Anthem "Exposed": They Done fucked up

[Noctus]

Would seem the reality behind the "blockbuster game" Anthem is finally revealed.

 

Good video by Joe:

Lengthy Article detailing it's conception to retail that Joe refers to: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

 

Quote

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.

Rather glad i never paid any more than a passing interest in it. Game would apparently be 6 years in PRE-PRODUCTION and had 1.5 years tops to make and finalise the game..... jeeeez. Feel sorry for everyone that snapped this up without a thought.... slightly.

[M1RR0RED]

Can someone summerize this for me please?

[Fasauceome]

3 minutes ago, Noctus said:

had 1.5 years tops to make

I could make a game just as good in 1.5 minutes

[Princess Luna]

1 minute ago, m1rr0red said:

Can someone summerize this for me please?

Anthem was just another of those huge projects that under delivered.

[PlayStation 2]

EXPOSED: Anthem Was Supposed to Have a Different Title

Same shit different day. So many huge projects have flopped like hell.

[Giganthrax]

7 minutes ago, m1rr0red said:

Can someone summerize this for me please?

Game was in pre-production from 2012 to 2018, at which point it finally went into full production and was crapped out in a year. They used an engine that wasn't made for RPGs, EA screwed them over by enforcing microtransactions, and it's just overall a massive shitshow. 

 

TLDR: Games as a service. 

 

EDIT: Also, despite EA being cancerous as usual, BioWare main team still had 7 years to finish the game and they still delivered jack-all. BioWare is well and truly dead. 

[Lathlaer]

2 minutes ago, m1rr0red said:

Can someone summerize this for me please?

In short? Making Anthem was very much like making ME:Andromeda.

 

1. Many dev teams arguing and bickering

2. EA insisting on using Frostbite which was very hard for them

3. True developement started about 1.5 year ago (and not 6, like they claimed before)

4. The game wasn't even supposed to be named Anthem

5. The gameplay was supposed to be different as well

 

In short, if anyone thought that they sacrificed Andromeda for Anthem, they were wrong. The process looked very much the same.

[M1RR0RED]

Wow. EA is doodey poopoo not funny and wearing a tootoo.

[bellabichon]

3 minutes ago, m1rr0red said:

Wow. EA is doodey poopoo not funny and wearing a tootoo.

yikes.

[Gullerback]

something tells me they just weren't willing to take development off Dragon age to save it and they were just like; Fuck it release it.

[M1RR0RED]

2 minutes ago, bellabichon said:

yikes.

I'm sorry. I got so angry that I used no no words.

[TVwazhere]

20 minutes ago, Noctus said:

Lengthy Article

My index finger is cramped from all the scrolling I did. Doesnt help that their formatting only allows for the sit to take up half of a 1080p screen...

[RejZoR]

I wish people would finally stop with this bullshit that Bioware, Ghost, Westwood or whatever EA's internal studio name are some poor independent studios bullied by EA. This crap always blows up my kettle and people just keep on saying it. It's all EA. EA owns them entirely and 100%. If Bioware fucked up, that means EA fucked up. There is no Bioware anymore. Bioware as an independent studio was gone when EA bought them. Period. Ende. Finito.

 

I've seen this bullshit on NeedForSpeed subreddit when I complained what a stupid garbage NFS Payback was and how it's missing things that NFS games had freaking 2 decades ago and how that is absolutely and entirely inexcusable. And queue in excuses by dumb gamers how Ghost Games (another EA's internal studio name) is this and that and how they are trying and blablabla. I. DON'T. CARE. You made a game with name from one of longest running franchises in existence and that's the crap you served me for 60€? Are you kidding me? Yeah, NFS Payback was the final nail in the coffin and a point when I decided to just start boycotting EA the same way I do Ubisoft. Which means I shit on them on every opportunity and not buy or play any of their games. Because that's the only thing they deserve.

[MoonSpot]

59 minutes ago, m1rr0red said:

Can someone summerize this for me please?

Timestampped for ya here.  Watch 1-2mins  and you'll get it.

 

[crystal6tak]

1 hour ago, m1rr0red said:

Can someone summerize this for me please?

I watched the video and read the article, basically boiled down to three things:

 

1.) Lack of leadership - Decisions not being made quickly enough. Unclear vision throughout most of the development. (e.g. Removing and re-adding the flight mechanic, not once, but multiple times throughout production)

 

2.) Using Frostbite engine - Engine wasn't designed for online looter shooter. Bioware had to write and rewrite a bunch of codes to get even the most basic things working (e.g. Save and load). Lots of bugs and hacks in the engine itself. To add even further, the original vision of the game (which was more of a dynamic survivor shooter, not looter shooter) was impossible to achieve with the frostbite engine.

 

3.) Resource mismanagement - EA allocated a lot of Frostbite engineers to work on FIFA instead of Anthem. Anthem developers that wanted to report a bug or have a question had to wait up to a week to get a response.

[Sparviero]

Jet packs and unforced errors by BioWare management. 

[Bouzoo]

Key parts:

Quote

Such a major last-minute upheaval might seem strange to an outside observer, but on Anthem, it was common. Very few things went right in the development of BioWare’s latest game, an online cooperative shooter that was first teased in mid-2012 but spent years floundering in pre-production. Many features weren’t finalized or implemented until the very final months, and to some who worked on the project, it wasn’t even clear what kind of game Anthem even was until that E3 demo in June of 2017, less than two years before it actually came out. Later, they came up with an explanation for the name: The game’s planet was enveloped by something called the Anthem of Creation, a powerful, mysterious force that left environmental cataclysms across the world.

 

Quote

By the beginning of 2018, by another former developer’s recollection, Anthem’s progress was so far behind that they’d only implemented a single mission. Most of the high-level design had still not been finalized, like the loot system and javelin powers. And the writing was still very much in flux. “They talk a lot about the six-year development time, but really the core gameplay loop, the story, and all the missions in the game were made in the last 12 to 16 months because of that lack of vision and total lack of leadership across the board,” said the developer.

 

My 2 favorite parts:

Quote

Over the months, Anthem had begun naturally picking up ideas and mechanics from loot shooters like The Division and Destiny, although even mentioning the word Destiny was taboo at BioWare. (Diablo III was the preferred reference point.) A few people who worked on the game said that trying to make comparisons to Destiny would elicit negative reactions from studio leadership. “We were told quite definitively, ‘This isn’t Destiny,’” said one developer. “But it kind of is. What you’re describing is beginning to go into that realm. They didn’t want to make those correlations, but at the same time, when you’re talking about fire teams, and going off and doing raids together, about gun combat, spells, things like that, well there’s a lot of elements there that correlate, that cross over.”

 

Quote

Meanwhile, the gaming landscape was changing. Electronic Arts had gone all-in on regularly updated “games as a service” but was struggling in several key areas, closing Visceral Games in San Francisco and facing serious drama at its ambitious EA Motive studio in Montreal. The Star Wars Battlefront II pay-to-win debacle led to a reinvigorated public hatred for all things Electronic Arts and a publisher-wide reboot of all things loot box, even as EA executives continually pushed for all of their games to have long-term monetization plans, Anthem included. EA has been public about its distaste for linear games that can be easily returned to GameStop after a single playthrough.

*shocked Pikachu meme*

[Warlockben]

One of the most concerning things in the article is this:

Quote

 “Some of the people in Edmonton were so burnt out,” said one former BioWare developer. “They were like, ‘We needed [Dragon Age: Inquisition] to fail in order for people to realize that this isn’t the right way to make games.’”

About 95% of Bioware was developing Dragon Age during Anthem's pre-development , and by the end they had people dropping out in what they called "emotional casualties", where team members would just disappear for months because it was so stressful to work at such an insane pace. TO THE POINT that some devs wanted their game to fail in order to prove a point. The sad thing is that this will probably be the last game Bioware ever makes as EA is notorious at shutting down "under-performing" studios.

[Trik'Stari]

I'm gonna go ahead and say it.

 

Developers need to unionize, and strike.

 

I'm somewhat conservative leaning, I don't like unions because if they aren't carefully controlled and structured correctly, you end up pricing your employer out of business and you end up with shitholes like Detroit. So that should tell you how serious I am about this.

 

Developers need to unionize and strike, and take back control of their businesses. These "publishers" are nothing but parasites that take over a developer, and in the end demand infinitely, exponentially increasing profit, and in the result we as a customer suffer, and the developers suffer due to bad business practices.

 

This needs to stop. Developers need to take back control of the development process, 100%. They must maintain all creative and intellectual control of these properties, and publishers need to be told

 

"You are nothing more than an investor. You give us money, we make a game, you get the profit we are able to make from it. You have zero control over what that game is, how it is released, how it is marketed, what the development and release timeline is, or what the content of that game is. If you don't like it, move the fuck on and we'll find someone else that wants to make some money and is less of a sociopathic asshole".

 

End of story. These companies have show they do not care about the product or the consumer, they are 100% predatory and destructive in their behavior.

 

The purpose of a business should be to bring a good or service to market at a competitive value, not purely to make money by any means necessary. This mentality towards business needs to be beaten to death with a rubber hose.

[justpoet]

What matters isn't how a game was made, how long it took, or how much it cost to make.  What matters is if a game is good or bad, and if it has support to keep making it better or maintaining it.  

 

If you don't like AE or Activision, etc…fine…don't buy their games.  Anything else is just people trying to make a buck or be more notable by armchair quarterbacking and not actually offering anything.

[killertek78]

Glossing over the fact it was released 'fully' along side Apex Legends, but whatever. It's cool to hate on games for not being successful. I paid $20 for a month of Origin Access to play Anthem for well over 60 hours. Fun game for sure, had it's issues for sure. People hold Bioware in some gilded hall of developers for making a couple neat games, then shit all over them when they try something different, zomg it wasn't a classicly styled RPG where my choices matter(they never really did by the way)??!! SUUUUCCCKKKSSSSS. Get over it, it's a fun looter shooter with jetpacks. That's all it needed to be taken for, not the next holy RPG grail.

[Eaglerino]

34 minutes ago, killertek78 said:

Glossing over the fact it was released 'fully' along side Apex Legends, but whatever. It's cool to hate on games for not being successful. I paid $20 for a month of Origin Access to play Anthem for well over 60 hours. Fun game for sure, had it's issues for sure. People hold Bioware in some gilded hall of developers for making a couple neat games, then shit all over them when they try something different, zomg it wasn't a classicly styled RPG where my choices matter(they never really did by the way)??!! SUUUUCCCKKKSSSSS. Get over it, it's a fun looter shooter with jetpacks. That's all it needed to be taken for, not the next holy RPG grail.

Sorry man, when Bioware is hailed as among the best RPG creators in history then they're degraded into making games like Andromeda and Anthem, nobody has to "get over it." People have every single right to complain, call it trash (because Anthem was), and ask why it exists when you could instead play Destiny 2, which is not only already has far more content but also acts like I'm doing something when I change the graphics settings.

[Bouzoo]

39 minutes ago, killertek78 said:

Glossing over the fact it was released 'fully' along side Apex Legends, but whatever. 

And the fact that it was hyped on E3 for two years prior with big trailers while Apex had a pretty small launch, almost no hype, but whatever. 

[Eaglerino]

6 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

And the fact that it was hyped on E3 for two years prior with big trailers while Apex had a pretty small launch, almost no hype, but whatever. 

Apex seemed like it had the Hearthstone treatment. "yeah whatever release it but if it fails you're going under", and as a result, accidentally allowing some talent to break out of the company

[yian88]

All the fault of this market mentality, the bigger fish swallows the smallers ones.

As long as company owners sell to bigger ones these things will keep happening.