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The ANTHEM Thread Of Sadness


J.T.

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10 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Companion piece:

Dragon Age 4 has already been a disaster thanks to Anthem

https://kotaku.com/the-past-and-present-of-dragon-age-4-1833913351

Avert your eyes @JLSigman

My main takeaway from that article was bemusement at their project naming scheme. First one gets named Joplin and gets cancelled.  Second version gets named Morrison.  Nice job tempting fate, folks.

 

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16 hours ago, Robert C said:

My main takeaway from that article was bemusement at their project naming scheme. First one gets named Joplin and gets cancelled.  Second version gets named Morrison.  Nice job tempting fate, folks.

 

Wait until Hendrix.

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18 hours ago, Robert C said:

My main takeaway from that article was bemusement at their project naming scheme. First one gets named Joplin and gets cancelled.  Second version gets named Morrison.  Nice job tempting fate, folks.

 

"Yeah, we're really excited for Project Belushi."

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  • 2 weeks later...

If it wasn't for bad news this game would have no news at all

Quote

In an Anthem update released today, BioWare lead producer Ben Irving and head of live services Chad Robertson announced that a number of updates planned for the game, including its limited-time Cataclysm event, have been delayed.

“While we have delivered many of the Act 1 features on time, we are not going to hit all the goals on our Act 1 Calendar,” the two wrote. “We set aside time for this work, but the reality is there are more things to fix and improve than we planned for. While this is the best thing to do for the game, it means some items from the calendar will be delayed.”

The list of delayed features includes:

  • Mastery system
  • Guilds
  • Legendary Missions – Phase II
  • Weekly stronghold challenge
  • Leaderboards
  • Some freeplay events
  • Cataclysm

The leaderboards, guilds, and weekly stronghold challenges were some of the bigger updates planned for April intended to help build out the end-game. BioWare has been light on details about some of the other delayed content, like the Mastery system. Cataclysms have been described as limited-time events that will bring new enemies and dramatic changes to the world’s terrain and climate. They were promoted in a video prior to the game’s release as Anthem’s “most challenging and ambitious content.”

https://kotaku.com/bioware-delays-anthem-s-big-cataclysm-event-1834253069

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  • 3 weeks later...

This game is an embarrassment and should be cancelled. BioWare itself should be shut down if this is the tripe they are going to put out. Just a few months ago all the apologists were coming out defending BioWare saying how any failure would be the fault of EA and we should support the game so BioWare doesn't get shut down. BioWare is a joke now and a shell of its former self. 

The fact that they had an edict to make this game "un-meme-able" is hilarious. The whole game is a meme. Everything BioWare has done in response to the game's failure is a meme, especially "This is the cost of transparency."

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At this point, BioWare is a meme, and it makes me sad to say that, given how much I've enjoyed a lot of their games.

Kind of sounds like Dragon Age 4 is heading down the same path.

"Dragon Age 4 won't be Anthem with dragons."

Which, at this point, I can only take to mean that Dragon Age 4 is totally going to be Anthem with dragons.

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The thing is I'm playing DA:I some right now, and my god... with what I know about Biowares direction at the time, this is a miracle game. It's not even THAT good. It has a lot of flaws. But it's still a really damn fun game with super fun characters.

 

While Andromeda wasn't THAT bad, this might be the game viewed as their last hurrah.

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A few weeks back John Elper sent out a tweet saying Dark Souls 2 was his favourite in the series which he ended with literally *mic drop* and I can't think of a better way to sum up my feelings on where Bioware has somehow found itself than simply quoting that example. Explains a lot about why they have so many awful game design ideas, though.

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Dragon Age Inquisition won Game of the Year when it came out. Which apparently lead some top people at the studio to think they had magical powers and could do no wrong creatively.

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I love DAI even with its flaws. Still its sad how that article from Kotaku before mentioned the teams needing/wanting it to fail so the idiots up top would realize changes were needed.

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On 5/10/2019 at 6:38 PM, TheVileOne said:

This game is an embarrassment and should be cancelled. BioWare itself should be shut down if this is the tripe they are going to put out. Just a few months ago all the apologists were coming out defending BioWare saying how any failure would be the fault of EA and we should support the game so BioWare doesn't get shut down. BioWare is a joke now and a shell of its former self. 

The fact that they had an edict to make this game "un-meme-able" is hilarious. The whole game is a meme. Everything BioWare has done in response to the game's failure is a meme, especially "This is the cost of transparency."

Woah, woah, woah. Hold up. Just because Anthem wasn't all that you wanted it to be doesn't give you or anyone else the right to call for the whole fucking studio to be shut down.

Just a reminder, but those people that work in that studio rely on that work and that job to pay bills, to put food on the table, etc. If the studio shutters, that's a whole lot of people out of work, with no money, all because you're dissatisfied with a game they put out.

Get a fucking grip.

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Based on Kotaku's article, those workers are routinely abused at BioWare and probably shouldn't be working there anyway.

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

Here is BioWare's initial response:

 

Quote

We’d like to take a moment to address an article published this morning about BioWare, and Anthem’s development. First and foremost, we wholeheartedly stand behind every current and former member of our team that worked on the game, including leadership. It takes a massive amount of effort, energy and dedication to make any game, and making Anthem would not have been possible without every single one of their efforts. 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. We respect them all, and we built this game as a team.

We put a great emphasis on our workplace culture in our studios. The health and well-being of our team members is something we take very seriously. We have built a new leadership team over the last couple of years, starting with Casey Hudson as our GM in 2017, which has helped us make big steps to improve studio culture and our creative focus. We hear the criticisms that were raised by the people in the piece today, and we’re looking at that alongside feedback that we receive in our internal team surveys. We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid “crunch time,” and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems. Making games, especially new IP, will always be one of the hardest entertainment challenges. We do everything we can to try and make it healthy and stress-free, but we also know there is always room to improve.

As a studio and a team, we accept all criticisms that will come our way for the games we make, especially from our players. The creative process is often difficult. The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real. 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.

Our full focus is on our players and continuing to make Anthem everything it can be for our community. Thank you to our fans for your support – we do what we do for you.

 

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Still doesn't change what you said or what you want. Again, these employees depend on their job for numerous, obvious reasons.

I'm not at all surprised by your response.

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2 hours ago, Craig H said:

Still doesn't change what you said or what you want. Again, these employees depend on their job for numerous, obvious reasons.

I'm not at all surprised by your response.

Its sadly the typical response many fans have when a studio is annoying them with disappointing or bad releases. People rarely think about the devs needing the jobs to support themselves and their families. 

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3 hours ago, Eivion said:

Its sadly the typical response many people on the internet have when literally anyone is annoying them with literally anything. People rarely think about people they dislike needing the jobs to support themselves and their families. 

FTFY.

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I agree that Anthem is a total embarrassment, but I'm not really sure what needs to happen.

Ideally, I'd like to see Bioware cast off the shackles of its oppressor, EA, because it seems that EA's high pressure release schedule is not beneficial to Bioware's meticulous development process.

OTOH, it took a really long time for Activision and Blizzard to overcome their initially intra-adversarial relationship and get in synch before they started pumping out excellent product so maybe Anthem is the ugly baby that will cause EA to take a hard look at its business practices as they pertain to Bioware.  

The best thing that EA could do would be to just leave Bioware alone and let them develop at their own pace.

It is far easier to pump out a Madden game every year than it is to put out something like Mass Effect.  The fact that EA continues to force totally impractical development schedules on Bioware just tells me that the EA brass really doesn't understand how Bioware works or what made Bioware a successful game developer.

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13 minutes ago, J.T. said:

I agree that Anthem is a total embarrassment, but I'm not really sure what needs to happen.

Ideally, I'd like to see Bioware cast off the shackles of its oppressor, EA, because it seems that EA's high pressure release schedule is not beneficial to Bioware's meticulous development process.

OTOH, it took a really long time for Activision and Blizzard to overcome their initially intra-adversarial relationship and get in synch before they started pumping out excellent product so maybe Anthem is the ugly baby that will cause EA to take a hard look at its business practices as they pertain to Bioware.  

The best thing that EA could do would be to just leave Bioware alone and let them develop at their own pace.

It is far easier to pump out a Madden game every year than it is to put out something like Mass Effect.  The fact that EA continues to force totally impractical development schedules on Bioware just tells me that the EA brass really doesn't understand how Bioware works or what made Bioware a successful game developer.

That's what they did with Anthem. They let Bioware have over half a decade to plan both Andromeda and Anthem and they just debated on the cool whit they should do instead of making any of it work.

 

As much as it pains me to say this, this seems like a Bioware problem, not an EA problem.

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Then it's the leadership and project managers that need to change, not shitcanning all of the employees and closing the studio. They need someone to give them better direction, someone who can come close to filling the shoes of the doctors.

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39 minutes ago, El Dragon said:

That's what they did with Anthem. They let Bioware have over half a decade to plan both Andromeda and Anthem and they just debated on the cool whit they should do instead of making any of it work.

As much as it pains me to say this, this seems like a Bioware problem, not an EA problem.

Why shouldn't they debate the cool since it is the cool that players demand to see with every title?  You should always put your best concepts out there on paper and then see whether or not they are feasible within the framework of the technology you are building around.

To your point, I 100% agree that a plan is not a plan until it is executed and that it is the job of the publisher to reel in pie in the sky developers and drag a finished product out of their collective navel gazing. 

However, most case studies of Activision and EA in relation to their subordinate companies that produce(d) RPGs (Bioware, Blizzard, Troika, etc) seem to indicate that for the most part, these two publishers in particular don't have a shadow of a clue how to manage RPG games in development.

It has literally taken Activision the better part of a decade before they've found something resembling a sweet spot between release schedule and dev time when it comes to RPG projects development and I fear that Andromeda / Anthem are just the pains of ugly child birth in this situation.

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1 hour ago, J.T. said:

Why shouldn't they debate the cool since it is the cool that players demand to see with every title?  You should always put your best concepts out there on paper and then see whether or not they are feasible within the framework of the technology you are building around.

To your point, I 100% agree that a plan is not a plan until it is executed and that it is the job of the publisher to reel in pie in the sky developers and drag a finished product out of their collective navel gazing. 

However, most case studies of Activision and EA in relation to their subordinate companies that produce(d) RPGs (Bioware, Blizzard, Troika, etc) seem to indicate that for the most part, these two publishers in particular don't have a shadow of a clue how to manage RPG games in development.

It has literally taken Activision the better part of a decade before they've found something resembling a sweet spot between release schedule and dev time when it comes to RPG projects development and I fear that Andromeda / Anthem are just the pains of ugly child birth in this situation.

I think both you and El Dragon have a point here, honestly.

I think we've all played Andromeda to completion, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything here, but from the way the game ended it's clear that the intention was to do more, whether it was in the form of DLC or a sequel. It was a game from a franchise that was pretty universally loved and had/has an incredibly passionate fan base.

And within three months of release you throw your hands up and say, "Nah, fuck it, we're done here?" And the reason you stopped supporting ME:A was, allegedly, so that you could concentrate on Anthem. . .which sucks.

I mean, on the one hand, EA ruins a lot of what it touches. That's pretty tough to argue against. On the other hand, as El Dragon said, Bioware had years to produce Anthem and came up with what they came up with. From the Kotaku story a while back, it doesn't sound like anyone knew what they wanted Anthem to actually be for most of its development process. ("We're gonna have flying!" "Wait, no, we're not going to have flying." "Dude, put the flying back in!")

So yes, EA needs to let Bioware go through the development process,  but Bioware also has to have their shit together enough to concentrate on what they want their games to be and stop changing their "vison" in mid-stream. Relying on the "Bioware magic" and the assumption that it's going to make things not suck isn't an acceptable way to do things anymore, it doesn't appear.

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11 minutes ago, Gonzo said:

I think both you and El Dragon have a point here, honestly.

I totally agree with his El Dragon's of logic.  I just find it easier to blame the producers in this sort of situation.  

Activision had a long history of screwing the pooch when it came to RPG development and I see EA perpetuating a lot of those sins.

These sorts of problems still crop up even with developers who pride themselves on quality RPGs (I'm looking at your last two MMORPG debacles, Squeenix), but those incidents are few and far between.

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