to casually scavenge the Declaration of Independence, and sell it, whatever immaculate prestige American history once had is probably gone.

On your tour of D.C., you're made to revisit all the initial promise inherent in that document, while you're picking up the pieces and kicking around the ashes. The buildings stand remarkably intact, frozen in time, for you to look up at and think about how this all went to hell.

Sitting in the Museum of Technology's planetarium, you can watch the stars flicker across the ceiling from an antiquated projector, listening to an earnest narrator explains the great dream of mankind to explore outer space and some '40s nostalgia drifting over the radio. A pair of super mutants interrupt with lead pipes and miniguns, screaming about tearing your head off. That's Fallout 3.

Vault Boy's Lament

It's a heartbreaking picture, even though Fallout is still decorated with contrarily cheerful '50s duck-and-cover iconography, replete with the perpetually enthused Vault Boy character. As much as that imagery serves as ironic commentary, it almost exists to leaven the psychological burden of walking around awake in this nightmare.

If you can point to something out-of-place or ridiculous, then you can detach from the world -- rather than submitting to it as a reasonable state of existence.

Even so, Fallout the third is the sober one in the family. Whether you think that's a deliberate choice or Bethesda's Achilles' heel, it works for this game. Fallout 3 executes its humorous interstitials as well as anything in the first game, while rejecting the broader pop culture excesses of Fallout 2's Monty Python prostitute showcase. It is, after all, the end of the world.

Far Cry 2, another sequel from a different studio, has absolutely nothing to do with the first game. The name is a vehicle for an unrelated design document and the game's called Far Cry 2 only because Ubisoft doesn't own the Mercenaries license.

The new Far Cry team and the new Fallout team offer new perspectives. Far Cry 2's Africa abandons aliens for malaria, item degradation, civil war and all-purpose ugliness -- while Fallout 3's wasteland is deliberately and unremittingly tragic. To the history of their respective series, they introduce a conscience.

They tell gamers that they can have their open-world shooter and post-apocalyptic wastelands, with their bloody conflicts, nuclear weapons, headshots, political intrigue and all the occasionally goofy video game accouterments, but they won't pretend anymore that it's all unreservedly awesome.

You should feel bad in Far Cry 2 or sad just walking around in Fallout 3. That Fallout 3 is able to convey all this entirely through atmosphere, rather than disadvantaging the player (a page out of the survival horror playbook) is a pretty remarkable achievement.

Enter The AntAgonizer

Fallout 3's weirdest moment has two costumed crusaders fighting on the outskirts of a remote town, calling themselves the Mechanist and the AntAgonizer. It's a moronic premise, albeit one right in line with Fallout.

When you talk to the AntAgonizer, though, and persuade her to knock it off, the game treats her with completely dignity, as she presents a reasonable case for how she wanted to help the impossibly lost inhabitants of the wasteland, before running away in tears.

As Fallout's setting is such an unnatural mode of existence, it's especially worthwhile to observe how the residents of the wasteland choose to live their lives. What are you supposed to do when all of civilisation's institutions have been erased?

Everyone you meet has written their own self-help book on post-nuclear living. Most subsist on vice, as murderers, dealers, slavers and prostitutes. Skilled fighters hire themselves out as mercenaries or anarchically pillage towns. Others go flat-out insane.

Personal survival can be so insurmountable a bar that few rise above self-interest and do what's right for what little remains of the world. Some try, like the semi-righteous order of knights, the Brotherhood of Steel, but even they're divided on how much they want to help out humanity. The Capitol Wasteland lacks any government or ideology and as chaotic and sociologically fractured as it is, it's a perfect setting for an unfocused open-world game.

There's exactly one person in Fallout 3 who will sacrifice for the greater good and you can follow him if you want. It's impossible to believe that in this world enough people like Alexander Hamilton or James Madison will emerge; a small number of smart people who, though ideologically divided, could do something as immense as drafting and ratifying the Constitution. You can't expect any such coherence or drive from the people of Fallout 3.

Carry On, Regardless

Most interesting among the populace are not the raiders or the samaritans but those going on as if nothing happened. Isolated in private zones or secluded in vaults, they run restaurants, sweep floors, nurse high school crushes; reintroducing domesticity to the post-apocalypse.

You have to wonder how responsible that actually is. Are they doing the right thing in rebuilding familiar societal constructs, or should they accept that the world's in decline and do something about it?

You're an actor in the wasteland like the rest, with more agency and influence than all of them combined, which prompts you to consider what you are going to do. In Fallout, making moral decisions isn't a feature designed to encourage replayability, it's arguably the entire point.

Fallout is distinctly unlike those "choose fate, save world" games like Mass Effect (or Oblivion, for that matter) since their worlds are never believably imperiled. The world is in pretty good shape for the entire game; the danger is theoretical and only ever exacerbated by the player allowing the linear plot to progress.

Here, the world is already a write-off. You can't fix the wasteland or the war but there are so many people whose lives you can affect, and that in turn determines what kind of person you are. All that really matters is the quality of your character. If you help whoever you meet, you won't get anything out of it -- not really, not the world or power or glory or any kind of meaningful relationship. All it is is karma.

See What You Can Do

In a weird way, the wasteland is an inviting avenue for change. There are no rules, no institutions, no laws. What do you do when nobody is watching and you can't be held accountable? If you try and approximate the moral and legal standards of today, then that's a statement in itself: you want those structures to endure.

The place is already so desolate you don't even have to do much to improve it. It reminds me, tangentially, of reading about post-invasion Iraq and the early stages of the occupation when the country, bleached to a dreamlike blank slate, so briefly overflowed with possibilities, and an influx of bright young graduates headed out to the Green Zone to reconstruct the country.

I remember thinking, for one dangerously unguarded moment, that wouldn't it be great to move to Baghdad. A place where there's so much to achieve and you can finally have an impact even though you'll probably ruin everything and get murdered.

When the Ink Spots' shiftless anthem "Maybe" is broadcast over the in-game radio, the song being the first thing you heard in Fallout 1, it invokes the series' own memory. Bethesda inspire nostalgia for something they had nothing to do with and recall how unlikely it once seemed that they'd be the ones to restart this thing.

The lyrics -- "Maybe you'll sit and sigh, wishing that I were near/Then maybe you'll ask me to come back again/And maybe I'll say 'Maybe'" -- contradict what this game is all about. Fallout 3 is about making a decision. It's about commitment. It's about doing something.

'A Tribute To Intent'

If it seems like an overly general theme, consider Bethesda's own history with this game. Consider how, out of unspecified desire, they left the safety of the Elder Scrolls for this, and how many development studios are factories for endless variations on popular franchises or uninspired sequels nobody cares about.

Fallout 3 is a tribute to intent. It's not a rallying cry for any cause or even a cautionary tale about the hypothetical horrors of nuclear holocaust. It's a statement on the worthlessness of inaction. It's about not staying in the vault.

In the spirit, then, of conclusive action and definitive answers, we are at last able to resolve every question we've ever had about this game. Does it work; did they pull it off; was it worth all the time, the money, the effort, the mistrust and the suspicion; with everything that this game says and everything that it achieves, well, finally, is this Fallout?

Here are the major suggestions and obervations he makes:

• Remove the zone control/locking from the game
• Make keep taking meaningful by adding a Darkness Falls type dungeon
• Remove renown and victory gain from T4 scenarios
• Merge the servers and merge them now
• Revamp the PvE in the game
• The Tome of Knowledge is great but we need substance
• Add content to the game!
• Find some way - any way - to make the world have more ‘place’ and less ‘utility’
• The game doesn’t even know what it’s supposed to be at heart

I agree with the last bullet most of all. Back in beta, before I even got in, the main focus of the game was much different than what we have today. I can’t elaborate too much on it because I’m not properly informed on the previous situation, but I do know that ORvR including keeps was NOT the main feature. I believe the previous version had much more emphasis on scenarios and non-objective-driven ORvR. Keeps were added because the majority of testers found the previous incarnation too reliant on instanced RvR and requested that keeps be added to encourage more open-world RvR.

They had an original vision for the game that just didn’t pan out with the players, so they changed it. The result seems to be a bit of a hodgepodge to be honest.

My personal desire for this game was for it to be DAOC 2.0 and a lot of things line up with that on paper, but not so much in practice. My biggest complaints about DAOC were:

• Horrible PvE grind from 1-40 (grinding was the primary method of progression, not quests)
• You could only feasibly progress through PvE and not RvR (this was patched in later but DAOC didn’t have the population to support it)
• Very poor class balance with drastic nerfs and buffs every few months that hugely impacted RvR
• The Trials of Atlantis expansion placed a huge emphasis on PvE, which required players into brutally long and unfun gear/master-level grinding sessions in order to remain competitive

Look at my hate list for DAOC and compare it to Keen’s must fix list for WAR. His list is quite a bit larger, and could be bigger still if I really wanted to get nit-picky and add my own complaints, including bugs, class balance, missing classes/cities (content), lack of dungeons, etc.

I’ve always felt that DAOC was an amazing concept and only needed a few design tweaks to make it appeal to the masses. The trouble is, I think Mark Jacobs wanted to make it a much bigger departure from DAOC than it needed to be and now we’re left with a game that has some totally amazing features and an equally long crappy feature list. Here’s a quote to help support that statement:

Folks,

I loved DF as well. One of my favorite ideas. I can’t imagine though we would want to do it again, would we?

I mean, really, if we could come up with a totally overwhelming, mind-blowing, kewl innovative, next-generation idea, well then, who knows?

Mark

This statement makes me grit my teeth. In a way, I am happy that they don’t want to recycle all the same old ideas, yet, when you have such a hugely requested feature like this that people are practically begging for, what’s the problem - your own pride? I am really hoping he was being sarcastic here. Darkness Falls wasn’t perfect, but with some minor adjustments, I think it would be one of the best features of WAR.

This isn’t me speaking solely from nastalgia here. WAR would benefit hugely from a DF not only as a really fun way to PvE/RvR up our <40 characters and get some sweet gear and fun experiences for our 40 characters, it provides that incentive for people to go out into ORvR and fight for something too.

Let’s face it, Keen’s first and second bullets are spot on. The zone capture mechanic is retarded and we need more reasons to take Keeps in RvR. Why the hell should I be forced to grind out PQs for hours on end to move that bar forward once I already own all the keeps in the zone? I just spoke with some ex-guildies who are on Phoenix Throne and the reason why they can’t seem to lock up T4 zones is because they have TOO MUCH population and that population is too balanced on both sides mixed with a lot of apathy. It’s very discouraging to log on for 4 straight hours and push your campaign forward only to have it stall up because people got lazy when you logged out. If the endgame is city capture and it takes weeks of your side constantly dominating to push past the enemy’s fortresses, that just seems like bad design. Sooner or later you won’t be able to keep it up for a few days or hours and the control will rebalance itself.

The way the current capture/control mechanic is set up, it only benefits a more dominant side, if there is one. If the sides are balanced, there’s no way in hell you’re going to push to your enemy’s city, which means you’ve feasibly given people an unreachable goal and unreachable content for their endgame characters. When people put in several days or weeks worth of effort and don’t get anywhere, they’re going to stop bothering to even try. The benefit of a Darkness Falls is that they would actually get something immediately for all their hard work in capturing all the zone’s keeps.

People want to play a game, not have another day job. I’ve always hated the capture mechanic and you can read my posts back to the days of beta to see that I basically called called this current situation right out of the gate. I’m not saying this to be cocky, just that it was highly predictable and if I could see it happening, why couldn’t the devs? Is it actually “working as intended?”

Anyway, to tie up this post, I think they simply needed to work with the DAOC model, fix up for four major complaints I had about the game, tied it to the Warhammer IP, and people would be drooling all over WAR. Not quitting in droves like they currently are.

I would love to get a current reading on the number of people paying to play WAR right now. Keen’s right: Get out the hatchet and start hacking away at all the crap that is making you lose your subscribers, Mythic.

I want you to be successful and I want to play DAOC 2.0 not some mystery MMO with roots here, there and everywhere, but without a cohesive and successful implementation.

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1. Lessons I Hope They Learned from DAOC Even though I have a lot of fond memories of...
2. Subscribe to DAOC = Get into WAR Beta? Interesting find in my quick browse over at the VN...
3. The Double-Edged Sword of RvR Map Alerts… Isn't it great that we can survey the open-world RvR...

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X3F reader John O. just sent in an interesting rumor tip regarding the Zune's future use as additional Xbox 360 storage. That is, official Xbox 360 storage.

Rumor: Zune to double as additional Xbox storage originally appeared on Xbox 360 Fanboy on Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is all part of Walmart’s goal to save consumers over $200 million this holiday season. We just posted a survey that showed that Walmart does big game business, so I thought I’d pass this on to you guys.

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