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.
“Everybody was like, “Well, that doesn’t make any sense “what does this have to do with anything?’” said one person who worked on the game. Just days before their game’s announcement, the team at BioWare had a brand new name that nobody really understood.
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 finalised 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.
When Anthem launched in February of 2019, it was panned by fans and critics. Today, it has a 55 on the review aggregation site Metacritic, BioWare’s lowest score since the company was founded in 1995.
The developer once known for ambitious role-playing games like Dragon Age and the original Mass Effect trilogy has now released two critical flops in a row, following 2017’s disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda. Although hardcore fans have put their faith in BioWare to continue fixing Anthem‘s bugs and improving its mechanics”especially since Bungie’s Destiny, a similar game, had a rough launch and eventually recovered”few were happy with the initial release.
Anthem wasn’t just buggy and thin on content; it felt half-baked, like it hadn’t been play-tested and tweaked enough by developers with experience playing other loot shooters. In the weeks after launch, there appeared to be a major new problem every day.
Fans have speculated endlessly as to how Anthem went so awry. Was it originally a single-player role-playing game, like BioWare’s previous titles? Did EA force BioWare to make a Destiny clone? Did they strip out all of the good missions to sell later as downloadable content? Is the loot system secretly driven by an elaborate AI system that keeps track of everything you do so it can get you to spend more money on the game?
The answer to all of those questions is no.
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 authorised 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.”
“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.”
EA and BioWare declined to comment on this story.
Among those who work or have worked at BioWare, there’s a belief that something drastic needs to change. Many at the company now grumble that the success of 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was one of the worst things that could have happened to them. The third Dragon Age, which won Game of the Year at the 2014 Game Awards, was the result of a brutal production process plagued by indecision and technical challenges.
It was mostly built over the course of its final year, which led to lengthy crunch hours and lots of exhaustion. “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 realise that this isn’t the right way to make games.’”
Within the studio, there’s a term called “BioWare magic.” It’s a belief that no matter how rough a game’s production might be, things will always come together in the final months. The game will always coalesce. It happened on the Mass Effect trilogy, on Dragon Age: Origins, and on Inquisition. Veteran BioWare developers like to refer to production as a hockey stick”it’s flat for a while, and then it suddenly jolts upward.
Even when a project feels like a complete disaster, there’s a belief that with enough hard work”and enough difficult crunch – it’ll all come together.
After the high-profile failures of Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, it has become clear to current and former BioWare employees that this attitude is no longer working. In recent years, BioWare has done serious damage to its reputation as a premier RPG developer.
Maybe the hockey stick approach is no longer viable. Or maybe – just maybe – that sort of production practice was never really sustainable in the first place.
One thing’s for certain: On Anthem, BioWare’s magic ran out.
At the beginning, they called it Dylan. In late 2012 and 2013, while finishing up the Mass Effect trilogy, BioWare director Casey Hudson and a small team of longtime Mass Effect developers started work on a project that they hoped would be the Bob Dylan of video games, meaning something that would be referenced by video game fans for years to come.
Even within BioWare, it was a mystery project – you needed a password to get into the wiki, according to one person who was on it. For a while, the team stayed small. Most of BioWare’s staff were on Dragon Age: Inquisition, which needed all hands on deck in order to ship by the end of 2014.
The early ideas for Dylan (which we’ll call Anthem from now on for clarity) were ambitious and changing constantly, according to people who were on the project. As is typical during this sort of “ideation” phase, nobody knew what the game would look like yet”they just wanted to see what might be cool. It would be an action game, certainly, and you’d be able to play it with your friends. The goal was to get away from traditional sci-fi and fantasy, so the game would feel distinct from Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
One concept that quickly emerged was the idea of a dangerous, hazard-filled planet. Anthem would be set on a hostile alien world, and in order to go out into the wilderness, you’d need a robot suit. A realistic, NASA-inspired robot suit. The pitch was simple: Iron Man, but less cartoony.
Over the months, a core concept started to crystallize: Anthem‘s planet would be sort of like the Bermuda Triangle of this universe, with an inexorable gravity that was constantly pulling in alien ships and hazards. As a result, the world would be lethal and full of dangerous creatures.
“You are the bottom of the food chain, and everything is significantly more powerful than you,” said one person who worked on the game. When describing these early iterations of Anthem, developers have made comparisons to Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon, even Shadow of the Colossus.
There would be big, scary creatures out in the world, and your job would be to see how long you could survive. One prototype allowed the player to attach themselves to a giant monster; others centred on the atmosphere, the weather, and environmental effects.
“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so there’d be different events happening at all times,” said a developer. “You’d be out somewhere, and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it. We had an early demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the trees … There were states of the build where that was being demonstrated, and that we could see this was something you could actually accomplish.”
We saw a small glimpse of these prototypes at E3 2014, when BioWare showed a teaser trailer for the as-yet-untitled game that would eventually become Anthem:
The final game would have nothing even close to those teases.
Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons. In these early versions, the idea was that you’d embark from a city and go out on expeditions with your friends, staying out in the world as long as you could survive. You’d use a robotic exosuit, and you’d fight monsters with melee and shooting attacks, but the focus was less on hoarding loot and more on seeing how long you could survive.
One mission, for example, might take you and a squad to the centre of a volcano, where you’d have to figure out why it was erupting, kill some creatures, and then fight your way back. “That was the main hook,” said an Anthem developer. “We’re going out as a team, going to try to accomplish something as a team, then come back and talk about it.”
Along the way, you could scavenge or salvage alien ships for parts and bring them back to your base in order to upgrade your weapons or enhance your suit.
“It was really interesting,” said one person who worked on it. “It really struck a chord with a lot of the people who were working on it originally.”
What remained unclear during this process was how many of these ideas and prototypes would actually work at scale. Dynamic environments and giant creatures might perform nicely in a controlled environment, but would the Anthem team really be able to make those features work in an online, open-world game played by thousands and thousands of people? And would Frostbite, the volatile video game engine that BioWare was now using for all of its projects, really support all these features?
As these questions lingered, the Anthem team faced a major shake-up. In August of 2014, as they continued to prototype and dream about their game, they lost their leader. Casey Hudson, who had directed the beloved Mass Effect trilogy and was supposed to be creative director on Anthem, was departing.
“The foundation of our new IP in Edmonton is complete,” he wrote in a letter to the studio, “and the team is ready to move forward into pre-production on a title that I think will redefine interactive entertainment.”
Jon Warner, a relatively new hire who had worked for Disney before joining EA in 2011, took on the role of game director.
BioWare veterans liked to describe Casey Hudson’s Mass Effect team as the Enterprise from Star Trek: They all did what the captain said, and they were all laser-focused on a single destination. (By comparison, they called the Dragon Age team a pirate ship, meandering from port to port until it reached its final destination.) Now, the Enterprise no longer had its Jean-Luc Picard.
Still, members of the Anthem team say they remained happy. Dragon Age: Inquisition shipped at the end of 2014 to critical acclaim, and many of those developers moved over to Anthem, where they found a team full of high hopes and ambitious ideas.
“EA had these team health reports,” said one. “Anthem‘s morale was among the highest in all of EA. It was really, really good for quite a while. Everybody saw there was so much potential in those early prototypes. “Potential” was always the word there.”
One BioWare developer who hadn’t yet moved to the Anthem team recalled hearing those colleagues talk about how much better they had it than the people who were stuck on Mass Effect: Andromeda, which at the time was going through serious struggles thanks to technical challenges and significant directional changes.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/12/the-story-behindmass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-year-development/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/03/MassEffectAndromeda-2017-03-15-22-31-55-864-410×231.jpg” title=”The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Troubled Five-Year Development” excerpt=”In 2012, as work on Mass Effect 3 came to a close, a small group of top BioWare employees huddled to talk about the next entry in their epic sci-fi franchise. Their goal, they decided, was to make a game about exploration — one that would dig into the untapped potential of the first three games. Instead of visiting just a few planets, they said, what if you could explore hundreds?”]
Surely, they thought, that couldn’t happen to Anthem. “We took so much time to get the experience correct,” said another person who worked on the game. “I think that’s why morale was so high. I knew we had taken the time to really refine what we wanted the game to be about. Now we just had to go and produce it.”
Question was, how would they do that? As development progressed, it became clear that some of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to be implemented.
Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem‘s world would be massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying”which, developers say, was removed from and re-added to Anthem several times”were more like gliding, and members of the Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain to accommodate the latest movement style.
There were experiments with procedural encounters, where dynamic creatures and environmental hazards would spawn randomly from the world, but those weren’t working too smoothly, either. “That took a long time,” said one developer. “The game was super reliant on this procedural system that just wasn’t fun.”
The story started changing drastically, too. In early 2015, veteran Dragon Age writer David Gaider moved over to Anthem, and his version of the story looked a lot different than the ideas with which they’d been experimenting for the past few years. Gaider’s style was traditional BioWare “big, complicated villains; ancient alien artifacts; and so on” which rankled some of the developers who were hoping for something more subtle. “There was a lot of resistance from the team who just didn’t want to see a sci-fi Dragon Age, I guess,” said one developer. Added a second: “A lot of people were like, “‘Why are we telling the same story? Let’s do something different.’”
When asked for comment on this, Gaider said in an email that when he’d started on the project, Anthem design director Preston Watamaniuk had pushed him in a “science-fantasy” direction. “I was fine with that, as fantasy is more my comfort zone anyhow, but it was clear from the outset that there was a lot of opposition to the change from the rest of the team,” he said. “Maybe they assumed the idea for it came from me, I’m not sure, but comments like “‘it’s very Dragon Age‘ kept coming up regarding any of the work me or my team did… and not in a complimentary manner. There were a lot of people who wanted a say over Anthem‘s story, and kept articulating a desire to do something “‘different’ without really being clear on what that was outside of it just not being anything BioWare had done before (which was, apparently, a bad thing?). From my perspective, it was rather frustrating.”
Gaider left BioWare in early 2016 “As time passed, I didn’t feel keen to play the game that I was working on,” he told me”which led to new writers for Anthem and a total story reboot. This led to even more chaos. “As you can imagine, writing for BioWare sets the foundation for all the games,” said one developer. “When writing is unsure of what it’s doing, it causes a lot of destruction to a lot of departments.”
Instability had become par for the course on the Anthem team, as Hudson’s departure left a void that proved tough to fill. The job of steering Anthem now fell to the creative leadership team, a group that included game director Jon Warner, design director Preston Watamaniuk, art director Derek Watts, animation director Parrish Ley, and a handful of other Mass Effect veterans who had been on Anthem since the beginning. Some current and former BioWare employees feel a lot of resentment toward this group, and in interviews, many who worked on Anthem accused the leadership team of indecision and mismanagement. “The root cause of all this was that lack of vision,” said one former BioWare developer. “What are we making? Please tell us. The recurring theme was there was no vision, there was no clarity, there was no single director saying, “‘This is how it all works together.’”
“They never seemed to settle on anything,” added that person. “They were always looking for something more, something new.” Said another: “I think most people on the team felt like we didn’t know exactly what the game was or what it was supposed to be because it kept changing so much.”
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
“Keep in mind,” said another Anthem developer, “everyone had hard decisions to make that we’ve never done before. New IP, new genre, new technology, new style, everything was new.”
Throughout 2015 and 2016, it appeared to the Anthem team that they were accomplishing very little. They struggled with the online infrastructure, they hadn’t figured out how missions would work, and while they had built a few environments and creatures, it still wasn’t clear exactly what the basic gameplay might look like. The story was changing constantly, and progress on the game grew sluggish. One early idea was that there would be multiple cities, which eventually turned into one city and player-created outposts, which eventually turned into one city and a mobile Strider base, which eventually turned into a single fort. Those earlier survival ideas melted away. “They were still figuring out core parts of the IP, like [crafting material] Ember, how technology worked, that sort of thing,” said one former BioWare developer. “The whole back-end architecture and everything wasn’t figured out yet.”
At the same time, BioWare’s studio leadership had to focus much of its attention on Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that was causing headaches for just about everyone and whose rapidly approaching release date was set in stone. Put another way: Anthem might have started to look like it was on fire, but Andromeda was already nearly burnt to the ground.
Complicating these problems further was the fact that sometimes when the Anthem leadership team did make a decision, it could take weeks or even months for them to see it in action. “There were a lot of plans,” said a developer, “where by the time they were implemented it was a year later and the game had evolved.”
The explanation for this lag can be summed up in one word, a word that has plagued many of EA’s studios for years now, most notably BioWare and the now-defunct Visceral Games, a word that can still evoke a mocking smile or sad grimace from anyone who’s spent any time with it.
That word, of course, is Frostbite.
“Frostbite is full of razor blades,” one former BioWare employee told me a few weeks ago, aptly summing up the feelings of perhaps hundreds of game developers who have worked at Electronic Arts over the past few years.
Frostbite is a video game engine, or a suite of technology that is used to make a game. Created by the EA-owned Swedish studio DICE in order to make Battlefield shooters, the Frostbite engine became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a whole lot of money in licensing fees.)
BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisition team had to build them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time would be the charm?
As it turned out, Anthem was not the charm. Using Frostbite to build an online-only action game, which BioWare had never done before, led to a host of new problems for BioWare’s designers, artists, and programmers. “Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails “it’s poorly documented, hacked together, and so on” with all the problems of an externally sourced engine,” said one former BioWare employee.
“Nobody you actually work with designed it, so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the way it is.”
Throughout those early years in development, the Anthem team realised that many of the ideas they’d originally conceived would be difficult if not impossible to create on Frostbite. The engine allowed them to build big, beautiful levels, but it just wasn’t equipped with the tools to support all of those ambitious prototypes that they’d created. Slowly and gradually, they started cutting back on the environmental and survival features that they’d devised for Anthem, in large part because they just weren’t working.
“Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in some cases you’d run into a brick wall,” said a BioWare developer. “Then you’d realise, “‘Oh my god, we can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.’ It was sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run.”
Even today, BioWare developers say Frostbite can make their jobs exponentially more difficult. Building new iterations on levels and mechanics can be challenging due to sluggish tools, while bugs that should take a few minutes to squash might require days of back-and-forth conversations. “If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing bugs,” said one person who worked on Anthem. “If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly.”
Said a second: “I would say the biggest problem I had with Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it’s a complicated thing.”
“It’s hard enough to make a game,” said a third BioWare developer. “It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”
From the beginning, Anthem‘s senior leadership had made the decision to start from scratch for a large part of the game’s technology rather than using all of the systems the company had built for Inquisition and Andromeda. Part of this may have been a desire to stand out from those other teams, but another explanation was simple: Anthem was online. The other games were not. The inventory system that BioWare had already designed for Dragon Age on Frostbite might not stand up in an online game, so the Anthem team figured they’d need to build a new one. “Towards the end of the project we started complaining,” said one developer. “Maybe we would’ve gone further if we had Dragon Age: Inquisition stuff. But we’re also just complaining about lack of manpower in general.”
It often felt to the Anthem team like they were understaffed, according to that developer and others who worked on the game, many of whom told me their team was a fraction of the size of developers behind similar games, like Destiny and The Division. There were a number of reasons for this. One was that in 2016, the FIFA games had to move to Frostbite. The annual soccer franchise was EA’s most important series, bringing in a large chunk of the publisher’s revenue, and BioWare had programmers with Frostbite experience, so Electronic Arts shifted them to FIFA.
“A lot of the really talented engineers were actually working on FIFA when they should’ve been working on Anthem,” said one person who was on the project. There was also the fact that BioWare’s main office was located in Edmonton, a place where winters can dip to minus 20 or even minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which staff there say has always made it difficult to recruit veterans from more habitable cities. (One also has to wonder: How many programmers heard about Frostbite’s razor blades and decided to shy away?)
When a BioWare engineer had questions or wanted to report bugs, they’d usually have to talk to EA’s central Frostbite team, a group of support staff that worked with all of the publisher’s studios. Within EA, it was common for studios to battle for resources like the Frostbite team’s time, and BioWare would usually lose those battles. After all, role-playing games brought in a fraction of the revenue of a FIFA or a Battlefront. “The amount of support you’d get at EA on Frostbite is based on how much money your studio’s game is going to make,” said one developer. All of BioWare’s best-laid technological plans could go awry if they weren’t getting the help they expected.
No matter how many people were involved, one thing about Frostbite would always remain consistent, as it did on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda: It made everything take longer than anyone thought it should. “We’re trying to make this huge procedural world but we’re constantly fighting Frostbite because that’s not what it’s designed to do,” said one developer.
“Things like baking the lighting can take 24 hours. If we’re making changes to a level, we have to go through another bake process. It’s a very complex process.”
Frostbite’s razor blades were buried deeply inside the Anthem team, and it would prove impossible to stop the bleeding.
By the end of 2016, Anthem had been in some form of pre-production for roughly four years. After this much time in a more typical video game development cycle, it would have entered production, the point in a project when the team has a full vision of what they’re making and can actually start building out the game. Some who were working on Anthem say that’s when they started feeling like they were in trouble, like the game was screwed, like they would soon have to face the same sort of last-minute production crunch that their co-workers were suffering on Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Yet word came down from leadership that everything would work out. It was time for BioWare magic. “You had to throw your prior knowledge out and either go on blind faith or just hope things were gonna turn out well,” said one person who was there. “A lot of the veterans, guys who had only ever worked at BioWare, they said, “‘Everything is going to be fine in the end.’ It was really hard on people who couldn’t just go on that blind faith, I suppose.”
One former BioWare developer said that they and some of their co-workers would bring up these concerns to directors, only to be ignored. “You’d come to management saying, “‘Look, we’re seeing the same problems on Inquisition and Andromeda, where design wasn’t figuring things out. It’s getting really late in the project and the core of the game isn’t defined.’ Basically saying, “‘Hey, the same mistakes are happening again, did you guys see this the last time? Can you stop this?’” said the developer. “They’d be quite dismissive about it.”
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.”
Because leadership didn’t want to discuss Destiny, that developer added, they found it hard to learn from what Bungie’s loot shooter did well. “We need to be looking at games like Destiny because they’re the market leaders,” the developer said. “They’re the guys who have been doing these things best. We should absolutely be looking at how they’re doing things.” As an example, the developer brought up the unique feel of Destiny‘s large variety of guns, something that Anthem seemed to be lacking, in large part because it was being built by a bunch of people who had mostly made RPGs. “We really didn’t have the design skill to be able to do that,” they said. “There just wasn’t the knowledge base to be able to develop that kind of diversity.”
One long-standing BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem‘s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point, BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game”they just couldn’t figure out how to make it feel good”so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain. You’d run through a farm and shoot some aliens. Some on the team thought it was successful as a proof of concept, but others at BioWare said it felt dull and looked mundane.
In the beginning of 2017, a few important things happened. In early March, Mass Effect: Andromeda launched, freeing up the bulk of BioWare’s staff to join Anthem, including most of BioWare’s Austin office. The Montreal office began to quietly wind down and eventually closed, leaving BioWare as two entities rather than three.
Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable. (Söderlund did not respond to a request for comment.) He was particularly disappointed by the graphics. “He said, “‘This is not what you had promised to me as a game,’” said one person who was there.
Then, those developers said, Söderlund summoned a group of high-level BioWare staff to fly out to Stockholm, Sweden and meet with developers at DICE, the studio behind Battlefield and Frostbite. (DICE would later bring in a strike team to help BioWare work out Frostbite kinks and make Anthem look prettier.)
Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art, knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.
For years, the Anthem team had gone back and forth about the flying mechanic. It had been cut and re-added several times in different forms. Some iterations were more of a glide, and for a while, the idea was that only one exosuit class would be able to fly. On one hand, the mechanic was undeniably cool – what better way to feel like Iron Man than to zip around the world in a giant robot suit? On the other hand, it kept breaking everything.
Few open-world games allowed for that kind of vertical freedom, for good reason; if you could fly everywhere, then the entire world needed to accommodate that. The artists wouldn’t be able to throw up mountains or walls to prevent players from jumping off the boundaries of the planet.
Plus, the Anthem team worried that if you could fly, you’d blaze past the game’s environments rather than stopping to explore and check out the scenery.
The leadership team’s most recent decision had been to remove flying entirely, but they needed to impress Söderlund, and flying was the only mechanic they’d built that made Anthem stand out from other games, so they eventually decided to put it back. This re-implementation of flying took place over a weekend, according to two people who worked on the game, and it wasn’t quite clear whether they were doing it permanently or just as a show for Söderlund.
“We were like, “‘Well that’s not in the game, are we adding it for real?’” said one developer. “They were like, “‘We’ll see.’”
One day in the spring of 2017, Söderlund flew to Edmonton and made his way to BioWare’s offices, entourage in tow. The Anthem team had completely overhauled the art and re-added flying, which they hoped would feel sufficiently impressive, but tensions were high in the wake of the last demo’s disappointment and Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s high-profile failure. There was no way to know what might happen if Söderlund again disapproved of the demo. Would the project get canceled? Would BioWare be in trouble?
“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.’”
This demo became the foundation for the seven-minute gameplay trailer that BioWare showed the public a few weeks later. In June of 2017, just a few days after that last-minute name change from Beyond to Anthem, BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn took the stage of EA’s E3 press conference and announced the game.
The next day, at Microsoft’s press conference, they showed a demo that helped everyone, including BioWare’s own developers, finally see how Anthem would play.
What the public didn’t know was that even then, Anthem was still in pre-production. Progress had been so slow that the demo was mostly guesswork, team members say, which is why the Anthem that actually launched looks so drastically different than the demo the team showed at E3 2017.
In the real game, you have to go through a mission selection menu and a loading screen before you can leave your base in Fort Tarsis; in the demo, it all happens seamlessly. The demo is full of dynamic environments, giant creatures, and mechanics that bear little resemblance to the final product, like getting to see new loot when you pick it up rather than having to wait until the end of a mission.
“After E3, that’s when it really felt like, “‘OK, this is the game we’re making,’” said one Anthem developer. “But it still felt like it took a while to get the entire team up to speed. It was also kind of tricky because there were still a lot of question marks. The demo was not actually built properly – a lot of it was fake, like most E3 demos.
There was a lot of stuff that was like, “‘Oh are we actually doing this? Do we have the tech for that, do we have the tools for that? To what end can you fly? How big should the world be?’”
“The abilities and all that were still getting decided,” said another developer. “Nothing was set in stone at that point at all.” Said a third: “Going out of pre-production is never really a crisp thing. You have to just look at the attitude of the team and what they’re doing. The fact of the matter is, fundamental things were not figured out yet.”
At E3 2017, BioWare announced that Anthem would launch in spring 2018. Behind the scenes, however, they had barely even implemented a single mission. And the drama was just getting worse.
Until very recently, hardcore BioWare fans used to refer to the studio’s various teams using derogatory tiers. There was the A-team, the B-team, and the C-team. Opinions may have varied on which was which, but in general, “A-team” referred to the original BioWare, the office in Edmonton, Canada responsible for Dragon Age and the Mass Effect trilogy.
A couple thousand miles southeast was the “B-team,” a studio in Austin, Texas that was founded to make Star Wars: The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. (The “C-team” usually referred to Montreal, the ill-fated studio behind Mass Effect: Andromeda.)
What fans might not have realised was that even within BioWare, some people thought the same way.
“Anthem is the game you get from a studio that is at war with itself,” said one former BioWare developer. “Edmonton understandably has the perspective of, “‘We are the original BioWare.’ Anybody not part of that brand is lesser, and does not garner the same level of trust as people that are in the Edmonton office. And so I think that’s a little bit of an issue there.”
After shipping The Old Republic in 2011 and continuing to cultivate and support it, BioWare Austin started a few of its own projects. There was Shadow Realms, a 4v1 multiplayer game that was announced in the summer of 2014, and then there were some other prototypes, like Saga, a multiplayer open-world Star Wars game that was in early development for a few months. (And then there was the dream of a new Knights of the Old Republic game, which some BioWare Austin staffers say was always dangled as a possibility but never really came close to getting off the ground.)
By the end of 2014, those projects were all canceled, and BioWare had enacted an initiative that it called “One BioWare” “a plan designed to get all of the company’s studios working in tandem. Many of BioWare Austin’s staff moved on to Dragon Age: Inquisition downloadable content and then Mass Effect: Andromeda.
By early 2017, around the time Söderlund was demanding to see that new demo, most of BioWare Austin was officially on Anthem, helping with just about every department, from cinematics to storytelling.
Anthem‘s lack of vision in Edmonton was even more pronounced in Austin, whose developers suddenly found themselves working on a game they didn’t quite understand. Was it an online loot shooter, like Destiny, or was it more of a role-playing game? How did you get around the world? What would the missions look like? “One of the things we struggled with was, we didn’t understand the game concept,” said one former BioWare Austin developer. “When Anthem was presented to us, it was never really clear what the game was.”
“They were still finding the vision for the game,” said a second. “I saw multiple presentations given to the entire studio trying to define what Anthem was about. The Hollywood elevator pitch version of Anthem: “‘When we talk about Anthem, what we mean is X.’ I saw many, many variations of that over time, and that was indicative of how much conflict there was over trying to find a vision for this game, and over how many people were struggling to have their vision become the one that won out.”
Even when they did figure out what was happening, it felt to BioWare Austin staff like they were the grunts.
Developers who worked both in Austin and Edmonton say the messaging was that Edmonton would come up with the vision and Austin would execute on it, which caused tension between the two studios. BioWare Austin developers recall offering feedback only to get dismissed or ignored by BioWare Edmonton’s senior leadership team, a process that was particularly frustrating for those who had already shipped a big online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and learned from its mistakes.
One developer described it as a culture clash between a group of developers in Edmonton who were used to making single-player box product games and a group of developers in Austin who knew how to make online service games.
“We’d tell them, “˜This is not going to work. Look, these [story] things you’re doing, it’s gonna split up the player experience,’” said an Austin developer.
“We’d already been through all of it with The Old Republic. We knew what it was like when players felt like they were getting rushed through story missions, because other players were on their headsets going, “‘C’mon cmon, let’s go.’ So we knew all these things, and we’d bring it up repeatedly, and we were ignored.”
After the E3 reveal, in June of 2017, the Anthem teams in Edmonton and Austin were meant to start moving into full production, designing missions and building a world based on the vision they could now at least somewhat see. But that just didn’t happen, the developers say. “They had been in idea land for four to five years, and nobody had actually gone, “˜OK, we need to decide what we’re making and make it,’” said one member of the team.
“They were still going back to the drawing board on major systems. Which is fine – part of game development is that you iterate, and it’s like, “˜This didn’t work, let’s go again.’ They never got to the point of like, “‘This doesn’t work, let’s iterate on it.’ It was, “‘This doesn’t work, let’s start from scratch.’”
The story was still in flux under new narrative director James Ohlen (who would also leave BioWare before Anthem shipped), and design was moving particularly slowly, with systems like mission structure, loot, and exosuit powers still not finalised. A number of veteran BioWare developers began leaving the studio that summer, and the untimely death of Corey Gaspur, one of the game’s lead designers, left a massive hole in that department.
Core features, like loading and saving, still hadn’t been implemented in the game, and it became difficult to play test builds because they were riddled with bugs.
“It came time to move from pre-production to production in June,” said one BioWare developer. “June comes, we’re still in pre-production. July, August, what the heck’s going on?”
The Anthem leadership team and some other veterans continued to talk about BioWare magic, but it was clear to a lot of people that something was wrong. They had publicly committed to a fall 2018 ship date, but that had never been realistic. Publisher EA also wouldn’t let them delay the game any further than March 2019, the end of the company’s fiscal year.
They were entering production so late, it seemed like it might be impossible to ship anything by early 2019, let alone a game that could live up to BioWare’s lofty standards.
Something needed to give.
On June 29, 2017, BioWare’s Mark Darrah published a tweet that may seem odd today. He noted that he was the executive producer of the Dragon Age franchise, then gave a list of games he was not currently working on: “Anthem; Mass Effect; Jade Empire; A DA Tactics game; Star Wars“¦” The implication was that Darrah was producing Dragon Age 4.
At the time, this was true. This iteration of Dragon Age 4 was code-named Joplin, and those who were working on it have told me they were excited by creative director Mike Laidlaw’s vision for the project.
Things I (EP of The Dragon Age Franchise) am NOT currently working on:
Anthem
Mass Effect
Jade Empire™
A DA Tactics game
Star Wars
… pic.twitter.com/sxo0ksvjmP— Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) June 30, 2017
But Anthem was on fire, and by October, BioWare had decided to make some massive changes. That summer, studio general manager Aaryn Flynn departed, to be replaced by a returning Casey Hudson. As part of this process, the studio canceled Joplin. Laidlaw quit shortly afterward, and BioWare restarted Dragon Age 4 with a tiny team under the code name Morrison.
Meanwhile, the studio moved the bulk of Dragon Age 4‘s developers to Anthem, which needed all of the company’s resources if it was going to hit the ship date that EA was demanding.
Mark Darrah was then installed over game director Jon Warner to become executive producer on Anthem. His role became so significant that he took top billing in Anthem‘s credits:
That the first name in Anthem‘s credits is someone who started working on the game in October 2017, just 16 months before it shipped, says volumes about its development.
If Dragon Age: Inquisition hadn’t been so successful, perhaps BioWare would have changed its production practices. Perhaps studio leadership wouldn’t have preached so strongly about that BioWare magic – that last-minute cohesion that they all assumed would happen with enough hard work and enough crunch.
But it was ultimately Dragon Age: Inquisition‘s executive producer who steered Anthem out of rocky waters and into port.
When Mark Darrah joined the project in the fall of 2017, he began pushing the Anthem team toward one goal: Ship the game.
“The good thing about Mark is that he would just wrangle everybody and make decisions,” said one former BioWare developer. “That was the thing that the team lacked – nobody was making decisions. It was deciding by panel. They’d almost get to a decision and then somebody would go “˜But what about this?’ We were stagnant, not moving anywhere.”
“He started saying basically, “˜Just try to finish what you’ve started,’” said a second developer. “The hard part about that was that there were still a lot of things to figure out. There were still a lot of tools to build to be able to ship the game we were making. It was very, very scary because of how little time there was left.”
At this point, that developer added, it felt like “player-based gameplay” was in a good spot. Combat felt like a strong evolution from Mass Effect: Andromeda, which, despite its flaws, was widely considered to have the best shooting of any Mass Effect game.
Now that flying was a permanent fixture in Anthem, it was starting to feel great, too. Other parts of the game were in much worse shape. “It was level design, story, and world-building that got screwed the most, in that things kept changing and they had to rebuild a lot all the time,” the developer said.
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 finalised, 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.
This final year was when Anthem began to materialise, and it became one of the most stressful years in BioWare’s history. There was pressure within the studio, as many teams had to put in late nights and weekends just to make up for the time they’d lost. There was pressure from EA, as executive Samantha Ryan brought in teams from all across the publisher, including developers from outside studios like Motive in Montreal, to close out the game.
And there was pressure from the competition, as The Division 2 was announced, Destiny 2 continued to improve, and other loot shooters like Warframe just kept getting better.
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 monetisation plans, Anthem included. EA has been public about its distaste for linear games that can be easily returned to GameStop after a single playthrough.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/11/a-guide-to-the-endless-confusing-star-wars-battlefront-ii-controversy/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/ohz7bdcejhmwtgwwbirm.png” title=”A Guide To The Endless, Confusing Star Wars Battlefront 2 Controversy” excerpt=”When 2017’s Star Wars Battlefront II was first previewed at E3 this year, people were cautiously optimistic. Its predecessor was slammed for being thin on content, but initial showings of the game looked promising and it seemed like EA had added the things fans wanted out of the game’s sequel, like a single-player campaign. Now, everything has turned to shit.”]
And Anthem needed to be finished. By rebooting Dragon Age 4 and moving almost all of BioWare’s staff to Anthem, the studio, now under new leadership, was doubling down. Decisions had to be made that would get the game out the door, no matter what that meant cutting. There was no more time for ideation or “finding the fun” in prototypes.
“I would say it ended up being quite a stressful time and a lot of people started to develop tunnel vision,” said one developer. “They have to finish their thing and they don’t have the time.”
That, the developer added, is one of the explanations for some of Anthem‘s critical flaws. Consider its unreasonably long loading times, for example, which could take more than two minutes on PC before the early patch. “Of course we knew loading screens would be unpopular,” the developer said.
“But we have everything on the schedule, hundreds more days scheduled of work than we actually have. So loading is not gonna get addressed.”
Anthem was so in flux during 2018 that even some major features that were discussed publicly that year never made it into the game. A Game Informer cover story on Anthem, published in July of 2018, detailed a skill tree system that would allow players to build up their exosuit pilots in unique ways: “Your pilot also gains skills that apply universally to any javelin you use. For instance, the booster jets on your javelins overheat with continued use, but by investing in a certain pilot skill, you can increase the amount of time you’re able to stay airborne in all of your suits.”
That system was cut before launch.
“I don’t know how accurate this is,” said one BioWare developer, “but it felt like the entire game was basically built in the last six to nine months. You couldn’t play it. There was nothing there. It was just this crazy final rush. The hard part is, how do you make a decision when there’s no game? There’s nothing to play. So yeah, you’re going to keep questioning yourself.”
It’s not unusual for a video game to be in rough shape close to launch. Some of the best video games in history, like The Last of Us, came out of rocky development cycles in which many of the staff felt like they were screwed until everything coalesced at the last minute. Something about Anthem felt different, though.
Too much had gone awry; too many ambitions had not been realised. “I think if just one thing had gone wrong, we would’ve navigated that,” said a developer.
One mandate from Anthem‘s directors had been to make the game “unmemeable,” a reaction to Mass Effect: Andromeda’s jittery facial animations, which became an internet joke in the days leading up to that game’s release. For Anthem, the team used high-end performance capture in order to ensure that the characters couldn’t be turned into embarrassing GIFs and plastered all over Reddit.
Since the bulk of the game’s story-telling would be told from a first-person perspective in the hub city Fort Tarsis, players would spend a lot of time staring at characters’ faces. The characters had to look good.
Performance capture, or “pcap,” did indeed make for beautiful animations, but it came at a cost. Because booking performance capture was so expensive, the team often had just one shot to get things right, which was a difficult proposition when Anthem‘s design was changing so rapidly. Sometimes, the team would record and implement scenes that stopped making sense as a result of design changes.
“There are little bits of dialogue, little moments in some of these performance-captured scenes, that if you stop and think, don’t make any sense,” said one developer. “The reason this doesn’t make any sense is because they changed some of the gameplay down the line, but it was impossible to change the performance capture.”
One mission involving the rebellious Sentinel Dax, for example, has a few lines of dialogue that reference the destruction of her javelin exosuit, which never happens in the game. The explanation is simple, the developer said. The mission was altered after they’d recorded the dialogue, and there was no time or money to go re-record it.
“They were just like, “˜Well it’s not gonna be destroyed,’” said the developer. “Wait, that makes that line of dialogue make no sense.”
Hardcore fans have spotted other examples of Anthem dialogue that seems incoherent or odd, like characters talking about other characters as if they’re not present when they’re actually standing in the same room.
“That’s a really strong example of the types of problems that befell us,” said another developer. “Why couldn’t they change this? It’s not that nobody wanted to. It’s because when we set the course with these huge assets, we’re sometimes stuck with them.”
Because decisions were being made so rapidly and there was so much work left to do, Anthem developers say they had a hard time looking at the game holistically. It was tough to zoom out and get a feel for what it’d be like to play 40, 60, or 80 hours of Anthem when entire missions weren’t even finished.
How could you tell if the loot drop rates were balanced when you couldn’t even play through the whole game? How could you assess whether the game felt grindy or repetitive when the story wasn’t even finished yet?
Plus, the build could be so unstable, it was difficult to even log on to test for bugs. “I think there was an entire week where I couldn’t do anything because there were server issues,” said one person who worked on the game. Another said that the team had to test out and approve levels offline, which was a strange choice for missions that were meant to be played by four people.
Just a couple months before Anthem shipped, decisions were still being finalised and overhauled. At one point, for example, the leadership team realised that there was no place in the game to show off your gear, which was a problem for a game in which the long-term monetisation was all based on cosmetics.
You could spend money on fancy new outfits for your robot suit, but who would even see them? The game’s one city, Fort Tarsis, was privately instanced so that it could change for each player based on how much progress they’d made in the story. So the team brought on EA’s Motive studio in Montreal to build the Launch Bay, a last-minute addition to the game where you could hang out and show off your gear to strangers.
Back in Edmonton, as the crunch continued, BioWare employees say leadership assured them that everything would be fine. The BioWare magic would materialise. Sure enough, the game did continue to get better”one BioWare developer emphasised that the improvements were exponential during those last few months”but the stress of production had serious consequences.
“I’d never heard of “˜stress leave’ until the end of Andromeda,” said one former BioWare developer, referring to a practice in which BioWare employees would take weeks or even months off for their mental health. On Anthem, the developer added, this practice just got worse. “I’ve never heard of people needing to take time off because they were so stressed out. But then that kind of spread like wildfire throughout the team.”
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.”
“We hear about the big people,” said another developer who left. “When [writer] Drew Karpyshyn leaves, it makes big waves. But a lot of people don’t realise that there were a ton of really talented game designers who left BioWare and no one knows. The general public is unaware of who these people are.”
Some of those people took off for other cities, while over a dozen followed former BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn to Improbable, a technology company that recently announced plans to develop its own game.
That list includes many former high-level staff – including art and animation director Neil Thompson, technical director Jacques Lebrun, and lead designer Kris Schoneberg – some of whom were at BioWare for over a decade.
By the end of 2018, those who remained on Anthem wished they could have had just a few more months. Under Darrah and the production staff, there was real momentum, but it became clear to everyone that the game wouldn’t ship with as much content as fans expected.
They came up with some artificial solutions to extend the campaign, like Challenges of the Legionnaires, a tedious, mandatory part of the main story that involves completing grindy quests in order to access tombs across the game’s world. (Originally, according to two BioWare developers, this mission included time gates that might force players to wait days to complete it all”fortunately, they changed this before launch. “That mission was controversial even within BioWare,” said one. “The reasoning was to definitely throttle player movement.”)
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.”
If there was one reason for BioWare staff to be optimistic, it was the fact that unlike the studio’s previous games, Anthem had room to evolve. Early mock reviews – critical assessments provided by outside consultants – predicted that Anthem‘s Metacritic score would land in the high 70s.
This was low for a BioWare game, but company leadership was fine with that, telling staff during company meetings that with some last-minute polish in the months following those mock reviews, they could get even higher. A few months after launch, maybe they’d have something special on their hands.
“They had a really strong belief in the live service,” said one developer. “Issues that were coming up, they’d say, “‘We’re a live service. We’ll be supporting this for years to come. We’ll fix that later on.’”
It turned out the mock reviews had been too generous. By the time Anthem came out, BioWare’s leadership would have killed for a Metacritic in the high 70s.
On February 15, 2019, Anthem launched in EA’s premium early-access services, opening the floodgates as players and reviewers began to see just how flawed the game was. The loading screens were too long, the loot system felt unbalanced, and missions were thin and repetitive. Plenty of players liked the core gameplay – the shooting, the flying, the javelin exosuit abilities – but everything around it seemed undercooked.
As it turned out, this February 15 build was a few weeks old, a devastating mistake for BioWare that likely led to far more negative reviews than they might have received otherwise. A patch a few days later fixed some of the bugs, such as audio drops and sluggish loading screens, that were highlighted in reviews, but it was too late.
By the time the Metacritic score had settled, it was a 55.
“I don’t think we knew what Anthem was going to be when it shipped,” said one developer. “If we had known the shipped game would have that many problems, then that’s a completely different take than, “‘Oh, it’s ok to get this out now because we can improve it later.’ That wasn’t the case. Nobody did believe it was this flawed or this broken. Everyone actually thought, “˜We have something here, and we think it’s pretty good.’”
While talking to me, a number of former BioWare developers brought up specific complaints that were voiced by players and critics, then shared anecdotes of how they had made those same gripes to the leadership team throughout 2017 and 2018 only to be brushed off. It’s easy for developers to say that with hindsight, of course, but this was a common theme.
“Reading the reviews is like reading a laundry list of concerns that developers brought up with senior leadership,” said one person who worked on the game. In some cases, perhaps they just didn’t have time to address the issues, but these former BioWare developers said they brought up bigger-picture concerns years before the game shipped.
As an example, two developers brought up non-player character dialogue. Most of Anthem‘s story is told through conversations in Fort Tarsis and radio chatter as you go through missions, yet the game strongly pushes you to team up with other players. As anyone who’s played an online game knows, it’s hard to pay much attention to NPC dialogue when you’re playing with other people, whether they’re blabbing in your ear or rushing you to hurry up and get to the next mission.
Current and former BioWare employees say they brought this up with BioWare’s senior leadership only to be ignored. Anthem developers say they anticipated other complaints, too, like ones about the heat meter that prevents you from flying for too long without breaks, and the fact that so many of those Fort Tarsis dialogue choices didn’t seem to accomplish much.
In the weeks after launch, BioWare’s Austin office began taking over the live service, as had always been planned, while BioWare Edmonton staff gradually started moving to new projects, like Dragon Age 4. Among those who remain at the company, there’s a belief that Anthem can be fixed, that with a few more months and some patience from players, it will have the same redemption story as so many service games before it, from Diablo III to Destiny.
Yet questions linger about BioWare’s production practices. Many of those who have left the company over the past few years shared concerns about the studio’s approach to game development. There’s widespread worry that the soul of BioWare has been ripped away, that this belief in “BioWare magic” has burned too many people out. That too many talented veterans have left. “There are things that need to change about how that studio operates,” said one former developer.
“There are lessons that need to be learned and the only way they’ll get learned is if they become public knowledge.”
One big change that’s already been enacted at BioWare is a new technology strategy. Developers still at the studio say that under Casey Hudson, rather than start from scratch yet again, the next Dragon Age will be built on Anthem‘s codebase. (We’ll share more on that game in the near future.)
“I think Anthem might be the kick in the butt that BioWare leadership needed to see that how you develop games has changed dearly,” said one former staffer. “You can’t just start fresh and fumble your way forward until you find the fun. That doesn’t work anymore.”
Perhaps Anthem will morph into a great game one day. A few people who worked on it have expressed optimism for the future. “A lot of us were screaming at the wall,” said one Austin developer.
“Over time, what builds up is, “‘OK, when we get control, we’re going to fix it.’ Sure, the game has all these problems and we understand them. It’s very much a “˜motivated to fix’ attitude.”
The game that emerged from a six-and-a-half-year development cycle was the result of a number of difficult, complicated factors, ones that won’t be quite as easy to fix as Anthem‘s loot drop rates or loading screens. When the Anthem team started development back in 2012, they hoped to make the Bob Dylan of video games, one that would be referenced and remembered for generations. They might have accomplished that. Just not in quite the way they hoped.
EA and BioWare put up a blog post in apparent response to this article. We had sent over a bullet-pointed summary of what was in this piece, although they did not have a chance to read the article before publishing their post, which makes it a particularly bizarre response.
The post explains the lack of comment for our article based on an assumption of what the article would focus on: “We chose not to comment or participate in this story because we felt there was an unfair focus on specific team members and leaders, who did their absolute best to bring this totally new idea to fans. We didn’t want to be part of something that was attempting to bring them down as individuals.”
While our article names some senior people at BioWare, and while we’d asked about the roles of various leaders at BioWare during the game’s development, readers can judge for themselves whether BioWare’s assumptions about our article were correct. We don’t think they were.
“The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real,” the post states. “But the reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”
We believe in asking questions and publishing what we can find out. We hope that in the future EA and BioWare will see the value of that process.
Update 25/02/21: After years of working on a supposed Anthem NEXT, a reboot of the game that would have completely overhauled Anthem‘s core systems, the project was cancelled.
“Game development is hard. Decisions like these are not easy. Moving forward, we need to laser focus our efforts as a studio and strengthen the next Dragon Age, and Mass Effect titles while continuing to provide quality updates to Star Wars: The Old Republic,” BioWare said.
“Game development is hard,” Christian Dailey, the studio director of BioWare Austin, said.
This story has been updated since its original publication.
Comments
119 responses to “How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong”
Well now we know why the game was a disaster. I don’t see bioware lasting that much longer if it’s bleeding talent like this.
Great work Jason.
DA4 is probably the last chance for Bioware
I hope they get to finish it. My partner is probably one of the most rabid DA fans on the planet, if she doesn’t get to hang out with Solas, I’m going to have to go make the bloody thing myself and kidnap Gareth David-Lloyd to do the voice-acting.
lol
good luck with that
I’ll certainly have to learn a lot about code and abduction techniques.
It’d be much easier if BioWare just makes the game, IMO.
Abduction is probably the easy part.
you might have to do it yourself anyway if EA decides Gareth costs too much and it would be best to just get the interns to do the voice acting.
So is mine, she just got super defensive while I was reading through this one advising her not to expect much from DA:4 (DA:3 was middling enough as it was).
people said the same thing about Anthem after amdromeida and they said the same thing about that after inquisition
Except that I’ve always said DA4 is their last chance
100%. If Da4 is good, great. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bioware dies before then. They can’t ship another shit game, I would imagine if they get halfway through and that is going to be the case they’ll dissolve rather than embarrass themselves again.
“the next Dragon Age will be built on Anthem’s codebase”
It’s another live service game.
How good do you honestly think it’ll be?
Probably really shit, I didn’t even like inquisition that much. I’m just saying if its good, I don’t think they’ll release it if its not… I think they’d dissolve if they realized in 2 years they had another shit game.
Anyone else heard about the claim of a rather insidious AI working in the background of Te game?
About a year ago a paper was leaked detailing an extremely troubling game based AI that built a unique profile on each individual player to maximise the chance of microtransactions, minimise buyers remorse, track the players online footprint and socioeconomic status based on location.
Here’s the story people have been posting, I’ve not been able to verify its validity however.
https://www.techpowerup.com/240655/leaked-ai-powered-game-revenue-model-paper-foretells-a-dystopian-nightmare
It seems like a pipe dream but one of the photos from the leak clearly shows what appears to be Anthem.
Some are claiming this is why scaling is so out of whack and why loot is so weirdly distributed among other bizzare design decisions.
If this is true it’s a troubling precedent and makes me extremely happy that I avoided the game.
I realise games that manipulate players aren’t anything new but the idea that EA is basically building a database on its players for the purpose of preying on our habits is troubling and very upsetting.
NOPE! The article dispells its not malicious design of some AI loot god… its just poor design and implementation.
That AI presentation also looks very much like a conceptual thing – “Here’s how it could be applied in X game” rather than something that was built in-house, a product of a third party pitching to a publisher.
Yeah that was my thought, as I said I wasn’t able to find much beyond this story and the post on reddit.
That being said, I’ve long pondered when this sort of thing will begin to happen and it’s not very reassuring to see its already being floated as a concept and clearly targeting companies who seek other means of revenue.
yeah it was patent that activision was proposing last year or the year before
let’s be honest if this kind of AI is being developed then it would definitely come from EA.
it looks to me like the push to have everyone using the same engine (EA) fiscal concerns (EA) leading to the game not being able to change it’s release date and well basically every thing that went wrong was traceable back to EA and it’s hunger for money.
it looks to me like EA’s insatiable hunger for profit is anathema to producing the kind of games that actually make heaps of money, especially if your going to do irreparable harm to the brand at launch. Maybe they should worry about adding micro-transactions for example until after they actually launch a decent product instead of making it an issue during production.
Never said it was buddy…
Yeah I think it’s a slideshow of some executive’s wet dream rather than an actual integrated piece of technology.
Yeah it definetly looks like a pitch, though its far from a dream, all its talking about is using existing technology and datasets in ways that are already possible and in use elsewhere.
To look at it another way, it’s a proposal of how to use data they already have or have access to, while expanding on the statistical analysis already in use.
The types of data required in game are already widely collected and the virtual/physical footprints are long established and profitable datasets in marketing, advertising, gambling, financial and entertainment industries.
On an interesting note, the theory raised on reddit doesn’t think this system is currently being used, it’s implying that Anthem would be collecting the data needed to build the foundations of the proposed system.
Jason nails it again. If anyone hasn’t already go pick up his book Blood, Sweat and Pixels. It’s filled with stories like this
Completely forgot about his book. Fair call.
An amazing read. For me, what makes me angry is how great the combat is, truly amazing combat, that is rock solid but it is lost in this cluster- of a world that is devoid of everything and the game is bare bones at every level. It is the biggest waste of a great idea that I can recall.
I just read the Bioware response over on reddit, not that was maddening… suggesting articles like this dont make the gaming world better. I would argue articles like this do more to make the gaming world better than Anthem did, on every level.
It sad that even after ME:A (which I somewhat enjoyed) and having the article written about it, they still went ahead and made another game seemingly with similar issues. It’s ‘we could have done better’ no longer works, and the blaming of an article like this is a symptom of how unwilling they are to change.
The major issue seems to be they basically have no decent project managers. That annoying person who tends to say no a lot, who knows the overall plan and keeps everyone focused
…Someone who realizes that meetings are there to serve a defined purpose, with documented expected outcomes, and documented future actions assigned to responsible parties.
Sounds like a whole lot of absent leadership, with positios held by indecisive, poor communicators.
Sorry, can you please point me to a workplace, any workplace, where such a person exists? Because I would like to work there.
Mine! My Principal BA and Manager are both super all about expected outcomes and documented actions. ^.^
Spot the self employed dude… :p
I’m just teasing, somebody has to have the 3-4 functional workers in the world!!
Seriously though, after a string of costly, company wide errors at my old job, management actually boasted and threatened that not having KPI’s was something good and done for us.
I replied it was something that was desperately needed and technically nobody should be afraid of it if they were doing their jobs, they weren’t happy.
I quit last week, partly because I need to be a stay home dad for a few months and also because they abused my work ethic.
One of their bullying tactics was to remind me constantly that the client I managed was a major part of keeping the company afloat, problem was I already knew this and was also well aware that nobody above or below me was actually capable of maintaining the systems I put in place to allow almost a single person to handle a government contract of that size.
Some of my contacts have already told me that in less than a week the department is crumbling, they are already unable to comply to the requirements of the contract and now the parent company is looking to close a number of sites with them in the crosshairs.
I feel bad in some ways but I can’t help but laugh, I gave them years of my life, exceptional service and plenty of warnings.
A good BA is worth their weight in gold.
I don’t think it’s a lack of project managers – it’s a lack of vision. They didn’t even know what they WANTED to make. It’s just like with Andromeda, when Casey Hudson took to twitter to ask fans if they wanted another Mass Effect game, whether it should be set before or after the original trilogy.
If your only requirement for making a game is “we need to make a new game in this franchise”, without having a clear idea of the game you want to make and the story you want to tell (especially for an RPG), then you are almost certainly going to make a mediocre game.
The thing this article seems to reiterate is that no one had a vision of what Anthem should have been. The fact that BioWare was forced into EA’s “culture” of making games and to use the sub-par engine that is Frostbite is just the icing on the poop cake.
Great article !
Unfortunately the ended up making the Rebecca Black of video games. Something to be mocked in perpituity.
Could become the Vanilla Ice of video games though. Something initially mocked, but somehow eventually becoming cool enough to be enjoyed.
The game has gotten better, but people still judge it on its launch window. Understandably, but as the game is being improved, that perception becomes less and less accurate. As the article mentions, Destiny 1 and 2 both had a similar problem, yet evolved into great games.
Theres no reason Anthem cant do the same. The core game is solid, and the flaws can be fixed.
Going off of news articles and Reddit posts you’d think it was one of the worst games ever made. After actually playing the game I’m inclined to believe that the people complaining haven’t played the game. It’s as if they’re just regurgitating all the early negative reactions.
I played the game and enjoyed it but there is no denying that what we got was barebones, not even barebones on a looter-shooter level, barebones in the sense you can’t even put a way point on a map, there is no easy way to group with people, barebones in the sense there was virtually only two armour sets per class at launch.
If this was a early access game or an old school mmo beta, such things would be understanble but this was a full price game. They was so fundamentally stripped of features, it played like a proof of concept. Damn I had fun, but this was, in no way, a full price game at launch.
And I say that as someone who liked playing.
Yeah they made some weird choices with some of the systems. No idea why we even get dialogue options. Lack of waypoints in free play sucks. But I’m still enjoying the gameplay more than Destiny or The Division for example.
It’s weird to compare Destiny and The Division to Anthem as Destiny and The Division are just fundamentally better games in almost every regard. I’ve played Anthem through to the end of the story and a bit more after and it was a real slog to get through, the fun of flying and shooting wore off very quickly once you realize that’s all it has going for it. I can only guess that you aren’t all that far into it or you haven’t played Destiny or the Division much. Or we just have completely different ideas on what makes a good game.
Played the hell out of Destiny 1 and 2 (not forsaken), 10 hours of division 2. A lot of the people being critical of Anthem make the comparison usually to Destiny, so I did too. My first ‘looter’ game was Phantasy Star Online on GameCube.
Not saying Anthem is/isn’t good or better than another game. Just saying I like it more. I don’t understand how they could be ‘fundamentally better in almost every regard’, that’s so broad and vague. On the point of class differentiation how is Destiny better? 3 classes that are so homogenised I couldn’t see the point in having already. Mission/dungeon structure? Go there, complete some objective, now go do the next one, Anthem and Destiny do it exactly the same. End game power progression? Did we forget how terrible the light system in Destiny was?
Destiny’s gotten better and it’s definitely ok now, but I’m enjoying Anthem more 1 month after release than I was enjoying Destiny at the same time.
Yeah I was being overly dramatic I think. I probably should have said those games were more complete packages but yeah that’s debatable too I suppose.
To be fair though the idea that everyone who is hating on it hasn’t played it is tinfoil hat territory.
Here’s hoping they continue to improve the game.
But also people tore those games apart when they first came out too, with good reason. Criticism is good (mostly) and contributes to better games.
“I like the game, Therefore everyone elses negative opinions are invalid because i say so ” -Rabid fanboy logic
I get it. You didn’t buy the game. Haven’t played the game. Therefore you’re an expert.
Kids do that too. Decide something is yucky despite never having tried it before.
I get it. You got a new favourite toy and you don’t like it when people say bad things about it. Most kids grow out of that.
Clearly, you haven’t. You decided the game was perfectly fine and then failed at an attempt to delegitimize the legitimate criticisms of the game.
Nice dodge. Without firsthand experience all you’re doing is regurgitating other people’s opinions. Would you call that rabid hater logic? Or are you exempt?
Anyway the game is fine for me. Plays well, doesn’t crash, it’s fun, I can’t complain.
How are the criticisms of version 1.0 relevant to 1.xx ?
Play from release and realise this is equivalent to buying a new pair of jeans only to get home and realise they have a big hole in the backside. Ringing the manufacturer, them sending you a iron on patch. – your simply buying the Jean’s once recalled and sown over, with very sad thread, which probably will break upon use.
They just need to add story, missions, enemy variety and loot. Seems like an easy fix 😛
None of them are complicated though. Story is just an excuse to pull out the weapons, enemy variety is really just skins of the same capabilities, loot boils down to the exotics, and making more synergies.
Missions, it depends. If you’re talking about grindy missions, they always boil down to 4 or 5 varieties, which are already there. Its not easy to introduce new ones when they’re mostly kill, collect, deliver, or find. Dungeons are a possibility, but that’s something plenty of games have been weak on.
My point was mostly that the game isn’t set in concrete, and has changed considerably even in the 6 weeks its been out. Changed plenty, and will change more over time. Changes that make the regurgitated hostility less and less meaningful as things improve.
Destiny 1 and 2 were like that, Warframe was like that, No Mans Sky was like that. There’s history of poor releases improving over time, and given this game is just 6 weeks old, the hostility is premature.
Come back when its a year old and re-review it. Or even after 6 months rather than 6 weeks. These articles that just recycle negativity, and don’t explore the efforts to fix things don’t help. They’re just clickbait.
Good call, the thing will be cheaper and better in a year. Shoulda done that with ME:A. Not buying any new games from EA though, if they want me to beta test they can bloody pay me!
i play warframe and i have played it since release and it is a completely different game now than when it launched, i’m going to give Anthem another look at the 12 months mark and if it improves the way i think it will i will be buying it.
Thats fair enough. Warframe and Destiny are the two best examples here. They both had issues at launch, both got better. Nobody remembers Warframes issues with passion though, because it was a game that largely slipped under the radar. Destiny had all the hype, so people remember it had problems.
Which werent huge or unsolvable. Anthem is in the same boat. It has problems, but they arent unfixable. So put the game aside, and come back to it in 6 or 12 months. Like so many other games, it’ll get there.
Also Warframe released in beta and was free to play, another reason expectations were lower. From the sounds of production and the nightmare that is the Frostbite engine I’m not holding out hope that they are able to produce the kind of turn around that Warframe or Destiny or even The Division did.
Pointing to other games that were not ready when they were released and saying “don’t judge” and “come back in 6 months” is part of the problem. This was released half baked and poorly optimised – and sold on the basis of a demo that was mostly pipe-dreams. It is time that these practices are called out and those who perpetrate them held to account.
If, as you say, these fixes are minor and easy to do – then it should be easy enough for the studios to postpone the release and get it done. Instead they are happy enough to ship a game knowing it is not ready, take people’s money and promise to fix it later.
It is time to stop making excuses.
Destiny 1 and 2 had problems but they still launched with far more content than Anthem has and thanks to the nightmare of developing with Frostbite engine Anthem may never ever get there. Here’s hoping though.
Haha just saw that click-bait line. Yeah you didn’t read the article did you?
Would be interesting to see the bullet point summary – they obviously interpreted it vastly differently than the finished piece.
In any event, what an absolute dumpster fire. Toxic workplace, unrealistic timeframes, management bereft of leadership… those poor people.
Great article Jason.
apart form the management being inept issue almost everything else seemed to trace back to EA but i hate EA so i’m probably reading more into it than i should.
It seemed to put an awful lot of the blame on BioWare from what I read. EA’s insistence on the Frostbite engine caused a massive amount of grief but in the end it was caused by nobody at BioWare being able to set a direction or make decisions about what game they were actually making until far, far too late in the process.
I’ve been waiting for this article, expecting it since the moment Anthem released to such poor reviews. And unlike the game it didn’t disappoint.
This is the kind of content that is why I read Kotaku. Tons of research, facts and a breakdown of one of the bigger breakdowns in the AAA industry in the past few years.
If only EA (BioWare) had learned from the mistakes of the ME3 ending debacle, DA: Inquisition’s failings (or at least its vast shortcomings when compared to its contemporary The Witcher 3), and Andromeda, they might not have found themselves in this mess. Sadly, I think it’s more likely that BioWare will just go the way of so many other great studios that EA have consumed and dissolved over many decades.
ME3 ending was somewhat overblown, but the general malaise that permeated ME:A and DA:I have definitely hurt them. Anthem is basically another nail in the coffin.
Eh, I disagree.
The ME3 ending took what could have been *the* definitive game series of a generation and crapped on it with a frankenstein’s monster of the endings of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Battlestar Galactica. It didn’t fit with the lore, the foreshadowing, the theme, the tone… it was a crappy ending that was the brainchild of Mac Walters and Casey Hudson.
Some of the reactions were overblown, for sure, but that doesn’t solve the ending being so poorly constructed. BioWare’s response of “it’s our ending, and you’re wrong for interpreting it wrong” didn’t help. If people are interpreting it wrong, and a significant portion of the community thinks that “it was all a dream” is a better ending… it’s the writers that have seriously goofed.
I managed to avoid spoilers and all the discussion about the ending to ME3 while I played it and my first reaction when I finished was to look online to figure out how the game glitched that badly at the end I was missing entire cut scenes.
I get you.
I’d heard people were unhappy with the ending, but not why. I was confused, as (almost) everything was great… right up until Harbinger showed up while running towards the space elevator to the Crucible.
After that, the inferior rehash of Saren’s ME1 dialogue fight with the Illusive Man, followed by the disdainful mess of the final dialogue with the space kid had me left me wondering how they had written something so incongruous and derivative to conclude the series.
I had hoped that the McGuffin of the Crucible showing up at the beginning of the game, and Kai Leng’s entire existence were going to be the only blemishes to be found…
Completely unrelated to the topic. Anyone who has Amstrad as part of their name is a hero in my books. CPC FOREVER!!!
That was exactly my experience as well.
That said, point being is that the ME3 ending was the start of the downhill trend.
BioWare started to lose more of their serious talent that had been the quiet achievers within their ranks, and that was showcased in the increasingly bland activities/side quests that showed up in Inquisition and Andromeda.
reading the article with all it’s references to magic and having faith it’s like they somehow adopted a game development religion or something.
My (totally unprovable) theory is that the major problem, that no-one in BioWare’s senior management is willing to commit to design decisions, stems from the blowback to the ending of ME3.
Casey Hudson, faced with a release deadline and no definitive ending, made a captain’s call which turned out to be a colossal dud, and the entire Internet fell upon him. Now as a result, no one is willing to make the tough decisions because no one wants to be responsible for the next bad call. And no one wants the Internet to fall on them. Problem is, of course, that no call at all is worse than a bad call, logistically and creatively.
If you have teams of talented people waiting to implement your vision, YOU HAVE TO GIVE THEM A VISION TO IMPLEMENT. Ideally, you do this early enough so that you can look at it and go “Yes, that works, now on to the next bit,” or “Ah. No. That’s not going to fly–happily, we have time to fix it.” But the BioWare decision makers won’t (or are not allowed to) make the bold choices–they waffle and procrastinate and weigh option after option until they just have to go with the last idea they had and pray it works in time to make an externally imposed deadline.
Meanwhile, some of the most talented people in the industry are sitting on their hands, noodling around with the idea-du-jour and wondering if anything they do will ever see the light of day.
governing by committee always results in the project running at committee speed.
committee speed ranges from 1-10 and acts kind of like the reverse of warp speed in star trek, committee 10 is incredibly slow and has the ghastly side effect of making a project go backwards whilst time continues to march on.
Anthem seems to have spent most of its development time running at committee speed 10.
The real issue is the leadership honestly. If any Senior members read this article or these comments. Please seriously consider showing the confidence to make the big decisions and listen to the little guys who are in the the thick of development.
I work in the car industry as a salesman, and if I have a suggestion for my bosses they will tell me WHY this doesn’t work.
Bioware released a three paragraph response to this epic article… they are going to conduct staff surveys *facepalm*
A 2 paragraph response released so quickly that they didn’t have time to even read said article haha
you think the survey would be pretty straightforward, massive medical problems among staff, high turnover of staff, ended up shipping the worst game in company history…..
maybe they should just use this as a guide for DA4, just this time do the exact opposite like turn left instead of right at every decision and see where they end up =P
Excellent article, a good read while I had my morning coffee.
Fighting with the game engine, fighting for resources, upper management meddling and a lack of direction. A recipe for disaster and unfortunately a recipe we see appearing time and time again.
I picked up Anthem and Division 2 a couple weeks back and so far I’m enjoying the early-mid game of Anthem much more.
Maybe it’s because I’m late to the party, but I don’t see what all the fuss was about.
Anthem is great up until you hit cap.
Give me Anthem’s gameplay with Division 2’s everything else.
Seems that the loudest Anthem fans are the new ones who haven’t played it all that much (but will still yell that critics are just trolls who haven’t played the game).
This makes me heartsick.
BioWare used to be the best at what they did; a new BW game was a Day One purchase for me, no ifs or buts.
But the image of workers being so stressed and devoid of hope they had to go find an empty room to cry in? Great swathes of staff being made so ill by their working conditions that they had to take weeks or months off, or leave the industry altogether? My entertainment is not worth that misery. No-one should have to work in those conditions.
And look at the results; rushed, mediocre games, lackadaisical reviews and rapidly shrinking player bases. There’s really no up-side here.
BioWare urgently needs to unionise, kick their entire management up the backside, and tell EA to shove Frostbite where the sun has never shone. Unless they *want* to wither into nothing and be jettisoned, like so many before them, I suppose.
Fantastic read. More of this please, Kotaku.
This game was never really for me. Despite this, I am really friggin’ concerned that people have to take Mental health weeks and months! These poor people. I really feel for them.
Very interesting read, thank you.
Tried this mess out for myself the other day with my Premiere subscription – lasted about 30 minutes. First mission has you scanning some shit whilst shooting waves of enemies, then repeating the same thing 3 times? They had YEARS to learn from the failures of Destiny lol and didn’t even want to hear it.
Honestly, the blowback from Destiny caused a lot of gamers from being untrusting of games promising the world. On top of that, a lot of game developers/publishers seem to think that ‘games as a service’ is the future and a brilliant way of maximising their profits. The issue is, they haven’t bothered to check if that’s what gamers want. Yes, if a game truly was amazing, offered the open shared world that something like Destiny first promised, everyone would jump on it, but as I said, Destiny promised that and failed to deliver big time. Since then, games like The Division, Fallout 76, Destiny 2 and now Anthem have all carried on that hype but again, failed to deliver and consumers really are showing that with their feet.
The problem is EA is that big they think that they can just barge into a new game genre and pump out a generic game with flashy graphics and think that’s good enough. It might be enough for FIFA/Madden/COD, but it doesn’t apply to every genre (see Battlefront 2).
This generation of consoles got the hype machine going big time with what could be possible in a way that hadn’t been seen since the PS2. However very few developers and publishers have really pushed the envelope in terms of what we expect from games and have pumped out half assed games, maybe because they know that now they have the luxury of being able to reboot a game after launch ala No Man’s Sky.
yeah from the looks of it, publishers and developers are trying to make games that are MMOs that arent MMOs. Basically publishers are still trying to create the next WoW while doing everything they can to say its not WoW.
Look at destiny 2 on PC its a good game, but the social side of thing is terrible. theres no abiulity to look for groups for content in game, there no general chat that goes across the whole game, and at the start there wasnt even clan chat. in order to get a group going you have to actually add those people to your friends list, even if its only for a quick nightfall for the weekly
Take away pay to win from battlefront 2 and is it a bad game? Nothing is wrong with the overall game of bf2. Just EA hating nerds needing to cry about something.
If Battlefront 2 didn’t have the Star Wars brand on it it would be another generic online shooter, and that’s the same as a few other Star Wars games that EA currently have out there. People are only playing them because of the brand name (hell, I play galaxy of heroes only because it’s Star Wars). But yes, take away the pay to win element and people probably would’ve warmed up to it more, but it just shows that different games have different issues making them not as successful as their publishers maybe would’ve liked, and EA are being quite good recently at ticking a lot of those issues across various games
The BioWare blog response is one of the more disappointing, dismissive pieces of misdirection I’ve seen from a group I thought was better than that.
Again, after their previous responses to criticisms of ME3’s ending, Inquisition and Andromeda, did you really expect anything different?
The EA spin machine dictates “we’re right, the customer is wrong” unless the Internet blows up so much that it hurts their share price. For anything less than that, the customer is worth nothing to them.
i think it is actually worse than that, EA doesn’t see it’s customers period it just see’s gamer’s as heroin addicts in need of heroin. They strive to make something addictive with MT’s subtly incorporated to milk the addicts slowly and without them noticing.
I think EA’s feelings towards gamer’s when we hurt the share price is something much more sinister.
but then again i hate EA ferociously so my opinion is not to be trusted.
The fish rots from the head down. Similarly to CIG and Star Citizen, the problem with Bioware and Anthem is with the direction. Casey Hudson (who should forever bear the stone of shame for the ME3 ending) leaving and then never being properly replaced with someone who would make the damn decisions (until the 11th hour) was the catalyst for this disaster. Too many cooks, not enough time, in a nutshell.
I dunno, the Dylan moniker seems appropriate. Saw him at Bluesfest a few years back and he was shit. Massively over hyped.
Dylan is a great musician and songwriter but a passable singer.
Yeah totally. Not the most consistent performer.
Do an article on Blizzard now. Their failed WoW expansion, Diablo Immortal, lay-offs etc.
They’re hilariously out of touch.
Yep, after BFA release and Blizzcon I decided to steer clear of Blizzard for a while. They were once good but nothing in the news I’ve heard about them is promising that they’ll improve.
Just came on to say amazing work Jason.
Destiny at launch and Destiny 2 weren’t good, but there was fun in those games. It feels good to shoot, the game is pretty and it runs well. Anthem has none of those things and it never will.
Love ur work Jason.
I absolutely see articles like this as vital accounts that document stories of genuine historical value, and which are borne of love for the medium and respect for the developers that work within it.
Wow, that article was just too long to read. It’s the kind of report that would be submitted to a senate hearing.
Is it just me, or has the last year or so seem more massively high-profile failures in gaming than any in living memory? As well as Anthem (a shitstorm of mismanagement and incompetence) there’s been Fallout 76 (a shitstorm of blatant lies, greed and stupidity) and Artifact (Valve’s first game in years which lost LITERALLY 99.5% of its player base within 2 months). These games aren’t just “failing to meet expectations” (a meaningless phrase in an industry where a game can be a multi-million selling smash hit and STILL be considered “a disappointment”), they’re outright failing, and they’re games from some of the biggest names in the industry. We can never have another “Great Crash” like the one of ’83 (because that was predicated on a prevailing belief that the entire medium of video games as a whole was just a “passing craze” that had run its course), but the industry is clearly trembling.
Also, I’d call this yet more proof that yearly sports games are a scourge upon the industry. Bloody FIFA.
Apart from the obvious management issues my big take away from this was that Frostbite just isn’t versatile enough to do the job for the concepts that developers are dreaming up, not without significant hurdles and time anyway. Is saving $$$ on licensing fees really amounting to more $$$ in their pockets overall?
Before Andromeda and Anthem I guess you could make an argument that it was, but now it just seems like an unnecessary constriction on workflow and creativity.
Half the point of an in house built engine is you build it specifically for the kind of game you are making, compared with say Unreal that is more general purpose.
And DICE built Frostbite specifically for their FPS games.
It really should have been no surprise to anyone that it does not work well for stuff it wasn’t designed to do.
Are you sure your big take away wasn’t that Bioware’s project nomenclature is woeful? Joplin? Morrison? Dylan?
A lot of game developers are still getting their heads around sharing. A simple concept that is utterly foreign to developers that have always been veiled under secrecy and anonymity. The best practice for building skyscrapers is an open book, you can literally look up entire building schematics online, because no one benefits from buildings collapsing. They share ideas and practices. Game development constantly makes the same mistakes over and over again because of the secrecy.
Eventually they’ll learn that criticism isn’t personal too, it’s feedback that what you did didn’t work, there has to be a better way. Yes someone is the lead on that decision, and takes responsibility, but reporting on it is not a personal indictment on that person as a human being. It’s still very immature industry, I can’t wait for the teenage goth phase.
Excellent article, yet again Jason. You really set the benchmark for interesting pieces on Kotaku.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think you were too harsh on the Bioware leaders. At the end of the day, it has to be their fault. They run the direction and if the team isn’t achieving, they have the power to change the team’s processes. The lack of proper decision-making where leaders discuss plans but never set a point where they say “we need to make a decision before we leave this room” is something I have seen before and it is a killer to projects.
In this respect, I even begrudgingly understand EA somewhat. There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere, although you’d think they would set that, and watch people “crunch” to meet it, then pull an extension out at the last minute to fix those last issues. Pushing this unpolished turd out when it would clearly disappoint was as destructive as any of the Bioware f*ck ups.
A shame. I was really looking forward to Anthem. And I have lost the heart to get it now. You never know, it might come good like The Division did, but even if it does, it will always remembered for its disastrous launch.
What an incredible article!
A valiant effort, Jason.
I know the reason Anthem failed. The article has not stated it. The comments have not discussed it. One simple word made anthem fail.
Apex
Anthem was released (well the early access) during the time of the biggest game of the year so far. Apex
Bad journalism, bad comments. Shame on all of you.
… Apex was made by a completely separate studio. With a separate budget, working in a wholly separate set of conditions that had no influence on Bioware management or process.
This might actually be the worst take of the week.
i don’t know i saw some articles about BL3 suggesting it should be a battle royal shooter that is pretty bad :S
Great article.
What a wasted opportunity Anthem was. For all the comparisons that are made with other loot grinders, aside from Warframe (this being F2P makes it a bad comparison choice though) which I don’t know much about I don’t believe they launched in as bad a state as Anthem has.
I am not sure how factual this really is, given that it was not technically Bioware that made ME: A, but rather a second-team re-branded by EA to have the Bioware name… Or am I wrong on this? lol
That Bioware studio had done supporting work on previous ME titles (they were chiefly responsible for ME3’s multiplayer, from memory) and was still very much a BioWare studio. Anthem came from the main Bioware branch, but on games like this all the studios help out in some way, shape or form.
Another example: Rockstar had 10 studios on Red Dead 2, all of Ubi’s major studios worked on various parts of The Division 2, and so on.
Anthem reminds me that when ME3 multi came out, I loved it so much and frequently commented that if you made an MMO out of ME3’s combat, I’d play the hell out of it.
Anthem turned out to be that MMO. And I’ve played a lot of it, but it’s feeling a little bit like a monkey’s paw wish.
Same thing happened with ‘Steam for Movies’. I envisioned… well. Steam (2019) for movies. Not Steam (2004) for movies. But that’s what we got.
Clearly, the real story behind these failures is that I am cursed.
Good idea, rubbish execution. That’s probably the lesson here – if you don’t fully commit to the latter, the former won’t get you over the line.
Called it! Almost a carbon copy of the problems that were blatantly obvious when destiny released. Although anthem doesn’t have the interesting and re-playable end game raid content that held destiny in a reasonable position with a LOT of players.
Amazing work Jason. You are a truly brilliant investigative journalist.
Its this kind of in depth journalism that keeps me reading kotaku and suffering through boring fluff pieces or the hyping of bad games in said fluff pieces (seriously sometimes you post such useless faff)
Because when you post a story like this its all worth it and videogame journalism feels like serious business again
Seriously you have outdone yourselves on this one
though none of the facts were actually surprising, of course EA fucked another studio by making it make game types its not used to making on a engine not made for that type of game, but its still good to get the details about it
I got through this on a brief train ride this morning and fuuuuuuuuuck it is beautiful reminder just how good your team is when pieces like this surface. This is some amazing reportage.
Even if it takes people a while, or a few sittings, or they have to make a crib sheet to keep track, this is a great read. And on two levels – the text itself and the broadening response – is a great reminder that videogames are just fucked and a shareholder industry is antithetical to life not being completely shit.
Excellent article with great insights, thank you!