Anthem - EA’s next PR disaster after BF 5

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How about the loading screens when you fly from one region to another? I think there was a loading screen for a loading screen.

 
Anthem Executive Producer Mark Darrah: The Truth About What Happened on Anthem
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CxwrCRdqZb8

A post-mortem on what went wrong behind the scenes of this game from the executive producer.
If I remember correctly it mainly boiled down to having a game based on a concept and nothing else, combined with design based more on guilting you to play forever than fun.
 
I decided to get the PS4 platinum trophy before this closed down, and managed to do just that. I'll say I can see what they were going for and the flight was competenly implemented; but the truth of the matter is, they had no idea where to go with it. They had what I'd consider a tutorial area, but made it the whole game. I know this game was cursed from the get go and so sure I wasn't expecting much, but this was more of a glorified tech demo than actual game.
 
Just like that, yet another project that cost millions of dollars and thousands upon thousands of hours to create disappears into the digital ether possibly to never be played again.
 
I remember seeing this game and thinking the flying exosuits looked cool. Then I saw you're just constantly fighting in the same jungle environment, and the death knell was this shit
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Prime millenial goyslop.
It's the same shit you see in outer worlds. Everyone looks brown or homosexual, there's nothing that looks interesting, it's all just generic garbo
 
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The game was over the second they invited Anita to do a tour of their studio. The rumor at the time said that she kept criticizing the character designs.
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I remember seeing this game and thinking the flying exosuits looked cool. Then I saw you're just constantly fighting in the same jungle environment, and the death knell was this shit
View attachment 8413111
Prime millenial goyslop.
It's the same shit you see in outer worlds. Everyone looks brown or homosexual, there's nothing that looks interesting, it's all just generic garbo
The character designed changed later after the reveal trailer. The guy who talks to the protagonist in the trailer was changed and became the tattooed samoan guy.
The facial animations were quite bad, the characters were over-expressive, perhaps as a way to show that Bioware learned their lesson from ME:A but it was just as cringe (especially if you 3D scan the ugliest chink).





 
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The facial animations were quite bad, the characters were over-expressive, perhaps as a way to say that Bioware learned their lesson from ME:A but it was just as cringe (especially if you 3D scan the ugliest chink).
They look/act like they're held at gunpoint. No normal human being acts like that. Bad theatre acting written by a Redditor.
 
The game was over the second they invited Anita to do a tour of their studio. The rumor at the time said that she kept criticizing the character designs.
View attachment 8415911


The character designed changed later after the reveal trailer. The guy who talks to the protagonist in the trailer was changed and became the tattooed samoan guy.
The facial animations were quite bad, the characters were over-expressive, perhaps as a way to say that Bioware learned their lesson from ME:A but it was just as cringe (especially if you 3D scan the ugliest chink).

Anthem - animation (1).webm

Anthem - animation (2).webm

Anthem - animation (3).webm
I forgot about those faces, were mocked relentlessly on /v/ for months.
Why do they all keep grinning like that?
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Also everyone is just the same shade of brown. It's disgusting
 
I remember watching Skillup's review and being super confused by the enemy designs in the B roll footage he had running.

Sometimes he was shooting Starship Trooper bug aliens, sometimes he was shooting generic sci fi robots, Sometimes he was shooting Space Marines straight out of Halo and Sometimes he was shooting these weird Ogre things with stone shields that looked like Dark Souls enemies.

There was zero thematic or visual consistency, they just threw everything at the wall desperately hoping something would stick.
 
I forgot about those faces, were mocked relentlessly on /v/ for months.
Why do they all keep grinning like that?
View attachment 8416037
Also everyone is just the same shade of brown. It's disgusting
Anita was already brought up, but the simplest explanation is "If Reddit made a videogame." Not only is everyone a one-note stereotype, the only noticeably white person in the game is your player character, if you choose to make them such. If they're not some ambiguous mix of brown, they're south/south-east Asian.


I remember watching Skillup's review and being super confused by the enemy designs in the B roll footage he had running.

Sometimes he was shooting Starship Trooper bug aliens, sometimes he was shooting generic sci fi robots, Sometimes he was shooting Space Marines straight out of Halo and Sometimes he was shooting these weird Ogre things with stone shields that looked like Dark Souls enemies.

There was zero thematic or visual consistency, they just threw everything at the wall desperately hoping something would stick.
Just my observation from what little I've played; the feeling is they bought into their own hype about it being a Destiny (the game) killer, when all they did was manage to make a bad knock-off. One of my biggest beefs with Destiny (the game) is how they made a lot of lore, but then did the FF13 problem and locked it all away in an online tome you use your PC to read about. But the way Anthem did it was not even give you the online tome to read, so there may be lore there, but discovering it is so fucking opaque there's no continuity or ease of understanding.
 
Anthem Executive Producer Mark Darrah: The Truth About What Happened on Anthem
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CxwrCRdqZb8

A post-mortem on what went wrong behind the scenes of this game from the executive producer.
So I listened to it and he personally sounds like he wants to blame Casey Hudson for a lot of it. However, I don't think he wants to burn that bridge. A large part of the video is him acknowledging development issues and the technical side of development. He also comes across as a massive dork.

However, he does admit they had no idea what they were making for the longest time. They just kinda fiddle fucked around until they were given a direction. Every decision was met with complaints and then walking back the decision. They had no idea what they were getting into with the looter shooter genre.

It felt like after listening to him, that he had very little idea about how the industry and market had evolved since Bioware's peak of the late aughts, early 10s. Bioware and large sprawling RPGs were the AAA space then. However, as time went on the market expanded and shooters which had always been popular grew an even bigger audience. Pushing the Bioware stalwarts to the side. Not to say there isn't a market. But it's a market of maybe 5 million copies a release from the top tier studio. Which is very respectable.

I think Casey Hudson pitched the game, bailed because he saw the writing on the wall for Bioware, got lured back with a truck load of money or out of a sense of loyalty for the company that he started with. Pushed out Anthem, and then bailed again as Bioware was truly cooked by that point.

Even in the mid 2010s you could see Bioware was slipping, the founders had left. Each release was getting worse and worse. Becoming cover shooter action games with some RPG elements added on. Not to say I don't like Mass Effect 2 and most of 3. But it was a departure from what they were. You could also see things getting gayer and gayer as the original devs left and they hired fujos to write. Every character got uglier and uglier and for some reason everyone became mud people until it reached apotheosis with Veilguard.

As I said earlier, Darrah comes across as a dork and not especially inspiring as a person. Looking at his credits they seem to be mostly DLC for Dragon Age. So he works best in a small team, where most of the groundwork has been done. Him being given something like Anthem, a prospective live service that was going to generate revenue for a decade tells more about Bioware than he realizes. Their talent pool had gotten so low they ended with this dork in charge of a what EA thought was going to be a billion dollar franchise. What Bioware thought was going to be its financial stability for the next decade.

I'm not saying he has to be a super kool dude. But there is a certain level of presence, of confidence you need to have to be able to lead people. If you know what you are doing or at least know enough and can bluff the rest, people will follow you and support your decisions. He seems like a nice guy, just not the kind you put in charge of a product like Anthem unless you have no choice.
 
Also everyone is just the same shade of brown. It's disgusting

Anita was already brought up, but the simplest explanation is "If Reddit made a videogame." Not only is everyone a one-note stereotype, the only noticeably white person in the game is your player character, if you choose to make them such. If they're not some ambiguous mix of brown, they're south/south-east Asian.
By the way, when ME:Andromeda was release it also had only shades of brown in the character creator. If you made a custom Ryder sibbling, you would always end up with a black father.
 
Just my observation from what little I've played; the feeling is they bought into their own hype about it being a Destiny (the game) killer
If you're willing to stretch definitions, Warframe is already a Destiny killer... made before Destiny 1 was even announced. Anthem had a snowball's chance in hell of dethroning D2 or WF from that fact alone.
 
Former BioWare Producer Lays Out $10 Million Plan That Could Bring Anthem Back from the Dead

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has proposed a bold $10 million plan to revive Anthem as a fully single-player RPG. The idea comes just days after EA officially shut down Anthem's servers, marking a potential new chapter for the sci-fi shooter.

In a recently released video titled "The Truth About What Happened on Anthem," Darrah laid out a three-phase plan for a single-player reboot of the game, estimating a total cost of $10 million. In order to do that, Anthem's technical framework would need to be upgraded for current-gen platforms like the PS5 and Switch 2, allowing it to target locked 60 FPS and enhanced visuals. Since local server code had existed internally before launch, offline play was entirely feasible even without needing EA's support, a point that resonates even more strongly now that hundreds of fans have signed a petition to save Anthem. The final, and easily most expensive component, would involve creating AI-controlled squadmates to replace the original four-player requirement, offering a true BioWare-style experience centering on the sort of narrative depth and companion dynamics that fans love.

More than just a technical overhaul, Darrah framed this revival as a way to finally deliver the single-player RPG fans expected all along. By focusing on story, character-driven squads, and personal progression rather than the grind most expect from live-service IPs, the reboot would effectively reverse-engineer Anthem into the kind of BioWare experience that made the studio famous.

The first hurdle to over come will be in the character creator where he must put male/female and not body type a/b or pronounce. If the former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah fail with that, it will not be successful revival of the game.
 
Former BioWare Producer Lays Out $10 Million Plan That Could Bring Anthem Back from the Dead
10M$ that would immediately go over budget because rather than employ a guy who'd do it in a month for 10K, it would be entrusted to incompetent idiots who will want to add unnecessary features to justify their paychecks and art commissions.
 
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