Anthem - EA’s next PR disaster after BF 5

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Gravityqueen4life said:
what a piece of fucking shit. Anthem needs to be a study on how NOT to create a game.
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More like how a publisher needs to allow developers to produce full games instead of partially completed ones where the rest of it is sold as DLC. Anthem was rushed because EA assumes when a game is ready.
 
MasterDisaster said:
More like how a publisher needs to allow developers to produce full games instead of partially completed ones where the rest of it is sold as DLC. Anthem was rushed because EA assumes when a game is ready.
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Biggest problem was that they gutted the game halfway into the development cycle and reworked it into something else. Remember, Bioware started on Anthem’s development after finishing Mass Effect 3: Citadel. They worked on this for roughly six years, only to throw out everything and move back to square one about a year or so before EA announced it at E3. Whether it was EA or someone at BioWare who made the call to scrap three years worth of work is something I don’t know, but EA needs to start taking their IPs WAY more seriously.
 
MasterDisaster said:
More like how a publisher needs to allow developers to produce full games instead of partially completed ones where the rest of it is sold as DLC. Anthem was rushed because EA assumes when a game is ready.
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737 MAX Stan Account said:
Biggest problem was that they gutted the game halfway into the development cycle and reworked it into something else. Remember, Bioware started on Anthem’s development after finishing Mass Effect 3: Citadel. They worked on this for roughly six years, only to throw out everything and move back to square one about a year or so before EA announced it at E3. Whether it was EA or someone at BioWare who made the call to scrap three years worth of work is something I don’t know, but EA needs to start taking their IPs WAY more seriously.
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I don't know where you guys are getting this information from, but Anthem was not rushed, we've even discussed as much in this thread; in fact, the opposite issue happened. EA gave them way too much leeway and just left the team to their own devices, even despite half of the team and several of the project leads/creative directors leaving during that time and raising massive red flags to anyone looking from the outside inwards. While it is true that development for Anthem started after Citadel, it was only when EA decided to check in on Anthem's development after those 5 years were up that they found out that the team only had the basic ideas for a game and had only just left pre-production. In that same year they were only able to get a single mission of the game actually done and had only just arrived at the idea that it was going to be a looter-shooter (I'm ignoring the infamous "WE DON'T TALK ABOUT DESTINY" bit as that's been talked to death here and people have already discussed at length why this was such a bad idea).

No work was ever scrapped, because no work had ever been done, and for any work that had been done? Well...

...Lemme put it this way: had a senior executive at EA not stepped in when he did, the team at BioWare would've removed flying from the game entirely, the one thing left from the game's original vision (and the only good thing about the game) left standing. This is one of the rare cases where EA wasn't at fault here, at least not entirely.

EDIT: Unfortunately as Back me up! said, this lead to the unfortunate side-effect of them overcompensating, making sure you fly everywhere in the overworld, and completely miss all the small details that they'd actually somewhat worked on and placed into the world bit by bit during that 5 year developement gap and 1 year crunch.
 
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Its because Bioware starting huffing their farts waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy to much. This from the Jason Schreir article on Anthem

Within the studio, there’s a term called “BioWare magic.” It’s a belief that no matter how rough a game’s production might be, things will always come together in the final months. The game will always coalesce. It happened on the Mass Effect trilogy, on Dragon Age: Origins, and on Inquisition. Veteran BioWare developers like to refer to production as a hockey stick—it’s flat for a while, and then it suddenly jolts upward. Even when a project feels like a complete disaster, there’s a belief that with enough hard work—and enough difficult crunch—it’ll all come together
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The focus kept going all over the place, with the flying being added in at the last second since a EA Exec came down to view the project, saw how cool the little bit of flying there was (honestly the only good part of the game) and said expand on that. Like YOUR NOT SUPPOSE TO FLY ALL THE TIME in the game world. Some dude on reddit played the game without flying (unless required) and it turned into a much better expereince with a ton of details people just would not see/experience by flying everywhere.
 
Whenever I see this thread bumped I think about this game's art direction again. Even nearly three years later I still can't figure out what the fuck the environments are supposed to look like. It's visual gruel.
 
RJ MacReady said:
Whenever I see this thread bumped I think about this game's art direction again. Even nearly three years later I still can't figure out what the fuck the environments are supposed to look like. It's visual gruel.
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Your sentiments are shared with the rest of Bioware: Austin as well.
 
Every time I see that "Bioware magic" quote I get MOTI, because it is just such horse-shit. First DA: O didn't magically coalesce in the final months, it was fucking finished a year before release but then we had to wait about 10 months for the console ports to be done. And the rest? Mass effect 2 and 3 and DA 2 and inquisition were all crap, the utter lack of direction and cohesion blatant for all to see.

So their entire design philosophy, throw random shit at the wall and it will all sort itself out in the end, has never worked, they just convinced themselves otherwise through bought review scores and a delusional but always diminishing fan base, until they made a game where you couldn't be a dude and fuck another dude, so even the most deranged biodrone had no reason to defend this pile of shit.
 
OmnipotentStupidity said:
I don't know where you guys are getting this information from, but Anthem was not rushed, we've even discussed as much in this thread; in fact, the opposite issue happened. EA gave them way too much leeway and just left the team to their own devices, even despite half of the team and several of the project leads/creative directors leaving during that time and raising massive red flags to anyone looking from the outside inwards. While it is true that development for Anthem started after Citadel, it was only when EA decided to check in on Anthem's development after those 5 years were up that they found out that the team only had the basic ideas for a game and had only just left pre-production. In that same year they were only able to get a single mission of the game actually done and had only just arrived at the idea that it was going to be a looter-shooter (I'm ignoring the infamous "WE DON'T TALK ABOUT DESTINY" bit as that's been talked to death here and people have already discussed at length why this was such a bad idea).

No work was ever scrapped, because no work had ever been done, and for any work that had been done? Well...

...Lemme put it this way: had a senior executive at EA not stepped in when he did, the team at BioWare would've removed flying from the game entirely, the one thing left from the game's original vision (and the only good thing about the game) left standing. This is one of the rare cases where EA wasn't at fault here, at least not entirely.

EDIT: Unfortunately as Back me up! said, this lead to the unfortunate side-effect of them overcompensating, making sure you fly everywhere in the overworld, and completely miss all the small details that they'd actually somewhat worked on and placed into the world bit by bit during that 5 year developement gap and 1 year crunch.
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Yeah I remember getting into arguments with people using the idea the game was rushed as defence for its poor release. It seemed to me the results of corporate bloat and sub-quality employees that is starting to infest gaming even more so than usual because the original generation of great devs are leaving.
 
I think it was Bioware themselves and not EA who started leaking that they were "making the Bob Dylan of videogames," which is really all the proof people need to know that the project was fated to be a turd right from the start.
 
OmnipotentStupidity said:
(I'm ignoring the infamous "WE DON'T TALK ABOUT DESTINY" bit as that's been talked to death here and people have already discussed at length why this was such a bad idea).
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to be fair, considering how division 2 and breakpoint turned out, this might have actually been for the better. for all it's faults at least the game didn't try to poorly imitate the worst aspects of destiny. now, if they only had competent designers to begin with...

Anonymus Fluhre said:
Bioware Austin is now working on Anthem. The game is officially dead as Austin wont work on jack shit. Reason to send it to a lazy development team? EA is probably forcing Bioware Edmonton to work on the new Dragon Age game and their other new IP.
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I wonder when that happened, because for all intesive purposes the game is in a pretty solid state gameplay-wise now, albeit a bit content-starved. I'll never understand why EA keeps giving projects to tards like bioware and dice sweden when you need a whole new studio every time to clear up the mess they made - why not give it to those studio to begin with? it would be cheaper and they'd end up with a game that isn't complete shit at launch.
and I doubt much force is needed, considering dragon age is their hail mary. they burned down mass effect, they burned down their "destiny killer" and after inquisition it's their last chance to save them from what EA does best, suiciding studios with 2 round in the back of the head - which would be for the better, before they start shitting up KOTOR again (which probably was cockblocked by disney in the past, but they are imploding right now so might get desperate enough for it) or even jade empire.

if EA would be smart they'd turn anthem into a warframe clone and go from there, but given they teamed up with a literal stasi official because #muhracistgamers (not kidding, look it up) I highly doubt they have the management they'd need for it, or not crash the company with no survivors at this point.

RJ MacReady said:
Whenever I see this thread bumped I think about this game's art direction again. Even nearly three years later I still can't figure out what the fuck the environments are supposed to look like. It's visual gruel.
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lorewise it makes sense since the planet (or that area at least) has been raped sideways by shaper artifacts reality-bending the shit out of it.

OmnipotentStupidity said:
EDIT: Unfortunately as Back me up! said, this lead to the unfortunate side-effect of them overcompensating, making sure you fly everywhere in the overworld, and completely miss all the small details that they'd actually somewhat worked on and placed into the world bit by bit during that 5 year developement gap and 1 year crunch.
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that's not limited to bioware tho. almost every open world game has a way to speed past shit or completely sidestep the map by teleporting back and forth, because the lowest common denominator they're aiming for has the attention span of a fucking goldfish (the recent ghost recon entries are the biggest offender in that regard)
at least in anthem's case there's still stuff all around you're picking up/collecting and contracts happen all over the place, so after a while you've seen most of the map in some form and visit most places often enough afterwards.
 
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ZMOT said:
that's not limited to bioware tho. almost every open world game has a way to speed past shit or completely sidestep the map by teleporting back and forth, because the lowest common denominator they're aiming for has the attention span of a fucking goldfish (the recent ghost recon entries are the biggest offender in that regard)
at least in anthem's case there's still stuff all around you're picking up/collecting and contracts happen all over the place, so after a while you've seen most of the map in some form and visit most places often enough afterwards.
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Oh, your mis-understanding what we were referring to. The original idea of the game (and what the map was designed and created for) was that the player and crew would go out into this extremely hostile world with iron man like suits that could jump/glide. The whole map was made for the player to walk and maybe fly like once a mission to get out of emergencies.....but flying was the only cool looking part of the game so a EA Exe told them to put it in full time. It wasn't a way to skip stuff in open world games, it was "This is the only unique and fun thing I have seen so far, focus on that" from a higher up with a game that was not designed with it in mind.

So all that works was basically just wasted cause Bioware had no idea what they were doing and wanted to make.
 
ZMOT said:
I wonder when that happened, because for all intesive purposes the game is in a pretty solid state gameplay-wise now, albeit a bit content-starved. I'll never understand why EA keeps giving projects to tards like bioware and dice sweden when you need a whole new studio every time to clear up the mess they made - why not give it to those studio to begin with? it would be cheaper and they'd end up with a game that isn't complete shit at launch.
and I doubt much force is needed, considering dragon age is their hail mary. they burned down mass effect, they burned down their "destiny killer" and after inquisition it's their last chance to save them from what EA does best, suiciding studios with 2 round in the back of the head - which would be for the better, before they start shitting up KOTOR again (which probably was cockblocked by disney in the past, but they are imploding right now so might get desperate enough for it) or even jade empire.
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Bioware Montreal were the ones who worked on the last Mass Effect game. This was when Edmonton was working on Anthem. Edmonton was going to try and fix Andromeda with a skeleton crew but EA told them to put everyone on Anthem and get it out as soon as possible. That also meant removing the skeleton crew on Andromeda. Which is a good thing because no one likes working with the Frostbyte Engine. It's a particle/ physics engine EA tries and tell people it's a 3d engine, except you need 3rd party software to model, texture, and even rig everything. The fact the EA forces Bioware to use it pisses them off. Respawn got to use Unreal Engine for Jedi Fallen Order and not forced to use Frostbyte 3 which pissed some people off.

I should mention that the reason why EA keeps naming city companies after Bioware is because they want some of the good will Bioware has from the old AD&D and KOTAR days. Except Austin his housed by lazy fuckers and Montreal had interns that didn't know what they were doing.

Expect a lot of hype from the Austin studio.
 
Raging Capybara said:
Just like any other engine ever made.
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I can do everything in Unreal if I wanted. I don't have to install Blender to work on models, or Houdini for particles and physics, or Substance Painter for texture work. Same goes for Lumberyard, though the physics engine part for it still needs work. It's as bad as the old Build Engine for that.
 
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