Comment by mandevil
6 hours ago
As always, the Onion nailed it perfectly long ago:
https://theonion.com/anthem-developers-assure-players-whiteb...
'“We know the thousands of customers who pre-ordered Anthem have some concerns, but we are confident this collection of words scrawled on a conference room board will be a revolutionary third-person shooter experience when released at the end of the week,” said director Jonathan Warner, who shared a progress update with players by sending out a screenshot of an email chain that ended with an agreement to call the game Anthem.'
https://theonion.com/people-criticizing-anthem-don-t-underst...
"Stop complaining and attacking studios just because a game isn’t everything you want. Developers put too much stock in making games enjoyable and playable as it is. Planning to make something as profitable as Anthem was supposed to be and is a huge undertaking, so at least give them credit for trying. BioWare had 18 months to build a game that would sell millions of copies based on the goodwill they built up, and they hit it out of the park. You may not understand Q4 projections, but they do. Anthem is a game that exists and is funding [EA] CEO bonuses, and by that measure, it’s been a huge success."
For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...
The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.
A long video on the subject from one of its project leads (Mark Darrah): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y65eoBVF0Y&t=10s
The frostbite engine seem to be the tip of the iceberg.
Core issue was lack of clear leadership from what I read on Wikipedia.
Iirc it was a stupid C-suite decision to use Frostbyte across EA studios. It never made much technical sense and DICE lacked the bandwidth and capital to support so many teams and usecases.
1 reply →
What’s most disappointing about Anthem was that the game had so much potential. The graphics, flying around like Ironman, sound, etc was incredible. But the world and content felt like you were playing a tech demo. It was like they finished polishing everything technical and were forced to launch before the game to rest on top of it was even started.
No other game has come close to capturing the absolute joy of flying in that game.
I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.
The Onion is funny, but not exactly kind here. I would recommend Mark Darrah's post-mortem on Anthem; he's not an unbiased source (he became an executive producer on the project part way through development, and I think he does try to let himself off easy in his retelling of events), but it's pretty clear that mismanagement--both within Bioware and especially from EA--set Anthem down a track that was hard to recover from. Development goals, gameplay design, and even architectural decisions were constantly shifting until late in development, leading devs to constantly rework the game as new requirements came and went.
https://youtu.be/CxwrCRdqZb8
The game _was_ forced to release in that financial year, but as Darrah eloquently puts it: "There was no point in delaying because that team didn't have another year in them"
Seems Anthem is gone, but not completely?
From the same post-mortem video:
former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah revealed that internally at the studio, the shooter had code for local play and private server use until a few months before launch. Presumably, it's still there to be "salvaged and recovered."
"Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months up to launch," Darrah commented. "I don't know that they still work but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered."
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/anthem-is-dead-after-t...
Mark Darrah suggested releasing a single player only version but presumably this version of EA that has entirely shutdown BioWare altogether has even less reason to release Single Player Only Anthem.
There is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.
I mean, most likely it just means they could run servers locally for development, that's pretty standard. I used to work on The Division and every dev could trivially spawn local servers for testing, I basically had it set up so every time I ran the client my own server started in the background. That was "local play" since the architecture of the game is fundamentally centered around all the gameplay systems running on the server. If(or rather - when) their public servers go down, the same statement could be made - that there is code in there for "private" or "local" play. But in reality it's just about running the servers locally, "salvaging" is just having access to the full source code, which is not something Ubisoft would ever do, just like EA wouldn't(I would love to be surprised though!).
2 replies →
Both articles GP linked were jokes pointing blame at the mismanagement