Battle for Middle Earth Community Day Writeup

Whoo EA!

We got up and headed for the offices, eating breakfast in the EA cafeteria. They had a pretty good selection of food to choose from, and an insane selection of drinks; I spent several minutes just deciding what drink to pick and ended up with the Electronic Arts brand bottled water...unless Dasani is a developer, I don't think any other developer has its own bottled water. Insane, but it was oh so good water.

Following breakfast, we took a tour of the EA offices here in LA which are currently entirely dedicated to development of EA's latest James Bond and Medal of Honor games, along with Battle for Middle Earth..though we didn't see the BFME floor during the tour. The offices are - at first glance - pretty similar to most other development offices with a kitchen on every floor for the constant food needs of gamers, a gaming room, a game/book library, and a "war room" on every floor for talking about the progress of the game or whatever else.

Getting a look at the EA pad

However, they did have a couple things that I haven't seen in any other developer offices: in particular, an on-site gym. Sitting around working on game doesn't burn that many calories, so the EA guys like to keep in shape by going to the gym whenever they can. In addition to the gym, there is a basketball court, a volleyball court, and a soccer field right beside the offices; pretty every day the EA guys have a soccer game against the valets, I wonder who is better. One other thing that's different about the EA offices is EA tv, a bunch of televisions throught the place that have various important announcements that the whole staff needs to know about.

The EA LA offices are pretty damn nice nowadays, but they weren't always like that. Starting out in a much smaller place, the offices were compact with at least two people to a cubicle as opposed to the one man to an 8x8 cubicle (technically a "hexagonicle", or something like that...) conditions of today.

Q&A time

After we were done with the tour, all of us were ready to find out more about Battle for Middle Earth. And find out more information we did, getting a look at the E3 demo narrated by Mark Skaggs; since I hadn't seen the E3 demo (whooo dialup!) it was pretty interesting to watch, especially with the commentary by Mark. We also got a Q&A session with Dustin Browder, finding out just about anything on the gameplay aspect of BFME.

Following the Q&A session, we went to the EA store that they have there in the offices and got some nice EA merchandise and games for unbelievably prices: 20 bucks for a console game and 10 bucks for a PC game, they were practically giving it away. Needless to say, I got all the games I'd planned on getting but were too cheap to buy until now. Everyone finished with their shopping and went to eat lunch: lots of sandwiches.

Next: The second half of the day
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