Anthem - How it went wrong @ Kotaku

How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong

It wasn't even supposed to be called Anthem. Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond. They'd even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff.

Then, less than a week before the Los Angeles press conference held by BioWare's parent company, Electronic Arts, word came down that securing the rights to the trademark would be too difficult. Beyond was ruled out. The leadership team quickly switched to one of their backup options, Anthem. But whereas Beyond had been indicative of what BioWare hoped the game would be--you'd go out beyond the walls of your fort and into the dangerous wilds around you--Anthem didn't really mean much.
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This account of Anthem's development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem's development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It's a story of technical failings, as EA's Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare's developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team's needs. It's a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It's a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn't enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.

Perhaps most alarming, it's a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare's longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take "stress leave"--a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. "People were so angry and sad all the time," they said. Said another: "Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware."
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ilm said:

Who decides that the studio is in crisis? The masses (Twitter)? I don't think any studio official commented on the sales numbers yet, or did they?

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It's pretty scary how hard these points hit BioWare. Every single one of them can directly relate to Anthem.

• An unhealthy obsession with graphical quality.

It should be obvious that's where most of the time and money went when it comes to Anthem. Not to mention performance is still very shaky because of it. They threw everything at how the game looked (and then had to strip most of it away). Instead of focusing on the core, fundamentals of the game.

• A lack of 'genre' knowledge by the developers.

BioWare have never really done anything like this and it shows. They get even the very basic fundamentals of a looter rpg wrong, or are completely missing the basest of systems necessary for the genre (stats screen). Not to mention the emaciated end-game and loot situation. Heck, they somehow didn't even get the RPG aspects down, despite experience with Mass Effect, SWTOR, and Dragon Age. How?!?

• The belief that everything can be fixed in future patches.

BioWare have said repeatedly that they are taking 'small steps' (patches) in order to reach an end-goal for a system or issue, in order to monitor how each change affects the game. That approach is simply not working and before the game gets to any 'okay' state through these small patches, the game will be dead. Anthem needs some major reconstructive surgeries, not a thousand band-aids that cause another thousand cuts.

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Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months. This is the story of what happened.

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Nereida said:

Let me preface this by saying that Anthem is by no means a perfect game, I'd rate it around 7.5/10, give or take. But its biggest problem was being made by a company called EA, which is widely hated and boycotted and will always be even if they one day come up with the cure to cancer and the phial of immortality.

Anthem made by any other company, especially the mediocre ones that keep being praised beyond their merits only because their games are flooded with unsmokeable walls of text (insert inXile, Obsidian, and a long etc) would be treated as a treasure to mankind.

We all understand. EA uses hard DRM, microtransactions, and a whole array of things we hate as gamers, and so we're all waiting around the corner with a club to bash them in the head at each opportunity.

Let's all take advantage of it now, then, since criticising these people who by the way, the vast majority are normal workers with an actual career that wanna feed their families, is completely fine.

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Nereida said:

Let me preface this by saying that Anthem is by no means a perfect game, I'd rate it around 7.5/10, give or take. But its biggest problem was being made by a company called EA, which is widely hated and boycotted and will always be even if they one day come up with the cure to cancer and the phial of immortality.

Anthem made by any other company, especially the mediocre ones that keep being praised beyond their merits only because their games are flooded with unsmokeable walls of text (insert inXile, Obsidian, and a long etc) would be treated as a treasure to mankind.

We all understand. EA uses hard DRM, microtransactions, and a whole array of things we hate as gamers, and so we're all waiting around the corner with a club to bash them in the head at each opportunity.

Let's all take advantage of it now, then, since criticising these people who by the way, the vast majority are normal workers with an actual career that wanna feed their families, is completely fine.

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