Pretty long read, but well worth the time.
TLDR: AAA game development is hard. When it’s compounded by the demands of corporate overlords, doubly so.
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So much to say on this, I suspect this post is going to turn into an essay. May contain strong language, though I hope you’ll agree that it is appropriate and not overused.
The value of actual journalism
A lot of games media is either fan-made stuff, or industry-led publications. There are precious few publications like Kotaku who employ writers that can be honest-to-Gaben journalists.
Journalists eat a lot of shit, Jason Schreier not least among them. Sometimes we deserve it, a lot of the time we don’t, but the reality is that most of the actual news we read in the technology and games industry comes from precious few independent sources.
Of course, no publication is just constantly breaking news. You’re reposting stuff people want to read from any reputable source that reports it, but if you actually sit down and count those places that consistently break news you’d come up with a depressing number.
And then, as Mr. Universe would say, there is the puppet theatre.
YouTubers and the like will only be too happy to give their hot-take on this report, but how many are willing to do the work to break a story like this? How many even have the experience and industry contacts to produce an article like this? Maybe Jim Sterling, though he generally prefers to operate as a commentator. I don’t know of anyone else.
Don’t get me wrong — I am a proud dual-citizen of the federation of the puppet theatre, and the republic of journalism. If you’re doing your job even half-right as a journalist there will always be more people talking about the news than producing the news.
The point I’m making is that I think too few people are appreciative of what it takes to report a story like this. Too many people interested in Anthem will be re-telling this story without even knowing who first broke it, only to criticise “The Media” for not doing its job half a beat later.
It’s become a growing frustration of mine to see/hear so many people panning “The Media” for being useless, without acknowledging that basically everything they know about what’s going on in the world is thanks to “The Media”.
On the underappreciation of leadership
EA, quite rightly, has received a lot of criticism. That said, the sub-story involving former EA exec Patrick Söderlund shows me that there is, or at least was, some substance in the top echelons of EA. (Söderlund has since departed to help found and lead Embark Studios. Curiously, Embark is working on a “cooperative free-to-play action game”).
TL;DR: Söderlund saw an early demo of Anthem (then Beyond) in which flying had been removed, and by which some accounts was thoroughly bland. Söderlund hated it, reportedly saying: “This is not what you had promised to me as a game”.
Ultimately, Bioware had to create a new demo build in six weeks for Söderlund. They decided to put back the only feature they had that really set them apart — flying.
This is what happened, according to the report:
“One of our QA people had been playing it over and over again so they could get the flow and timing down perfectly,” said one person who was involved. “Within 30 seconds or so the exo jumps off and glides off this precipice and lands.”
Then, according to two people who were in the room, Patrick Söderlund was stunned.
“He turns around and goes, ‘That was fucking awesome, show it to me again,’” said one person who was there. “He was like, ‘That was amazing. It’s exactly what I wanted.’”
If things really did play out this way Söderlund was not only 100% right to make this call, but also 100% right.
The Iron Man-style flying is Anthem’s hook. It’s what set it apart from the rest of the field of looter shooters.
Funny enough, it was in the original 2012/2013 design of the game, but pulled because BioWare struggled to make all the elements work. Compensating for players being able to move vertically around the environment is apparently hard.
EDIT after @Shrike’s note: Söderlund is not some game exec god, of course. According to the report, he’s the one who championed the move of games developed by EA studios to Frostbite, which was one of the causes of the development problems Anthem had in the first place.
Anyway, the whole issue around the lack of leadership at BioWare reminds me of a great scene from Battlestar Galactica. The ship’s commander (Adama) is reassuring his executive officer (Tigh) after the latter had to stand in and made some bad decisions:
“Never had much use for people second-guessing my decisions. Especially if they’ve never held a command [and] don’t understand the pressure. You make a call, it affects the lives of thousands, and you have no-one to turn to for backup.”
(The video should start at around 1:18)
Hang on, wait. EA isn’t the big bad?
After all the worry that EA might wreck Anthem, it seems that BioWare managed to do that all on its own. It turns out that the number of veterans who left the company is worse than any of us imagined.
The reason they were leaving was not because of pressure from EA, but because of the BioWare leadership’s belief that crunch solves all production problems.
People were burning out and taking “stress leave” for extended periods while others were just quitting outright.
This also led to attrition over the course of Anthem’s development, and a glance through the game’s credits reveals a number of names of people who left during 2017 and 2018. “People were leaving in droves,” said one developer who left. “It was just really shocking how many people were going.”
EA isn’t off the hook, of course. It wanted a “live service” game that could generate recurring revenues, and it obviously couldn’t allow the game to stay in development forever:
There was no escaping EA’s fiscal targets, and Anthem had already been in development for nearly seven years. They had committed to launching within EA’s fiscal year, which ended in March of 2019. The game would ship in February. Even if they wanted a few more months, that just wasn’t an option. “In the end,” said one developer, “we just ran out of time.”
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That was a depressing read, especially as a fan of Bioware’s games.
It’s both fully expected (and what many predicted when EA acquired them) - but also not squarely on EA’s shoulders. Lots of internal indecisiveness and drinking one’s own koolaid (“Bioware magic”) going on.
I hope they can salvage this. It would be sad to see the studio go the way of every other EA-acquired studio.
AFTER @SIGSTART’s TAKE
100% - by all accounts they had 7 years to deliver this, 6 of which they spent shrugging and going “lol idk”.
The fact this was slapped together in 12-18 months (and that the dev team only found out what game they were making the same time as the public got to see it unveiled) is 100% squarely on Bioware.
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Let us not underestimate the pain of developing on a platform that you cannot get your head around easily, where you have to keep asking a team of other developers for help. Frostbite seems to have bitten hard. I read between the clear lines where the article talks about developers having to make their own tools to circumvent the limits of the gaming engine that was forced on them.
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Yeah I completely forgot to add that disclaimer in regarding Söderlund. He’s made questionable calls himself, particularly moving all of EA onto Frostbite. But I don’t know what it would take to reverse or correct that decision, so it is difficult to criticise that from a leadership perspective.
It does sound like being forced to use Frostbite has been a major issue for BioWare. That said, when the chips were down and Söderlund was out there to potentially give a no-go on Anthem, the BioWare team got it done, albeit with the help from people who work on Frostbite.
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It was also revealing that most of the Frostbite support gives precedence to FIFA and Battlefield, because that’s where the money is. Shows how low down the pecking order Bioware is sitting at EA.
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…And a possible motivation to make a big-earning “live service” title to take a slice of some of that sweet, sweet looter-shooter pie.
If they can make a game that earns more money, then maybe they can enjoy some priority again.
That said, I also have to wonder if the execs at BioWare just didn’t make enough noise. If they had simply made the decision that Iron Man flight needed to be in the game, come hell or high water, they maybe could have made a nuisance of themselves until EA DICE’s Frostbite support desk helped them.
“This game is dead in the water unless you help us make this work.”
And the trump card: “If you can’t help us, we’ll need to go to Epic for an engine that can do what we need it to.”
Pure speculation, of course (and hindsight is 20/20).
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Found this article from yesterday just after nominating Anthem as one of the year’s biggest disappointments. Maybe if BioWare can do a NMS-style turnaround of the game, it’ll make next year’s “Most Improved Game” list? I do hope so. I really want to like this game.
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Well, interesting to see the previous comment in the thread being an article that hinted at this. But it seems a complete overhaul of the core gameplay loop is in order for Anthem. That is such a massive undertaking, and I feel like it is way too little way too late.
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I will check it out once it drops, can only hope it revitalises the game. It still has some of the most fun game play I have ever had, just the rest failed.
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I will never ever try Anthem. Still pissed off about Andromeda.
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I am in the same boat as you - got burned with andromeda and just do not want to bother with anthem
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Anthem has a really cool basic hook going — flying around like Iron Man.
Unfortunately, as an action RPG / looter-shooter, the core gameplay loop sucks. If this were a third-person action/adventure game there wouldn’t be an issue, but they botched the game’s itemisation.
On top of that, they decided to excessively limit your flight time. It’s an interesting idea to encourage players to fly close to water to “cool their engines” as they traverse the landscape, but by being too stingy with flying, especially in combat, they’ve taken the fun out of the game’s Main Thing™.
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An update on Bioware’s post about doing a total overhaul on Anthem. A gameplay transplant, if you will.
It turns out the commentators who were saying that it would require a massive amount of work to fix Anthem were right, though not necessarily for the right reasons.
People were talking a lot about fixing the loot drop rates, itemisation overall, and related systems like the weapon power controversy.
However, looking at the blog post, the things that seem like it will take longest to do are:
- Adding new quests, vendors, and loot tables to let you farm for specific loot, like Destiny 2 (and Warframe, to an extent).
- Identifying loot and allowing you to change your loadoat without having to return to town. It’s not necessarily “realistic”, but probably more fun this way.
- Redoing and rebalancing weapon affixes so that itemisation is not about getting a max roll, but about getting the exact types of bonuses you want (a la Diablo, it sounds like). You can then re-roll affixes to try and get that max stat.
- Making the whole rearchitected system scaleable.
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I look forward to this update and can then maybe get proper stuck into the game. I’m just worried that this will come in too late, I mean it is already one and a half years later and people lost interest a month or three into the game.
I do commend them though, but like I say, I just hope for Bioware’s sake that it isn’t done in vain. The world really is beautiful and and the characters ar the stand out, not really the story. I just hope they are able to devliver and showcase a game that they can be proud of and that players can appreciate as a whole.
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I’ll never try Anthem. Even if they turn it into the best game ever. Still salty over Mass Effect Andromeda.
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haha… I can understand your frustrations, I heard that one was trash as well. Never really played Mass Effect to get invested into or salty over.
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I will never play it either, the flying that I tested once made me puke so its a nope. The added nope is the disappointment from ME
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I love Anthem, so much. The flying, the blowing stuff up and the physics combined with the graphics make for incredible game play. A ton of fun.
However, doing those things for no apparent reason becomes not so much fun after a while. Missions, some kind of gear progression etc will certainly draw me back into paying EA a monthly fee, at least for a while.
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