Since returning to BioWare about two years ago to stabilize the development of Anthem and bring the studio back in line, Casey Hudson has not been very vocal or active publicly as the General Manager of the company. Recently he published an open letter to the Star Wars: The Old Republic and Anthem fans, addressing some of the major concerns and putting any doubts of BioWare’s future as a company to rest!
BioWare’s Casey Hudson, who left the company in 2014 after having served many years as part of the core team there, only to return in 2017 as a General Manager, published a rather short blog on the company’s own blog page. It discusses the future of Anthem and Star Wars: The Old Republic.The blog post is literally split into three segments – Anthem, SWTOR and “something new and exciting, but a well-kept secret for now. Or is it?
WHAT IS ANTHEM’S FUTURE
Anthem’s launch was more than bad and scandalous. The game did not ship in a status players deserved and expected. However, with the newest Cataclysm update, things are starting to look very promising and positive.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been ramping up our Cataclysm events in Anthem – a season-long event with new arenas, enemies, challenges, and rewards. We have a big team working on Anthem in both Austin and Edmonton, and while it’s been great to see the community response to Cataclysm, I know there’s a lot more work to do to bring out the full potential of the game. We have plans for those more fundamental improvements, but they’ll take time. While the team works towards the longer-term vision of the game, they will also continue to deliver updates to features and content. I believe in Anthem and would love to see its world grow, evolve, and thrive for years to come. Thanks for your patience and support as we do the work of constantly improving and expanding the experience. – Casey Hudson, general manager at BioWare
The previous blog post from Casey about Anthem was in the beginning of April and the previous one before that was in middle of March. That’s it. He has not been very vocal on forums or other social media either.
Anthem’s rocky start made many of us remember the disaster that Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s post-launch development was. The game promised a ton of DLC’s and patches to fix the issues and reveal stories left untold or only hinted at during the game’s narrative.
In his few public appearances, however, Casey has always been saying the same thing – Anthem is here to stay. The game is currently being supported by both the Austin studio and the Edmonton team.
At some point we thought only the Austin studio will be responsible for the future of the game after its launch. Now Casey confirmed it finally that it’s not a small team working on the game’s future, but rather two teams consisting of a lot of people.
The most recent patch 1.4.0 was a very unfortunate one. It brought a great and very often requested feature – the Vault Space has been expanded to 350 items limit up from 200. Unfortunately the rest of the patch was more or less a disappointment.
As many of you have discovered and communicated to us, we have a few issues the team is addressing ASAP (listed below). The good news is, we did not intentionally “stealth nerf” anything. The less good news is, fixing these bugs will require a patch, which the team is feverishly working on now. We’ll have full details in our Patch notes, but here are some of the bigger ones…
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- Some damage formulas from Gear & Weapons are not functioning as intended.
- Some Support items are not functioning as intended.
- Jarra’s Wrath is, well… “kinda” OP (yeah, we know)
We all knew that Jarra’s Wrath weapon is insanely overpowered and completely broken in regards to its balance and functionality. That doesn’t stop any of us from using it, of course, heh.
Some formulas got broken that affected many of the javelin’s builds performance in combat. The Combo builds seems to suffer the most.
Casey and the community managers for Anthem assured us that these things will get fixed soon. Because of that screw-up, we are getting an additional week with the current Cataclysm features. This means that Week 5 will be extended to two weeks duration before Week 6 begins.
Remember, the Cataclysm is a six week seasonal event. BioWare already teased what might be happening after the event is over with a short cinematic revealing a constant change in one of Bastion’s regions – the Emerald Abyss has been turned to ash and dust for the most part thanks to a giant Shaper construct appearing out of nowhere and destroying almost everything that was left from the Sanctuary Ruins.The latest patch was over 9 GB for PC and nearly double that amount for PlayStation 4. The game did not get any meaningful new content, only the bug fixes, some quality of life improvements and the above-embedded cinematic with the new Shaper construct in Freeplay.
It is more than clear, though, that these tons of GBs worth of game files add future content to the game. When and how will it be released, we can’t tell yet.
Many speculate that the Cataclysm map will be added to the Freeplay open world and become a freely explore-able area with no storm and no timers like in the actual event.
Because I decided to put the Scar image as featured on this post, let’s not forget to mention that although the game’s roadmap has been completely scrambled and ignored, there are still two more acts promised for 2019. The second one does indeed feature Scar on the cover. In the first Act we are primarily dealing with the Dominion’s crazy ambitions to rule the world. If second Act is about the Scar, maybe in the third we will get Outlaws. But what about the Urgoth, BioWare? When will we learn more about them and their imminent return?
How do you feel about Anthem? Does the game have a bright future in your opinion and why do you think so?
SWTOR IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE
SWTOR’s been around for almost eight years now and it’s still going strong with regular updates. Although fewer and more stretched in time, the new content patches continue to fuel the game. Right now we are about to get a new digital expansion – Onslaught, which will bring the Republic vs Empire conflict back in the main storyline.
I was in our Austin studio recently, where I was able to check out the update our SWTOR team is working on. Star Wars: The Old Republic Onslaught is coming this fall, and delivers an adventure spanning several new areas including two new planets, a return to Corellia, plus a new and updated itemization system. I love seeing the team’s enthusiasm and passion for SWTOR, where nearly 8 years after the initial launch, they are demonstrating their long-term commitment to the game with an ambitious update. – Casey Hudson, general manager at BioWare
Onslaught was first set to release in September. The official release date was recently announced and the expansion was pushed to October 22 – a month later.
BioWare needs more time to properly test and adapt the brand new gearing system they are introducing with game update 6.0 – the Spoils of War.
I, for one, am very very scared of what this system might do to the game. In several private conversations and in my Patreon Discord I shared some of my thoughts, but I have tried my best to keep them as such – private – for now.
There is so much that we have not yet seen implemented on the Public Test Server. There’s also a ton of tweaks that are being made on weekly or even daily basis, based on feedback.
There is no doubt in my mind that BioWare is listening to player feedback: “Although the underlying system of Spoils of War is there, it is clear that there needs to be a mechanism to work towards getting the exact item(s) you want. Our intention is that this type of system would need to be supplementary, but the current solutions we have in place are not enough.”
The problem is they are listening on our feedback after they ignored us (well, me, I can’t really speak for everyone) when we warned them this kind of a huge overhaul of the most important system in the game in such a short time will likely result in a giant disaster.
Do you remember the initial implementation of Galactic Command in 5.0? It’s been a few years now, I’ll understand if you don’t. Let me remind (or tell) you of what Keith Kanneg – SWTOR’s Producer – called the Galactic Command in its original form “kinda crap”. I quoted him by memory, but if you dig well enough you will likely find my coverage of that live stream where he said it. I don’t want to go so far back now.
The Spoils of War system introduces nearly 20 (that’s not a typo!) new tiers of gear sets. Community manager Eric Musco attempted to calm the masses down bu stating that the new system will attempt to allow us to gear up to the highest tier faster than the previous systems, but even if that is true, Spoils of War and its insane RNG will drag us through the tweaking stages for ages.
The latest patch to the PTS (we are in the middle of Phase 2 right now, by the way) introduces a few new interesting changes, which I will not state in full here. Let me just highlight some lines from Musco’s recent forum post:
- You are now more likely to receive a side-grade or upgrade from Renown Crates and the Tech Fragment vendor.
- Increase the number of loot drops received.
- Players should see an increase in Tech Fragments earned overall.
- Increased the chances of receiving mods from loot drops.
- Increased the overall quantity of mods that drop.
- Higher chance to get rare, moddable gear.
- Random mods can now be purchased from the random Tech Fragment vendor.
- Players will notice a larger quantity of loot at higher difficulties.
- Personal loot now has a higher chance to drop for your current character.
- Group loot will now take the current group composition into account.
- Added completion rewards for winning an Unranked Warzone and playing Solo/Group Ranked.
- Increased the Renown and Tech Fragments earned from completing a Warzone.
Onslaught’s release date is way too close for the Spoils of War to be ready to ship without bugs. I am afraid that even if there are no issues at launch (there will be!), the studio will have to spend several months tweaking the system to make it what is should be. Veteran players, does this sound familiar to you? It sure does.
There is little new content to support the Spoils of War with. We will once again be forced to farm our new gear from the same old instances and group content. Don’t get me wrong, I still love some of the Flashpoints and most of the raids in the game. They have already seen way too many revamps, new tiers of gear and rebalancing in their life span.I would have loved to see the old gearing system from before 5.0 make a return and the developers spending more time creating new group content instead of the Spoils of War.
How do you feel about SWTOR’s upcoming expansion? are you excited for the brand new gearing system or are you troubled by the studio’s decision to rush it with 6.0?
WHAT ELSE IS BIOWARE WORKING ON
It seems that despite the many flaws and problems in the studio’s recent video game titles releases, I remain their fan. Why else would I still be playing their games and covering them on VULKK.com. In line with that, let’s take a quick look at Casey’s blog post one last time to check what he might be willing to reveal for us:P
We have several other big projects in the works. I wish I could tell you more about them, but they’re mostly super-secret right now. I can say however that one of our projects has a large and growing team in Edmonton working through pre-production, and based on the progress I’m seeing, I can confirm that indeed the Dread Wolf rises. – Casey Hudson, general manager at BioWare
Really? That was all for the September update blog post. There are a few more lines and images in the article regarding the studio’s new offices and how they decorated them. If this is going to help Anthem’s and Dragon Age’s development, then money well spent. Otherwise, I am not very interested where they are located and what their offices work space looks like.
The clear hint at Dragon Age is unmistakable. However, Dragon Age’s development has not been a secret for a long time now. Mark Darrah has been spamming his twitter audience with Dragon Age content for months.
Not much else has been revealed, sadly. The project he hints at being in pre-production in Edmonton could be the next Mass Effect. It has been two years since Andromed and the fact that this new project is in such an early stage yet, could be a reason for us to believe another Mass Effect is coming.
Final question – are you excited for another Dragon Age? Do you believe it will be a good game or have you lost your trust in BioWare, because of the shaky and unstable performance of Andromeda and Anthem?
