BioWare’s Anthem May Update blog post comes out of the blue to remind the world that the game is still alive and preparing for its redesign. A small team of developers are starting the long process by going all the way back to the drawing board for some of the core issues of Anthem in its current status. Would BioWare give the new project a name? Will it be Anthem NEXT or something else and what is going to happen to the game, let’s find out by reading between the lines of the blog post!
A rather new (or not so much) face has surfaced on the Anthem stage. Christian Dailey pubilshed a new post on the studio’s blog. In his message he introduces himself and gives first glimpses of what is to come for Anthem as he and his team is starting work on the long ago promised Anthem Redesign.
In the next paragraphs I will take apart the blog post and attempt to analyze it for you to see what may be hiding in between the simple and generic words and sentences.
Who provided this Anthem May Update
First, a word about Christian himself. This is the new Studio Director at BioWare Austin, leading the production of the new Anthem project.
“[…] what we are exploring NEXT for Anthem. NICE TO MEET YOU” -his first words may be a hint already to something.
Are the caps used for NEXT a word play or a random element? Many players have already started speculating that the game may be renamed to Anthem 2.0 or Anthem NEXT, following the example of No Man’s Sky.
Before taking the role of Studio Director, Christian was a Development Director for the Anthem Live Service. His role was to help guide the development of the game after its launch.
As you may know already, Anthem was primarily developed by the BioWare Edmonton studio and the Austin studio took over for the live service as these guys seemingly have more experience with such products. They have been managing the Star Wars The Old Republic for over nine years.
To his name Christian has a few other interesting jobs in his past. He has worked on The Last Airbender, Lords of EverQuest and even Fear Effect, going all the way back to the year 2000. He, apparently, was involved with Overwatch as a Service Technologies Manager for the Customer/Technical Support.
Christian has been involved with pretty much all events and updates that we saw in Anthem’s first year after release – the original Cataclysm event, Season of Skulls, the Winter Icetide event and the most recent patch – the what I would call “All in One” update 1.7.
Everybody from BioWare, and EA is now working from home. This, of course, creates some obstacles that the dev team has to manage and overcome.
What is the Anthem Incubation Team and why was it created
Christian’s team is rather small, numbering about thirty people. He prefers it that way, as he himself states in the blog post.
“The Anthem incubation team has kicked off and we are starting to validate our design hypotheses. Incubation is a term we use internally – it essentially means we are going back and experimenting/prototyping to improve on the areas where we believe we fell short and to leverage everything that you love currently about Anthem. We are a small team – about 30-ish, earning our way forward as we set out to hit our first major milestone goals. Spoiler – this is going to be a longer process. And yes, the team is small but the whole point of this is to take our time and go back to the drawing board. And a small team gives us the agility a larger one can’t afford.”
It makes me wonder why are they starting just now? The announcement that Anthem will get a complete redesign came months ago – all the way back in February.
Thirty people is indeed a small team. To this day I do not know the exact number of people working on the other BioWare Austin game VULKK.com covers extensively and has been doing so for many years – SWTOR. What I do know is that that team could not be much larger judging by the number, quantity and quality of updates we receive on yearly basis.
We already knew that the redesign of Anthem will take a long time. What we expected (or I did at least!) was for that work to be well under way already. Instead they “kicked off” just now.
UPDATE May 16, 2020:
The (relatively) new BioWare Community Manager Ythisens, also known as Sakaar wrote on Reddit:
“This is simply not the case and I agree that’s on us for not clarifying that this work has been happening for quite some time already before we even announced the news that we’d be reworking the game back in February.
In reality we’ve been working on this since last year.”
In case you are wondering, this is the same guy, who you might have seen in WoW forums and Reddit. He was laid off from Blizzard last year and has then joined the Anthem team to work as a community manager. Up until now his appearances on social media and forums has been scarce, but nothing really new was happening around Anthem that was worth discussing.
It’s good news to hear that they have been working on this since before the February announcement, but it still leaves a bad mark on the blog post from Christian for phrasing it so poorly to mislead so many. The disappointment among the community that Anthem 2.0 may get delayed to 2021 or even 2022 was huge since yesterday.
End of the May 16 2020 update! Original story continues
“We really want this experience to be different for the team and our players, but we know we have some tough challenges to tackle. We want to include you as we go and be open and honest with where we are at and what the expectations are with where we are going. The reality is you will see things that look awesome but end up on the cutting room floor or things that you might think suck that you feel we are spending too much time on – but in the spirit of experimentation this is all OK. We really want to provide you all the transparency we can because of your passion and interest in Anthem. But, with that comes seeing how the sausage is made – which is not always pretty by the way.”
After almost complete silence for so long and the drastic change of behavior shortly after launch – from very open and sharing to insanely private and not talking about anything until it is released – the Anthem dev team seems to have made a complete turn once again.
Being open is fantastic. I would love to hear about a possible Public Test Server involvement in the process. That would really be a good promise for open discussion and progress sharing.
This May Update will be followed by more regular communications with frequent updates along the way
Christian made a promise that he and his team will do their best to be as transparent as possible with their actions. That’s fine, but let’s see how they kicked things off actually and what they did already.
“We also want to start putting together some regular comms out to everyone to show/talk about these changes and our progress. This blog is one example, but we also want to include you in more of the day to day and hopefully get you some real interactions with the team. These updates could come in the form of an ad-hoc live stream, or some cool concept art posted on social media, or the occasional feed of me curled up in a ball crying in the corner…”
From this we can take nothing, really. I personally have heard these words before both with Anthem and with SWTOR. In fact I have heard them in regards to other video games I have been passionate about in the past.
The idea and the goal are admirable, but I highly doubt that what this quote above details is going to happen. Sharing an artist’s drawing on Twitter doesn’t really count as sharing progress in my eyes.
I would truly love to see some live streams with behind the scenes discussion of how the devs are tackling this or that issue the current version of Anthem has and what they plan to replace this or that feature with, what new ideas they have and so on.
BioWare doesn’t want to overhype Anthem again. Wise!
Christian’s final segment of his blog post states the most important thing his Anthem team has to do – keep up the interest, but avoid trying to hype up the gamers. We suffered one bad Anthem launch already.
“[…] I am not here to over hype anything, but we do believe the changes we are making are the right ones and we hope you think so as well…but you might not and that is cool too. It is the constructive criticism and feedback we need – in either direction.”
Anthem had a full year of players like you and me playing it, providing feedback and data. BioWare has all they could ever need to reform the game and reshape it to be more than just a stunningly beautiful, but scarely empty from content wild world.
Conclusions and… an eye on the horizon
I am optimistic that the developers will do things right this time around. I decided to stick with Anthem despite its issues and the lack of content.
The game has enormous potential and if one more year is what it takes for us to get what we deserve, that’s fine.
I really really wish for a PTS to be involved in the process, so we can not only read, hear or see what is coming and how, but also help test it. That’s what Christian and his team seem to want as well.
What do you think about the Anthem May Update? Are you still enjoying Anthem and how? Or are you waiting for the new version to be ready and return for more epic Iron-Man-style action?
You can read Christian’s full blog post.
Keep up with everything about Anthem’s Redesign process. You can also sign up to receive new posts notifications from VULKK.com or even follow the source on Google News.
