BioWare’s looter shooter Anthem has been out for about a month and a half. The gaming community and press have been pouring negativity on top of the game like mad since long before the release date. Why? Because Anthem is unfinished and empty in a lot of areas, where a complete and polished AAA title shouldn’t be. This article goes over the reasons why Anthem is not what it should have been and what it actually should have been.
To the new reader, who has not previously followed my Anthem coverage and is not familiar with how much of a BioWare fan I am, let me tell you that this is not a EA-hate article. I am not a professional journalist like Jason Schreier and I have no sources like he does. Most of the content below is based on my own opinion from researching the game for years and now playing it for hundreds of hours before and after its official launch.
I still enjoy and play Anthem two to four hours on daily basis on average. I am not blind to the many issues, but if you want to learn why and how I stick with the game and still enjoy it despite the many flaws and issues it has, check out the last segment of the article.
Which BioWare actually made Anthem
Yesterday a massive article was published on Kotaku.com by one of the site’s most respected journalists Jason Schreier. It was entitled “How BioWare’s Anthem went wrong”. It tries to follow the production of the game from its earliest stages back in 2012 all the way to release in February of 2019. Jason claims he has 19 BioWare employees (most if not all no longer working for BioWare), who contributed with facts and insider information from the kitchen of the two studios, who mostly worked on Anthem.
The original BioWare Edmonton, responsible for the Dragon Age and Mass Effect Franchises had the idea of Anthem way back in 2012, when first glimpses started floating around and rumors began. Later in 2014 we saw a tech preview with a few short commentaries from the devs. The Austin Studio, created and responsible primarily for Star Wars: The Old Republic, was brought in later in the project to help with development. Now after the launch it took over to keep delivering the live service. The third studio in Montreal was pretty much solo focusing on Mass effect: Andromeda and slowly diminished after the game failed to meet expectations.
Anthem wanted to be a new and different game. In fact, we learned from that article that most of the developers, working on the title, were not even certain what the game would or should be. All of this was happening until very recently – the beginning of 2017.
Jason writes in his article long and detailed paragraphs over some of the major issues Anthem faced in pre-production and during actual development. BioWare’s indecisiveness and lack of proper leadership capable of making the hard decisions, EA’s persistence the Frostbite engine to be used and the fixed release date, when clearly the game is not ready yet. These are the three major points I will be discussing more in-depth below.
The Indecisiveness of the Anthem leadership
I in no way approve or accept the way BioWare developers have been treated during the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda and now Anthem, reported in the Kotaku article. This kind of work environment can make you hate your profession and needs to change immediately. This cannot be the BioWare studio that created several timeless classics in the video games industry. However, this is just one of the many issues, not the biggest, not the one that allowed (yes, that word) Anthem to ship unfinished and in a bad shape. Bad management and indecisiveness are ruining BioWare as a studio, not Anthem.
BioWare is known for creative story-telling. They are one of the best role-playing games makers ever. With the release of SWTOR, Andromeda and Anthem their reputation is now far from what it once was. While SWTOR had amazing stories, it struggles in many other areas. The game is far better than what it was in December of 2011, when it launched, but still not what fans expected. Anthem was an average game, but a total failure compared to the rest of the Mass Effect series.
Jason reports in his article that it was mostly indecisiveness that ruined Anthem’s development. Many of the leaders at different stages of production (because there have been quite a few!) were not capable of making the hard decisions and setting in stone the future of various parts of Anthem.
That is, of course, strictly issue from inside the studios. If BioWare is to regain its glory, they need to act fast and not allow the Andromeda and Anthem development cycles to happen to yet another game.
Not being able to tell your colleagues what they should be striving towards, is a huge issue in every type of work, not just game development. The fact that several lead producers have been changed for different reasons, surely didn’t help the game.
Anthem has been in the works since around 2012. In my overview of The Art of Anthem you have most likely read how the course of the game changed in pre-production. At first there was an idea that the planet would be located in some kind of a space-bermuda-triangle, where spaceship get caught and then crash on the surface. Lancers were not supposed to fly in early stages of development. This, according to Jason, has been changed back and forth several times over the years until it was set in stone in middle of 2017.
Why wasn’t the indecisiveness the main reason why Anthem was released unfinished?
Do you know CD Projekt Red? They are the polish studio, responsible for the huge fame the Witched franchise has today. They are now working on a brand new game – Cyberpunk 2077. Do you knwo how long it’s been since they announced they are working on it? About seven years! Who knows how long they have been “playing with ideas” before the official announcement. Nobody is demanding a release date from them. And Cyberpunk 2077 is not a brand new IP, created from the ground up. it’s based on a tabletop game. EA pushed BioWare for a release date. The reason Anthem released unfinished is because EA refused to delay the release date past the fiscal year ending, which was in March.
I still cannot believe who thought that pinning a classical RPG studio to work on a looter shooter game, with which they have zero experience, is a good idea. They should have been allowed high levels of uncertainty. They were working on a brand new game, set in a completely new world and this game would be in a brand new genre, unknown and unfamiliar to most if not all of the developers involved.
Frostbite was not created for RPGs and third-person shooters
The famous now Frostbite game engine (a collection of tools and systems used to create a video game) has been in use for all of EA’s games for several years now. DICE created it originally for their own purposes – the Battlefield games and later the Battlefront ones too. It was an engine designed for something quite specific – first-person shooter games. It was not a tool that fits BioWare’s needs.
The issue started with Dragon Age: Inquisitions. Jason points several times how the game was developed in the last minute and this created a lot of frustration in the people, who worked on it endlessly to meed the deadline “end of 2014”. He also quotes developers complaining from the Frostbite engine. The team was forced to create whole new modules and systems and then add to the existing engine, to make it serve the purposes of a third-person camera, angles, behavior.
The same issues repeated with Andromeda a few years later. While it was also littered with restarts, redesigns and drastic changes of its core, the engine was once again getting a huge portion of the blame.
Not surprisingly, the story repeated for Anthem. Once again most of the ideas and concepts proved impossible or extremely hard to adapt using DICE’s engine. Many of the people, working on Anthem were openly complaining and asking for a third-party tool, such as the Unreal engine to be used.
If the engine is such a drag for several titles in a row, why the hell did EA demand it to be used for all of them? Did they learn nothing from their own previous experience?
The truth is that EA is a company that is only led by the noise of the money. Having their own “in-house” engine for all of their titles, was important and a huge financial benefit.
It makes sense, of course. The issues continued stacking, though. The internal Frostbite engine, as Jason reports, has its own support crew within EA. This team is there to help the various studios under the hood of EA, while they work on their games. Problem? Yes. The time these guys were allowed to devote to each dev team and their own title to help them fix issues and understand why the tools work the way they do, was based on the scope of the sales the game is expected to make. When FIFA switched to Frostbite, this took a considerable working force away from Anthem in order to make the transition for EA’s biggest and most successful financially franchise.
The Fixed Release Date Issue
When I mentioned CD Projekt Red earlier, it wasn’t just because I like them and want to give their work as an example. No, they have their own issues, of course. I wont go into detail over them, of course.
CD Projekt Red is a company that has no hood, or a mothership to control and manipulate their decisions. They are not responsible before anybody, except the gamers who buy their titles. That is what allows them to drag the production of Cyberpunk 2077 for so many years. But they proved with The Witcher 3 and later with Gwent that they care for the gamer and customer satisfaction is a big thing in their books!
Have you wondered why this is so? It can’t be just because they are creating an enormous game with tons of content. No. Surely they too are facing similar issues with hard decisions being made. Most likely not in the same scope as BioWare with Anthem as Cyberpunk is an already established universe with all of its lore in place.
EA originally wanted Anthem to be out before the end of 2018. The Christmas Holidays are the biggest market for video games in the whole year. The release date was pushed as further back then as EA was willing to allow for it – February 2019 – just before the company’s end of fiscal year.
There is no denying of BioWare’s own fault for dragging the pre-production of Anthem. This is entirely their own responsibility. But it’s a brand new universe, created from absolutely nothing and striving to distance itself from the already established legacies of Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Still, over four years of pre-production is a lot more than what should be for a game of this scale and type.
EA’s greediness is understandable to some extend. They are a public company and the investors care more for their own wealth and bank accounts than the entertainment of the random gamer, who thinks they have the right to demand a AAA title for $60 that will offer them 250 hours of pure fun and joy without repetitiveness. CD Projekt Red did it with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but that’s more like an exclusion.
Had EA not forced Anthem’s release, I might have struggled with what game to play seeing how SWTOR isn’t getting enough attention and funding for fresh new content. If I am given a choice to play Anthem now in its current state or wait another year to play it finished, I vote for NOW. Why? Because for $60 purchase ($80 in my case) I got the value I paid for. Yes, I endured the worst state of the game as it was during early launch, but I don’t want to wait another year. If BioWare keep their promise and stick to the game, I wouldn’t mind watching it being developed live infront of my eyes and seeing all of the missing content and hot spots being filled up month after month.
Conclusions and a few more personal thoughts
The Kotaku article is truly one of the longest I have read about Anthem. Jason Schreier has made a great attempt to discover as many secrets from several developers, who worked on the game, and other sources.
While reading it myself, I felt like it was constantly swaying me towards the belief that it was not EA to blame, but the BioWare leadership alone. This is only partly true in my opinion. I do not doubt Jason’s honesty and honor in presenting the story as best he could, but I cannot accept his statement. EA is just as guilty as “BioWare’s top floors”.
Remember how EA was “crowned” worse company two years in a row? This was for a reason! If it wasn’t for the Star Wars community’s reaction to the insane Battlefront 2 controversy, I think we would have seen microtransactions implemented deeply into Anthem’s progression and loot as well.
Today I saw that some people are beginning to advocate for EA. What? Really? I cannot truly blame EA for their actions. A company of such scale and with the way it is built, they must care for earnings most of all. Something inside me burns quickly each time I hear or read EA representatives talking how they care for the gamers and want to improve for them. The only thing EA cares are money and benefits. Again – I can’t really blame them. I hate the fact that I don’t blame them. I hate to see what BioWare has become under EA’s leadership. However, as it was revealed years ago, if it wasn’t for EA, this studio might not have been alive today.
Yesterday I saw BioWare’s blog post first. That is how I learned there is “an article ” that apparently this was a response to. The text did not match what was in the article at all. I too think that this was not the right way and moment for such a response. Kotaku is one of the biggest gaming outlets today and going against them instead of working together to clear the confusions and misinformation (if any), would have been a far better approach than going all out defense.
After all this, I would like to end in a positive. Like some of the developers, who complained to Kotaku about many issues while working on the game, I too see bright future. Will BioWare be able to turn things around and deliver what was promised? I 100% believe so. They just don’t have any other options, just like they didn’t have when they had to pick the Frostbite engine for Anthem.
I am not blind to the game’s current state. I don’t like to have crashes and disconnects pretty much on daily basis. I dislike the loot system in its current format. I cannot believe that crafting is so useless. I am amazed in the most negative way that such a multiplayer-focused game has no text chat option at launch.
It’s been a month and a half since I started playing the game on daily basis. As I said in the beginning, I still enjoy it and have no plans to stop. I spend on average two to four hours farming for my Legendary Javelin Builds and I do it with friends, which makes the grind experience far less annoying and a lot of fun, actually!
I to urge both BioWare and EA to step up on the quality of their games. It’s not just Anthem that has failed in the past few years. Star Wars: Battlefront 1 and 2 also launched half-empty and riddled with many issues. Specifically the second Battlefront was developed by three studios. How could they fail? Pressure! Pressure not from inside their own studios, but from EA’s demands to meet deadlines and ship an unfinished product, which can be labeled as “live service” and fixed over the course of an year or so, before it begins seeing true additional content being added to it.
One of the main reasons I was not totally disappointed with Anthem, like probably many of you, was because I know already what to expect from a “game as a live service” under EA’s umbrella.
So what if Anthem has been in development for over 6 years? If the game is not finished EA should have delayed it, not rush an unfinished product and further damage BioWare’s already badly shaken reputation.
Now, here somewhere is where I put the digital pencil away and stop rambling. In conclusion Jason Schreier wrote a very extensive and interesting retrospect of Anthem’s unstable development cycle. However, little was new to those of us, who have been close to the project and have been following it in the past few years. I have been paying attention since I saw the tech demo in 2014. In the beginning of 2018 I even wrote a report of how bad Anthem’s development is going. In my other game that I play actively – SWTOR, it was painfully clear when and how resources from the BioWare Austin studio were pulled off and placed to support Anthem in a desperate attempt to meet EA’s deadline.
What would you say? Did you read the Kotaku article, what do you think about Anthem? Are you enjoying it and why so?
