Despite promosing a complete overhaul. EA is rumoured to be meeting this week to decide whether to kill Anthem entirely.

[Master Disaster]

I'm sure you all remember how disastrous Anthems launch was, its fair to say the game went down like a turd in a swimming pool. A few months after its launch BioWare promised players a complete game overhaul called Anthem Next.

 

In a move nobody could have predicted (sarcasm meter just broke) it looks as though EA is going to pull the plug on the entire thing.

Quote

Electronic Arts Inc. will hold a meeting this week to determine whether it will continue trying to create a new version of the failed online game Anthem, according to three people familiar with the matter.

 

Anthem, a multiplayer game by the EA-owned developer BioWare, launched in February 2019 to poor reviews. In the following months, BioWare put together a small team to overhaul the game. Executive Producer Christian Dailey wrote three blog posts last year outlining some of the big changes planned. But in December, Dailey left the Anthem team as part of a BioWare management shakeup, leaving the project’s fate in question.

Jason Schreier received this information from sources who asked to remain anonymous. The current team working on the game have said the team will need to be tripled for them to get it all done and I personally agree with Schreier, there's no way EA will sink that many resources into a dead game.

Quote

This week, EA executives will review the latest version of Anthem Next and decide whether to expand the team or abandon the project, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing private information. The Anthem Next team includes about 30 people, BioWare said last year. People familiar with the project said it will need to expand to at least triple that in order to produce new content and continue attempting to overhaul the game. EA has not yet indicated whether it’s willing to commit that kind of budget to revive a maligned game.

EA have refused to comment on rumours.

 

Source - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-08/electronic-arts-to-decide-fate-of-anthem-game-this-week

 

I remember watching the E3 launch trailer and thinking the game looked really fun. How did they fuck this up so badly? Oh yeah, forced live service where its not needed combined with deliberately broken game mechanics to try and push microtransactions.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

I'm sure you all remember how disastrous Anthems launch was

Ok I'll be the one to ask for all that don't know, what was so bad about it? Honestly barely even heard of the game at all.

[Middcore]

 

38 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

I remember watching the E3 launch trailer and thinking the game looked really fun. How did they fuck this up so badly? Oh yeah, forced live service where its not needed combined with deliberately broken game mechanics to try and push microtransactions.

 

I frankly think this is an overly simplistic explanation that conveniently plays to narratives gamers want to believe in and villains they want to hate. If you read Schreier's lengthy "what went wrong" piece on Anthem from a couple years ago (and I have issues with Schreier, especially the way he's started to behave on social media since he's become Mr. Big Shot Mainstream News Game Journalist, but I do think he's done solid reporting in the past), Bioware never had a clear idea of what they even wanted Anthem to be but kept telling themselves "We're Bioware, we don't make bad games, it'll work out." Basically they bought into their own hype and thought their shit didn't stink. 

 

Anyway, I was really rooting for them to actually turn this around No Man's Sky-style and turn it into a decent game with a respectable playerbase, if not the Destiny-killer they clearly wanted it to be. (Of course, in 2021, making "kill Destiny" your goal seems sort of quaint.) But it's basically been a year of radio silence now since they said they were trying to rework it, with the only news in between that I can recall reports of developers in fairly important-sounding roles departing EA altogether. I know we all love to demonize EA but at this point I can fully understand them making a rational business decision that it's not worth the investment of resources to keep trying to fix a 2-year-old game with no playerbase which is synonymous with failure. 

[Levent]

Bioware havent had enough good PR since Mass Effect 2. ME3's ending was lackluster, MEA had terrible optimization and character details, plus they straight up shelved all DLC efforts, then there is Anthem. IMO Anthem was destined to die when it was released, they werent even able to deliver anything to get people who paid for the game to play after a year of alleged updates. If y'all want a deep dive into Anthem's history and why it failed, here is a 40 minute recap.

[JLO64]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Ok I'll be the one to ask for all that don't know, what was so bad about it? Honestly barely even heard of the game at all.

(Need to preface that I never actually played the game, plus some of these issues might have been patched.)

 

Loading screens that were longer than the missions, repetitive combat, multiplayer (which was one of its big features) was iffy at times, the story wasn’t that deep, a bunch of content was cut from E3 trailers, and for some people it was just a bit too much grinding.

 

Honestly (from someone why never played the darn thing) it didn’t seem like a bad game, just a mediocre one. I think what really spawned the backlash against it was the fact that BioWare made it and expectations were just that high for it.  That being said, there was a great video on them that I watched not too long back (I’ll try to link it) about the history of the company since they got acquired by EA.  In short, for both ME: Andromeda and Anthem they released trailers waaay before they had anything concrete, they over promised what these games would be like, development was troubled due to some of the above issues and high turnover of project heads, and they simply weren’t given enough time to finish these games.

[Master Disaster]

19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Ok I'll be the one to ask for all that don't know, what was so bad about it? Honestly barely even heard of the game at all.

Metacritic: 59 (Journalists) 40 (User Score)

 

It was universally panned for its boring, repetitive and grindy game mechanics, a loot system that was clearly intended to make users spend money, microtransactions up the wazoo and having no real end game content at all.

[Bombastinator]

IMHO the overhaul EA needs is of the EA brass.  The game designers make a good game that would sell well, and the brass turn it to garbage which doesn’t. The whole “I get paid hundreds of thousands to lower company value for my personal gain” thing makes EA worthless to me.

[RejZoR]

My god, they are still dragging this corpse around? What is this, weekend at Bernie's? But with NFS Heat, they swiftly decided they are sacking it entirely just 4 months after its release. The only game in last decade from EA that was actually half decent and had potential to become one of better NFS games of all times and they just sacked it like it's nothing. But this Anthem, EA has been dragging its cadaver around since 2019 and it's still not in the graveyard? I just don't get EA sometimes... Then again, that is exactly EA we know.

[Middcore]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

IMHO the overhaul EA needs is of the EA brass.  The game designers make a good game that would sell well, and the brass turn it to garbage.

 

Not the case with Anthem. EA certainly did things that didn't help, but you can't make a good game if you don't even know what type of game you're trying to make, and Bioware never figured that out. 

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Middcore said:

 

Not the case with Anthem. EA certainly did things that didn't help, but you can't make a good game if you don't even know what type of game you're trying to make, and Bioware never figured that out. 

Could be.  I dont know a thing about anthem.  First I’ve heard of it I think.

[Master Disaster]

5 minutes ago, Middcore said:

 

 

I frankly think this is an overly simplistic explanation that conveniently plays to narratives gamers want to believe in and villains they want to hate. If you read Schreier's lengthy "what went wrong" piece on Anthem from a couple years ago (and I have issues with Schreier, especially the way he's started to behave on social media since he's become Mr. Big Shot Mainstream News Game Journalist, but I do think he's done solid reporting in the past), Bioware never had a clear idea of what they even wanted Anthem to be but kept telling themselves "We're Bioware, we don't make bad games, it'll work out." Basically they bought into their own hype and thought their shit didn't stink. 

Anthem was EA's baby, not Biowares. Its pretty clear EA thought they could just tell BW to make a live service game and BW would do it. That's not what BW was good at and EA have a history of forcing studios onto games they would never usually touch (which usually results in said studio being killed).

 

I'm not saying Schreier was wrong, only that the choice of game was removed from BW by EA at the very beginning.

5 minutes ago, Middcore said:

 

Anyway, I was really rooting for them to actually turn this around No Man's Sky-style and turn it into a decent game with a respectable playerbase, if not the Destiny-killer they clearly wanted it to be. (Of course, in 2021, making "kill Destiny" your goal seems sort of quaint.) But it's basically been a year of radio silence now since they said they were trying to rework it, with the only news in between that I can recall reports of developers in fairly important-sounding roles departing EA altogether. I know we all love to demonize EA but at this point I can fully understand them making a rational business decision that it's not worth the investment of resources to keep trying to fix a 2-year-old game with no playerbase which is synonymous with failure. 

I don't disagree, it would be foolish to keep pumping money into Anthem at this point but they did publicly promise to fix it so....

[Bombastinator]

I provisionally disagree that no man’s sky is decent. I bought it some months ago on such claims and attempted to play it.  I finally ragequit when I found that literally 2/3rds of the quests and at least one of the MAIN STORYLINE quests were bugged so bad the game was unfinishable, and it couldn’t be fixed (by me at least) even with multiple restarts.  Attempts to report bugs were near impossible.  Compared to other indie games with near effortless bug reporting no man’s  sky seemed to me to be quite the dumpster fire.

Edited February 9, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Nowak]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

How did they fuck this up so badly?

I'm sure a certain Matt McMuscles has the answer. Anyway, I remember hearing about this attempted complete rework of the game and how it was going to be "like A Realm Reborn" was for Final Fantasy XIV. Doesn't seem like it was ever to be, knowing EA.

[suicidalfranco]

After ME3, MEA, DA2, DAI did anyone actually believe that Bioware would somewhat pull it off with Anthem?

That game was dead on the water the moment they released the first trailer.

But hey, keep worshiping Bioware and blame it all on EA, as if Bioware never changed between their hey days and now, and the people who made DAO, ME1, SWKotOR, are still working there smh.

Current Bioware could move to VNs and i can bet my yearly income that they'll manage to colossally fuck that up to.

[Master Disaster]

43 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

After ME3, MEA, DA2, DAI did anyone actually believe that Bioware would somewhat pull it off with Anthem?

That game was dead on the water the moment they released the first trailer.

But hey, keep worshiping Bioware and blame it all on EA, as if Bioware never changed between their hey days and now, and the people who made DAO, ME1, SWKotOR, are still working there smh.

Current Bioware could move to VNs and i can bet my yearly income that they'll manage to colossally fuck that up to.

I cannot fathom this black or white mentality a lot of people have, the world isn't black and white, it has hundreds of shades of grey.

 

Nobody is worshipping Bioware and nobody is implying that BW don't share the blame for the mess, that doesn't mean its not also on EA though.

 

Saying BW might have done a better job had they been given a task they were more familiar with isn't absolving them of blame, its stating an (IMO) obvious fact about the world.

 

BW were the singleplayer RPG masters, putting the on a multiplayer live service action adventure game is about as far removed from their norm as you can get.

 

If EA had told them to make a WOW killer we might have ended up with something better but EA being EA, they went after Destiny (the low hanging fruit) and chose the wrong studio for the task.

[RuffRuffmcgruff]

17 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Anthem, a multiplayer game by the EA-owned developer BioWare, launched in February 2019 to poor reviews.

Is a bit of an understatement LOL!

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

If EA had told them to make a WOW killer we might have ended up with something better but EA being EA, they went after Destiny (the low hanging fruit) and chose the wrong studio for the task.

 

I doubt it. This is bio-ware where talking about, their non-story interaction game-play has allways been meh to trash, they've just been really good at the story, presentation thereof, and player-interaction and feedback therein.

 

  

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

ME1, SWKotOR, are still working there smh.

 

None of which have especially great combat, (or anything else not related to the story). They just did the story side really, really, really well.

[CarlBar]

17 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I provisionally disagree that no man’s sky is decent. I bought it some months ago on such claims and attempted to play it.  I finally ragequit when I found that literally 2/3rds of the quests and at least one of the MAIN STORYLINE quests were bugged so bad the game was unfinishable, and it couldn’t be fixed (by me at least) even with multiple restarts.  Attempts to report bugs were near impossible.  Compared to other indie games with near effortless bug reporting no man’s  sky seemed to me to be quite the dumpster fire.

 

it's not a difficult thing to fix, the save editor fix's it super easy. from having had to do that for someone else it's a desync issue. Teh quest log thinks your at a different point to the game world, and if that gets saved to your save file before the game realises and fixes the dysnc the game world then takes the bad save data and runs with it which leads it to assuming it's allready done thing X that it hasn't actually done which breaks your ability to complete the necessary step to do the quest. it's actually common to most quest systems, it's just that it's normally fairly hard to get that kind of desync between the log state and the game state because they run on the same hardware. NMS doesn't and fixing it would likely require a really major re-write of the entire log system.

[suicidalfranco]

1 hour ago, Master Disaster said:

BW were the singleplayer RPG masters, putting the on a multiplayer live service action adventure game is about as far removed from their norm as you can get.

Were

As soon as they got purchased by EA that title went and never came back. DA2 and later were still single player RPGs, and they all ended up between mediocre at best garbage tier at worst.

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

None of which have especially great combat, (or anything else not related to the story). They just did the story side really, really, really well.

For the period they released they were okay, DAO had a good tactical style combat, Star wars felt like many MMORPGs of those day, me1... The most average of the bunch, but still passable

[Doobeedoo]

After seeing initial disgrace that Anthem was, who even thought they'd actually pull off their 10 year commitment for the game. That was a complete joke, as the game it self.

[GravityHurts]

I really regret choosing Anthem over Battlefield V for the free game that came with my gpu. After finishing the game I never really had a desire to play it besides like one or two times just to fly around and look at the landscape. There just was never anything for you to actually do after the story was over.

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

it's not a difficult thing to fix, the save editor fix's it super easy. from having had to do that for someone else it's a desync issue. Teh quest log thinks your at a different point to the game world, and if that gets saved to your save file before the game realises and fixes the dysnc the game world then takes the bad save data and runs with it which leads it to assuming it's allready done thing X that it hasn't actually done which breaks your ability to complete the necessary step to do the quest. it's actually common to most quest systems, it's just that it's normally fairly hard to get that kind of desync between the log state and the game state because they run on the same hardware. NMS doesn't and fixing it would likely require a really major re-write of the entire log system.

A mere “Like” or informative is inadequate to display my appreciation for this info.  You totally rock!  Thankyou!

[CarlBar]

4 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Were

As soon as they got purchased by EA that title went and never came back. DA2 and later were still single player RPGs, and they all ended up between mediocre at best garbage tier at worst.

For the period they released they were okay, DAO had a good tactical style combat, Star wars felt like many MMORPGs of those day, me1... The most average of the bunch, but still passable

 

Can't speak for the original Dragon Age. But KOTOR was a long way from decent on the combat side, it might have not been especially bad compared to other stuff around at the same time. But it was never what i would call good.It just wasn't any worse than anything else on computer platforms at the time. But not worse isn't the same as good. (As an aside it was cribbing heavily of D&D tabletop, 3rd edition i believe, which was known to be badly flawed at the time, hence the release of 3.5 the same year as KOTOR and subsequent editions majorly overhauling the elements KOTOR cribbed from).

 

49 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

A mere “Like” or informative is inadequate to display my appreciation for this info.  You totally rock!  Thankyou!

 

Bear in mind this is informed speculation, (an educated guess in other words), from what i saw while fixing a couple of save files with the editor and what I've seen happen with other quest log systems that track quest log states in a similar manner in other games.

[Bombastinator]

17 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Can't speak for the original Dragon Age. But KOTOR was a long way from decent on the combat side, it might have not been especially bad compared to other stuff around at the same time. But it was never what i would call good.It just wasn't any worse than anything else on computer platforms at the time. But not worse isn't the same as good. (As an aside it was cribbing heavily of D&D tabletop, 3rd edition i believe, which was known to be badly flawed at the time, hence the release of 3.5 the same year as KOTOR and subsequent editions majorly overhauling the elements KOTOR cribbed from).

 

 

Bear in mind this is informed speculation, (an educated guess in other words), from what i saw while fixing a couple of save files with the editor and what I've seen happen with other quest log systems that track quest log states in a similar manner in other games.

The editor appears to be a mod.  I avoided mods entirely when I played “no man’s sky” it’s really possible this could work. 

[JZStudios]

On 2/9/2021 at 10:04 AM, RejZoR said:

My god, they are still dragging this corpse around? What is this, weekend at Bernie's? But with NFS Heat, they swiftly decided they are sacking it entirely just 4 months after its release. The only game in last decade from EA that was actually half decent and had potential to become one of better NFS games of all times and they just sacked it like it's nothing. But this Anthem, EA has been dragging its cadaver around since 2019 and it's still not in the graveyard? I just don't get EA sometimes... Then again, that is exactly EA we know.

Well no one wants to be the one to put Bob Dylan down.

 

8 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Nobody is worshipping Bioware and nobody is implying that BW don't share the blame for the mess, that doesn't mean its not also on EA though.

 

BW were the singleplayer RPG masters, putting the on a multiplayer live service action adventure game is about as far removed from their norm as you can get.

I've played Dragon Age and ME 1 and 2. I honestly don't know why people like them at all. A lot of people praise BW for those franchises and they're both super generic and very lackluster. The only saving grace for DA is the characters and their interaction which was honestly quite good, but everything was pretty poor. ME didn't even have that.