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 authorized 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.
At least your're providing an archive link now with your spam link. Much improved.
Xavier Jackson
go woke go broke
Camden Morris
what a shitshow
RIP Bioware
Andrew Cooper
>"There was no clear vision"
Isn't that every looter shooter?
Wyatt Cox
>looter shooter Fuck off
Aaron Taylor
>Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another It's just like that episode of King of the Hill.
Andrew Hill
>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 what a shitshow
Camden Wright
I read that thing just yesterday, whatever you think of that site, this is a good article regardless. Explains every fucking thing that is wrong with EA and Bioware, even shit you only had a "funny feeling" on. Fuck em. I hope they dissolve the company at this point, their shit work on shit games, with shit organization, and shit decision making is all their own fault. Neverwinter Nights 1 Bioware is dead, Knights of the Old Republic Bioware is dead,and Dragon Age 1 Bioware is dead.
Charles Cox
I wonder how much a team full of white men instead of a "diverse" team full of women and minorities would have been able to do in this time
Connor Howard
why doesn't EA just fucking axe this shitty studio? this makes it clear that they don't know what the fuck they are doing
Jacob Rodriguez
hooter tooter
Sebastian Ward
Honestly, how long until Bioware is taken behind the shed?
This has been posted like 45 times since it came out.
Dylan Johnson
EA said they won't close it so they would be going back on their word if they do, so they will just slowly fire everyone and make it a ghost studio
Oliver Rogers
Wasnt even MEANT to be that at first, a outpost based survival exploration game was the first rough idea. Then they changed it 100 times.
Thomas Campbell
sorry i meant shlooter
Evan Mitchell
>ANDROMEDA WAS C-TEAM FLUKE >ANTHEM FROM EDMONTON A-TEAM Remember this Yea Forums?
Hudson Carter
Anthem isn't even woke though, it's just bland, uninspired and poorly designed.
Mason Hill
Yeah, haha. I remember people claiming that Andromeda was B or C team. But it's come out now that all of Bioware is C team material because all the good visionary people with talent left. Ironically, Soderland actually did some good for the game when he came in and actually made Bioware commit to an actual vision of Iron Man suits and flying.
Jackson Garcia
>didn’t enter production until the final 18 months I called this shit the moment I saw the game in its entirety
People were like 'but 6 years' and I said there's no way this game was actively developed for 6 years, not only was the game lacking in content and story but the mechanics of the game made no sense. How can you have a looter shooter with gear scaling that's so fucked that level 1 gear is the strongest gear because it scales the hardest?
Imagine having diablo, borderlands, the division, destiny and god knows how many looter games to learn from and making more mistakes than all of them.
Juan Nguyen
At this point, they are all F Team. Fucking Failures Forever. Too many of the old guard are gone.
Zachary King
wtf i love kotaku now.
Henry Hill
people think anthem is woke because there's a bunch of non-white and 'white' people in the game even though the MC's VA is clearly a white male/female
Luis Thomas
All lies by (((Jason Schreier))). Doesn't mention the SJW anti-white male agenda at Bioware, which is what really wrecked all of their games since Cisquisition.
Aiden Roberts
Apparently the uttering of the name Destiny was a sin of the highest magnitude.
Matthew Thompson
never forget that they had an anti-white indian poopstain
Jackson Sanchez
As someone who actually played Anthem i must say not everyone in development team is a hack. Animation are really nicely done and so are abilities and their animations, flight is okay. Shooting is bad.Original design of 4 Javs is good. Cosmetic suck ass. They fixing stuff but it wont save that their core gear system is total failure as is lootdrop system.
Camden Green
That’s not what the article was about
The problem was the creative leads kept changing, there was seldom someone at the top to make hard decisions about what to do about the game, and Frostbite was difficult to work with
This is why “ideas guys” are actually important, people. You need a guy who actually knows what the game is supposed to be
Jayden Murphy
Bioware has too many whales... i mean hardcore followers.
Gabriel Martin
I think destiny is a shitty game but I would rather they learn from it than ignore it. EA should investigate bioware and make some head rolls or just shut them all down because they're not going to put out any good games in their current form.
Leo Morris
The lack of direction and experience in the genre is what fucked them the hardest. The game has so little content that every bad decision is magnified
Luke Price
animation isn't bad because they literally mocapped it because they didn't want a repeat of Andromeda.
Aiden Robinson
This is why I don't believe the game development takes a long time/is hard meme. So many games are mismanaged to the core and made six months before that shit comes out. They do nothing for 4 years and six months then rush to put something out at the last minute. Then everyone wonders why they worked on a game for 5 years but it has one biome and the weapon skins all look the same.
Nolan Gomez
>Bioware game >animations are nicely done Well that's a first if true.
Nicholas Roberts
>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 realize that this isn’t the right way to make games.’”
It's kinda funny how even Bioware realized that DA:I sucked. The "Bioware magic" the article mentions is actually reviewers giving inflated scores and biodrones fanatically defending their games. It's amazing that it took this long for people to figure out that Bioware is actually a mediocre developer.
Nathan Roberts
Do you ever notice that when articles like this assign blame, it's always "we were pushed too hard by my toxic bosses, now I have depression :(" I don't doubt that a complete failure in direction contributed to this flop. But the game sucks on all levels. There was clearly no vision at the individual dev level, either. The people making the game obviously had no idea what they themselves wanted. There's so much failure to go around here and it doesn't end at these faggots' bosses
Samuel Roberts
You don't know how game developement works.
Aaron Ramirez
Are you claiming you've never had a retarded boss?
Connor Bennett
What the fuck are you supposed to call these games?
Elijah Watson
Fight da powa, sista! When we finally remove all the toxic white male bosses, then we'll truly enter the golden age of non-binary progressive LGBTQIAP gayming.
Ayden Brown
>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. Confirmed, we memed Bioware to death
>panic attacks, depression, crying in corners >for being told to do a fucking job The entire gaming industry needs to be purged. These "people" need to beg for food under a bridge
>flashes that impair your vision >explosions that impair your vision >screenshake that impair your vision Cool game bro
Christian Stewart
does the game even have a single white competent white male character? all I saw was ugly strong wyman and minorities. that´s pretty woke in my eyes gaming used to be full of cool white male characters and sexy female ones.
Brayden Young
t.
Colton Long
this doesn't look good or bad. It doesn't look like anything. How could one assess whether a game is good from this?
You could, however, assess the game by actually playing it, and seeing that it is a hollow shell with garbage gameplay, copious bugs, a rickety structure, and nothing interesting to do.
Isaac Lewis
Based.
Liam Butler
digital trash
Luis Howard
I love how all of this is literally nothing new anyone with a brain couln't have figured out. You kinda have to wonder how isolated and up their own asses the leadership has to be not figure it out.
>your employees are bringing it up >nothing gets decided at meetings >games are steadily dropping in quality >THIS IS FINE.webp
Wyatt Rivera
There's clearly something with game development if teams of 100+ people need to do crunch hours.
Wyatt James
I think their brand is still strong enough to go on name power alone. Whatever DA4 was planned as has probably been changed because of Anthem, though.
Nolan Foster
>Bioware is actually a mediocre developer. *blocks your path*
Blame the masses for constantly demanding better graphics instead of being happy with 360 levels.
Isaac Morales
How much do you work? Do you work weekends? Do you work night shifts? Do you ever work without pay?
Cooper Morgan
>why create the same thing once again?
say devs who have been effectively creating the same game since kotor, nwn1 being the only exception.
Josiah Ramirez
Based.
Andrew Morris
That's when they were actually good
Cameron Torres
Might as well be a different developer. Probably not a single person still there from the BG days. Plus that was all Black Isle.
Jacob Long
It's fucking mindblowing to me a studio can spend six years and basically accomplish nothing until the last year and a half. Then you look at Witcher 3 and it looks like that game from a different reality even with its problems.
why does that matter so much to you? you're more annoying than SJWs and futa/trapfags the game failed because of garbage development not because your feelings were hurt that only a few characters look like you
Luke Myers
Found the ResetEra refugee.
Aiden Phillips
Everyone who had a hand in everything good bioware did is either dead or quit.
Although Anthem does still have potential to be a good game someday, I played it for a month and mostly enjoyed it. Shit just isn't finished, we basically got an alpha because EA refused to let them delay it. I mean they didnt deserve a delay, the entire dev cycle was mismanaged and the game probably shouldve just been cancelled, but it's here and there are elements of fun in it. In a year or two it might actually be worth playing.
Carson Parker
Jade Empire didn't have a single white person in it you dumb fuck.
Brandon Ward
nice flashy weightless combat
Ayden Wright
>the masses It was literally the ceo of EA that basically demanded the game have better grafix than the demo they initially showed him. Did you read the article?
Julian Green
Black Isle/Interplay published it, but the game itself was developed by BioWare.
Brody Ramirez
Not at all, the problem was mismanagement and lack of direction. Nothing to do with tour impotent yokel power fantasies, really.
Jaxon Torres
NEET corporate bootlicker detected
Cooper Lopez
I complete forgot about Jade Empire. Sequel when?
Julian Perry
And it shows just like it shows that EA publishes modern Bioware.
Asher Howard
The executive demanded it because better graphics are what people buy. Why do you think the entire fucking AAA industry is taking 5 years a game now.
Joseph Perez
but it did have sexy girls in skimpy outfits
Matthew Rivera
EA isn't to blame for Anthem being a pile of trash. They gave BioWare full autonomy during development.
Landon Wilson
It's not a matter of belief, cockbreath, big budget games reqire thousands of man hours to be put together. Your beliefs and lack of frontal lobe are of no relevance or consequence
Ryder Richardson
>why does that matter so much to you? because that is the main reason why I didn´t buy the game. just pointing out that sjws games almost never sell well
Logan Bell
And it turned out even shittier than Andromeda and has 55 on metacritic. Turns out that making your game less fun/ny is not a way to get people to like it. I bet quite a few dudes bought Andromeda hoping to laugh at it while drinking with their buddies.
Brandon Murphy
Can you imagine being EA, though?
>give Bioware years to develop Andromeda >they do fuck all with it and has to be crunched out in two years >poorly received
>same fucking shit happens with Anthem immediately afterwards
Connor Hughes
Code monkeys are like computer processors. If you feed them shit, they're going to output shit.
Sebastian Reyes
It has no competent characters at all, so no
Zachary Howard
And the guys that made BG2 are either no longer in vidya or not with the company anymore.
Ethan Cook
>because that is the main reason why I didn´t buy the game. How petty
John Mitchell
Schrier is a weiner, but he can do some pretty solid reporting at times.
Charles Hill
based 8gagger retard trying to force his victim complex into the conversation.
Jaxson Hernandez
Pooter scooter
Nathaniel Gonzalez
Holy shit. This is sad..
Jeremiah Taylor
If I was in charge of EA right now I'd seriously be trying to think about what I'd do with Bioware. Cause it's clearly not in good condition right now.
Aaron Morris
How much longer until EA cull BioWare entirely?
Ayden Ross
Why don't we make a game... where the enemies do not move?
