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Players who did not enjoy EA's free-to-play Android version of Dungeon Keeper found themselves unable to voice their displeasure in the days following its release, as Pocket Gamer discovered that the game actively discourages less-than-perfect ratings via Google Play.

After playing Dungeon Keeper for several minutes, an in-game pop-up requests a Google Play rating, giving players the option of submitting either a 5-star vote or a rating of 1-4 stars. Choosing the "5 Stars" option lets users proceed through the ratings process normally. Selecting the "1-4 Stars" option prevents users from submitting a rating at all, instead confronting them with a request for direct feedback - a result akin to voting in a Pawnee election.

Players can still rate Dungeon Keeper directly via Google Play, however, and nothing prevents users from submitting a lower rating after pressing the in-app "5 Stars" button. The game currently sits at an average rating of 4.3 stars out of 5.

Speaking to Eurogamer, an EA Mobile representative defended the tactic as a method to encourage detailed player feedback. "The 'rate this app' feature in the Google Play version of Dungeon Keeper was designed to help us collect valuable feedback from players who don't feel the game is worth a top rating," the representative said. "We wanted to make it easier for more players to send us feedback directly from the game if they weren't having the best experience. Players can always continue to leave any rating they want on the Google Play Store." [Image: Electronic Arts / Pocket Gamer]

EA announced a new game to accompany this summer's World Cup soccer event: 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil. The game will arrive on April 15 in North America and April 17 in Europe for Xbox 360 and PS3. Pre-order bonuses for the game include special All-Star and Classic XI teams, though no price was given for the game and its four editions.

The next entry in EA's World Cup series will uses licenses that span 203 national teams, 7,469 athletes, 19 officially-licensed managers and 21 new stadiums, which will include all 12 stadiums from Brazil in which the global event will take place. EA said that 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil will improve on the excellent FIFA 14 with one hundred new animations and other buzzword-like locomotion features such as Explosive Movement and World Class Control. It will also include an offline tournament mode, Road to the FIFA World Cup, as well as the new online mode Road to Rio de Janeiro, which has players "win their way across a map of Brazil's 12 host cities in licensed and authentic stadiums."

EA CFO Blake Jorgensen was pretty clear in including the next FIFA World Cup game in the publisher's list of games upcoming next-gen games during its Q2 2014 earnings call in late October 2013. We've asked EA if 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil will come to PS4 and Xbox One, and will update as we learn more.

EA's new mobile Dungeon Keeper is free-to-play in the worst possible way, offering up a twisted cartoonish world in which you can progress through the game either by waiting or paying, and people aren't too pleased about it.Read more...

All does not seem well at EA’s new British studio, Ghost Games. According to Polygon, there have been lay-offs in the last week, and the next Need For Speed game has been put on hold. They say that contractors have been moved on, and full-timers are being given choices over compensatory leave, or shifting over to Visceral’s currently project, thought to be the next Battlefield.

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EA Sports and the NFL "still have a number of years left on our agreements" to exclusively develop and publish video games, EA CEO Andrew Wilson told investors. "We have a number of games in development with the NFL" license, he added. Reports had suggested EA's license to make NFL games would expire this year.Read more...

A federal judge threw out a jury's award of $11 million to the programmer of the original John Madden Football, saying there was no evidence Electronic Arts copied his work for use in future editions of the game without paying royalties to which he would be entitled.Read more...

Marvel and DC superheroes in a modded NBA 2k14... just what basketball needed! A modder named MGX has done just that with the PC version of the game, adding 25 well-known heroes to the roster.Read more...

Those involved are supposedly not allowed to disclose any information regarding the arrangement.

After months upon months of sidestepping the issue, EA and Maxis have finally seen fit to give SimCity an offline option. Victory! At least, for folks still soldiering on with the beleaguered and – to be perfectly honest – not terribly interesting city builder. But while we wait for modders to laugh off Maxis’ suffocatingly stringent guidelines and finally make the game great, some questions still need answering. Foremost among them, why the not-so-sudden about-face when the company once claimed that separating SimCity from its precious servers would be nearly impossible? According to the developer, it’s because rewriting the simulation to function offline took nearly six-and-a-half months of hard work.

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In the wake of yesterday's news that SimCity will be getting an offline version, EA has come out with a blog post explaining just how they made it happen—and how much effort that took.Read more...

Another day, another Battlefield 4 update. EA DICE focuses on the PlayStation 3 and PS4 versions of its glitch-prone military FPS in a pair patches released earlier today targeting player damage indication, general stability, and other issues.

Today's PlayStation 3 update addresses out-of-sync animations and sound dropouts, and adjusts the damage-dealing capabilities of playable jets. PS4 players benefit from fixed flickering and spawn improvements, along with normalized vehicle repair rates. A recent server update should additionally boost performance across all platforms.

Yesterday, EA released a new patch for the PC version of Battlefield 4 eliminating sound loops and Windows 8.1 crashes, among other previously-reported problems.

An update for the PC version of Battlefield 4 was issued this morning, bringing with it some stability, balancing and player spawning fixes. Among the more tangible differences players will notice are tweaks to the stealth jets in the game, which see a 25 percent damage increase to their cannons and some changes in their handling attributes. DICE also fixed an issue where the friendly marker didn't always show when it was supposed to, which resulted in players shooting their teammates. Looks like you're all out of excuses for shooting at your team, Doug.

Head past the break for the full update notes.

An offline mode is coming to SimCity, Maxis announced. It will be delivered in Update 10 for the game. A timeframe for that update was not included in the announcement.Read more...

Good news! In a post on the official SimCity blog, Maxis have confirmed that an offline mode is on its way. The new mode is currently in closed beta testing, with promises that it’ll roll out to everyone in Update 10. Maxis first mentioned they were working on the mode last October, although RPS threw sand on the initial claims that offline mode was prohibitively difficult just days after the game was out.(more…)

SimCity will receive an update that allows for offline play in the near future. Arriving as a free download with Update 10 for the game, SimCity's offline play will allow players to access all of their previously downloaded content in the new single player mode. The developer was last exploring the possibility of offline play for the game in October 2013.

While EA did not reveal a full list of details for the update, it did note that single player campaign save files will be stored locally, so players will no longer be required to have an internet connection when playing the game. EA recently allowed for official mod support of the game, which the publisher cites as a major reason for SimCity's new offline mode to begin with. Now, mods can be made "to the game and its components without compromising the integrity of the Online game," an EA blog on the matter says. No release date was given for Update 10, though Maxis is in the "late phases" of wrapping up its development.

After a "first draft" that put the brakes on most anything interesting, SimCity has published its policy on mods. It means they'll allow some building re-skinning and creation, like this rail station. No changes to gameplay. As for an offline mode? "We are still exploring" that, which is what they said in October, too.Read more...

Bigger is better, says conventional wisdom. And by wisdom, I mean idiocy. “Size matters” is a phrase I’ve found to apply largely to jerks in giant trucks and Reese’s peanut butter cups (the smaller ones taste better for some reason; it is probably wizardry). Many games, in fact, suffer with more players in the mix. So I’ve never really gotten the inevitable tidal wave of enraged tears that hits every time a developer announces that their multiplayer shootything won’t feature 488370630-player battles. And yet, here we are. Titanfall is a 12-player affair, and many fans aren’t exactly pleased.

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Rhianna Pratchett’s writerly quill has guided the words and deeds of many a game character, but that won’t be the case with Faith in Mirror’s Edge 2. Fresh off stints on the likes of Tomb Raider, BioShock Infinite, and Beat Buddy, Pratchett is not reconvening with DICE and EA. She was apparently never even contacted. But perhaps it’s for the better, as Pratchett wasn’t particularly pleased with how the original Mirror’s Edge turned out in the story department.

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To the surprise of no one, China's Ministry of Culture has formally banned Battlefield 4—though "condemned" may be a more accurate term considering the game never was formally for sale there. Anyway, the game is henceforth "illegal," according to reports from the country.Read more...

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning closed down on Wednesday when the licensing agreement Electronic Arts had with Games Workshop ended. A developer who worked on the game says there is a way to preserve its world in a kind of museum-exhibit way, should EA choose to release it.Read more...

Oh ho, the plot thickens! Or rather, it congeals from thin air, because I suppose there wasn’t much of a plot before this. EA yanked the cord on Warhammer Online’s servers (and then presumably bit it in half and bathed in its blood), and that was that. The end. Roll credits. But now a former Mythic developer who’s currently working on Camelot Unchained has revealed the existence of a single-player, server-free version of the sadly short-lived (by MMO standards) game, and he’s pleading that EA release it for history’s sake.

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Nathan reported back in September on coming demise of Warhammer Online. Now it’s happened. Due to the end of EA’s licensing agreement with Games Workshop, as of Wedneday 18th Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has put the hammer down for good.(more…)

"Kill trading" in Battlefield 4's PC version is among the glitches fixed in the latest patch DICE rolled out earlier today. A sound-loop bug that had been bothering a lot of people also should be cleared up, too. Many more details are here.Read more...

Non-profit computer science advocacy group CODE.org promotes its ongoing "Hour of Code" campaign by giving students an audience with Gabe Newell, managing director of Half-Life creator Valve Corporation. The full half-hour talk is archived for public viewing in the video above.

"Hour of Code" challenges students to spend an hour learning the basics of software coding, with CODE.org offering several online tutorials helping to jumpstart a career in the field of computer science. Over three million students have completed the organization's "Write your own computer program" tutorial, which is available in 20 languages and features characters from Rovio's Angry Birds and PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies throughout its lessons teaching the fundamentals of coding.

Electronic Arts announced this week that elementary and middle school students who complete CODE.org's 20-hour training course are eligible to receive a free PC game via Origin. Available games include Bejeweled 3, FIFA Soccer 13, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition and Plants vs. Zombies.

DICE updated Battlefield 4 on PC this week to address a number of server and client crashing issues. The developer patched the game yesterday, addressing "one of the most frequently occurring client crashes" in addition to other bugs related to frame rate and collisions. The update rectifies one particular bug where players were able to be shot while behind cover and changing their characters' stance, as the transitions between poses would occasionally lead to a "multiple frame desync."

Among the other fixes introduced in this week's patch is the issue of grenades bouncing back from containers with open doors. Additionally, DICE fixed a bug that awarded teams a win in a round of Defuse mode by killing every attacker without disarming the bomb, providing it was disarmed in the previous round. The developer issued patches for Battlefield 4's PS4 and PS3 versions last week following EA's statement of commitment to fixing the game's numerous issues. DICE already patched up a one-hit-kill glitch in the game on both PS4 and PC.

Is your game about colossal, god-stomping futuristic machines of destruction most profound? Then make a soothingly voiced “commercial” about them. That seems to be the conventional wisdom of our time, at least if Star Citizen and now Titanfall are anything to go on. It’s a clever tactic, but especially in Titanfall’s case, it also leads to some weird subtext. “Military grade ultra-weapons,” it essentially says in a disarmingly calm growl. “Friends and inspirations to us all and also waterfalls for some reason!” But hey, there’s game/weapon marketing for you. Titanfall really does continue to look utterly smashing, though.

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Battlefield 4 developer DICE has rolled out a pair of patches to PlayStation platforms that should help alleviate the work needed to fix the game. The significant PlayStation 3 patch is currently available in "all territories except North America." The studio is shooting to get the NA version live "as soon as possible."

The PlayStation 4 patch is a field dressing. It fixes the "one-hit kill" bug, enables audio in video capture and should fix a crash that occurs when "having a very large amounts of Friends." Let's gloss over that a core competence of Battlefield is supposed to be playing with lots of friends.

DICE notes, "We are already working on the next PS4 update that will contain more fixes and have a bigger focus on game stability. Stay tuned."

The Xbox One patch is still planned for this week.

The elevators in Battlefield 4? They're fine, as long as you ignore stuff like this, straight from a horror movie. But glitchy elevator physics is the price we have to pay for collapsing buildings and levolution moments.Read more...

EA were voted the worst company in America by the public two years in a row. Now in an interview with MCV, Patrick Soderlund now says the company just wants to be loved. “I don’t believe for a second that we are the worst company in America, but I do believe when something like that happens, you have to sit down and ask yourselves ‘Why are people saying these things?’”

Why? Why oh why oh why oh why.(more…)

Everybody, stop whatever you’re doing. Just stop.

DOLLLLLLLLLLLPHIN GUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.

Go. Go watch it do both dolphin and gun things in the latest video of Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare. It makes high-pitched squealing sounds and blasts bubbles and everything. This is what Ecco The Dolphin would be like if Sega rebooted it as a gritty plant-centric zombie shooter. It is, in other words, the one thing that’s always been missing from your world – the puzzle piece that your heart and soul ached to find lodged between life’s sofa cushions – given shape and form. It is a dolphin gun, you guys. Let that just sink in for a moment. A dolphin gun.

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