EA games are just what you get when you design everything by committee.
EA runs a lot of focus groups, they do everything by the numbers and the problem with that can be summed up by the old henry ford quote.
"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse"."
they ask their existing customers what they want. their customers are the kind of people who buy fifa 2009, fifa 2010 and fifa 2011.
their customers just think of their favorite generic FPS and say "I's wan dat"
EA listens.
there's a similar problem in movies. Anyone here who reads Terry Pratchett will get this one about how the Mort movie hit the rocks:
'A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which wet down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said 'Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centes of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys. Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years.' -- Terry Pratchett
you can be sure that with XCOM and many other titles which EA has ruined some suit was put in charge of it and never once actually played the original game(though never admitted it).