His calm and smooth tone shows us that it’s not just a Darth Maul thing. Is that a result of like a weekend class at the Corruscant Community College or just a byproduct of giving into your hatred?

Given the years of back and forth we’ve seen over the possibility of an updated Syndicate for current-gen consoles, we’re looking at the handful of recently discovered copyright documents — that seemingly reveal a collaboration between Starbreeze Studios and EA — with a fair amount of skepticism. Internet supersleuth Supererogatory spotted the three filings on the US Copyright Office website (confirmed by Joystiq this morning, though not linkable), each for the title “Syndicate” and one of which is co-filed by EA and Starbreeze.

Back in 2008, the two companies officially announced that they were working together on revisiting one of EA’s “most acclaimed classic franchises,” dubbing the collaboration “Project RedLime” (and leaving us to speculate on what that classic franchise might be). We’ve reached out to both EA and Starbreeze for comment on the filings and will let you know if we hear anything back.

The sixth developer diary for Star Wars: The Old Republic has been released and it features a new (yet familiar) location players will be able to visit when the MMO finally goes live. Devastated by the sinister Sith Lord Darth Malak in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the post-apocalyptic world of Taris will be a “major world” in the upcoming Bioware MMO. While the original vision for the ruined planet was to be a giant swamp-like crater, Bioware smartly decided to shape the environment as a vertical wasteland that both the Republic and Imperial factions are attempting to reshape.

With all of the furor around the StarCraft 2 beta going on this week, you might actually have forgotten that there are actually two major, big-budget RTS sequels due out in 2010. Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is arriving in just a few weeks on March 16, and, to remind you of that fact, here are a few of the game’s developers telling you about how they balanced the multiplayer component. The main feature is the new class choices — whenever you start up a map, you choose whether you want to play as offense, defense or support, and your teammates can make the same choice, allowing each of you to choose to run your own units entirely, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

There’s also some information at the end about the co-op campaign, which will also let you use the complimentary classes to split up the fight against enemies and follow objectives that much more quickly with a friend. Sure, your Marines and your Zerglings and your Zealots are fun to play with, but it looks like C&C4 is ordering up some new ways to play one of the older genres in PC gaming.

[Via Big Download]

Either way you choose to go, one thing is certain: this is the end of the Tiberium storyline. Bass says that doesn’t necessarily mean the door to the universe is shut forever, but that this particular story thread will conclude with C&C4.

Choose GDI or NOD in this Command & Conquer 4 trailer originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For very many years Electronic Arts were the biggest game publisher on earth. They have an income of billions every year and they employ thousands of people all around the globe. EA are very important indeed for the video games industry. But they are no longer undisputed number one. The marriage of Vivendi and Activision, fed by the cash cow that is World of Warcraft, with mega hits like Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero and very ably led by Bob Kotick are now probably established at the top of the heap, especially when it comes to profit. (Amazingly they were bankrupt in the early ’90s.)

So again, very unsurprisingly, Electronic Arts have issued more bad financial results. They lost $82 million in the quarter ended 31 December (the best time of year for video games!). Their stock price took another hit. They can’t blame the industry, big global publishers like the aforementioned Activision, and also Ubisoft have done very well indeed. Even Sega have managed to get themselves back into profit. I have written about EA’s problems on here before. Repeatedly.

So what is going wrong?:

• The market for all entertainment IP (including films, television and books) is polarising into blockbusters and niche. Everything else is a potential loss maker. The most successful publishers are those who have geared themselves to the new reality.
• This generation of HD home consoles have awful business models to develop for. Basically making a came costs far, far too much. Several times the cost of games for the previous generation. The root of this is that HD games need a massive amount of content which is still largely hand crafted. The next generation of platforms will have enough power to run lots and lots of middleware so development costs should drop back to sensible levels. In the meantime we are stuck with the PS3 and 360 and they are causing a lot of problems.
• The Wii has been a black hole for many third party publishers. Their fault. They mostly haven’t made the games that Wii owners want to buy. Just look at the Metacritic for Wii to see this. Electronic Arts on the Wii published NCAA Football 09 All-Play (Metacritic 49), Celebrity Sports Showdown (Metacritic 50), NBA Live 09 All-Play (Metacritic 51), G I Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Metacritic 51) and many other such gems that should never have seen the light of day.
• There is a trend on the more casual platforms for developers to self publish. This removes discipline from the market, especially on price. The job of a publisher is to provide editorial control, finance and marketing. Self publishers tend to use the price mechanism as their main marketing tool. Done competitively this rapidly collapses the viability of a platform. Electronic Arts have not taken the grip that they should have, thus allowing upstarts like PopCap to gain traction. Also they were late on the scene for emerging platforms, such as Facebook.
• Electronic Arts’ marketing still seems to be largely based on that of the 1960s detergent companies with expensive broadcast advertising. Their customers’ lifestyle habits have moved on and EA seemingly haven’t moved with them. Marketing now is far more about one on one, two way communication.
• Electronic Arts is very corporate. This is expensive and not necessarily the best way to run a large organisation, no matter how good the man at the top is. Far better to take a lesson from Alfred Sloan and break it up into semi autonomous profit centres with individual bosses who live and die by the sword and who are far more receptive to their customers.

It is not all doom and gloom. The losses are less than they were. The management are cutting out the non block buster games. EA moved away from licensed products so have built up the beginning of a portfolio of good IP that they actually own. There are huge economic advantages of scale in publishing, which positions EA very nicely indeed. The world’s consumers will spend more on games in the future than they are now. The next generation of home consoles will reward those with enough clout to invest heavily in middleware.  And EA do have some excellent employees.

So where does the future lie? I still think that EA are a prime M&A target. They would make a perfect acquisition for Microsoft to give them ammunition in their console wars against Sony and Nintendo. And they would also be a perfect fit for Apple, if and when Apple launch their own home gaming console. To both of these companies EA would be far more valuable than it is for its current stockholders. And both of them have the cash sitting in the bank to buy EA with ease.

It got at least as far as the concept art stage, according to old artwork from concept designer Ross Dearsley unearthed by the man who prefers to be called superannuation. Dearsley’s concepts cover all manner of Electronic Arts project, from the unreleased Syndicate and Gunhead to something called Hurikan to other unnamed projects.

Let’s take a peek at the unannounced, potentially aborted Road Rash.

Dearsley’s notes says that he was focusing on “ease of differentiation” in his character concepts for a new Road Rash, with bikers of all shapes, sizes and visual personalities. There’s not much here beyond clothing studies and loose sketches of big, bulky and portly characters, but they certainly do nail “ease of differentiation.

And, to add to the list of literary works turned video games, Dearsley’s concepts out a game concept based on Oliver Twist.

Looks a bit like a kid’s version of Assassin’s Creed, but with one potentially interesting concept mentioned in the notes, Oliver’s hunger levels affecting his pose and animation and, I assume, his vitality. Dearsley’s concepts show off Fagin, multiple versions of Oliver and the Bowstreet Runners.

The artist has concept art from another project, something “Arthurian” from 2007, also for Electronic Arts, on his personal blog. He notes that one of the project’s “key visual elements was to be the scale difference between ‘normal’ people and the gigantic armoured knights.”

Seems EA is quite taken with building IP upon already existing work without those costly licensing fees. Shame that some of this stuff never saw the light of day. Another opportunity to work in “Dickensian” into a post lost.

Ross Dearsley [Blogspot via superannuation

The work of Jesse James Allen and his crew, it shows Faith (played by Yen Ryder) doing the kind of thing she does best, in the kind of places she likes to be seen.

While some of the shots in the gallery are a little cheesy, others restrain themselves enough to bring a little light to our dreary Monday morning.

The Mirror’s Edge [Savage Land @ Flickr]