Bioware's Anthem

I think people in charge might be putting way too much pressure on their employees. If things were better when EA was controling the team's health by asking for reports... then frostbite and EA are clearly not the problem.

sure. But putting pressure on employees could be symptomatic of earlier poor management by BW. Crunch culture was constantly being reference in the kotaku article, but the crunch followed years of unbelievably lax development.

it felt like the kotaku article described a typical procrastinator. All nighters suck and are bad for your health but if you spend months not really disciplined and avoiding working on you project and so only finish by cramming everything in at the last minute, the root of the problem is not the all nighters, the root of the problem is poor planning. Similarly the kotaku article doesn’t mention the stress on the team, besides the frustration of a lack of direction (but again, lack of direction is prior to the stress), until after it was clear BW had nothing to show for itself and a close deadline.

edit: and the management talking about “BioWare magic” is indicative that it is not just the crunch at the end that was bad. It was managements misdirection and hope that problems would just solve themselves.

edit again: I guess my point is that, the typical pro game developer narrative about stopping the terrible celebration of Crunch Culture is to give games longer development. With Anthem we had really long development, and yet it had an egregious example of a Crunch. So the solution is 1) realistic time scales and 2) managers that have a clear and achievable vision, have work inspected by publishers, and don’t string their developers along on a vague project and if they do lower tier workers should be able to raise red flags with out fear of being fired. 

Edit the third: and I guess I want to know about DAI because they said it was a “pirate ship” in terms of development. Which implies some things. Usually that means a sort of lawlessness (but like, that metaphor is vague), so it really feels like the reading in between the lines of that article is that BW has talented/opinionated people working for it but that there is weak leadership that can’t clearly direct their team and the times BW has been successful (when it was run like the enterprise) it had a strong leader/principles. But that is debatable because the strong leader they referenced was in charge of BW games that had their fair share of development scandals. 

I’m a procrastinator too. I think all humans have some element of procrastination even if they won’t admit it.

the thing though is when you do a project that is at least partially  funded by say, a publisher *cough* EA, you usually get deadlines, check-ins, emails, conference calls, etc. that are pretty motivating and informative to your higher ups what is happening. What is wild about this Kotaku story, is that not only did BioWare kind of fumble around for years, but that EA did not really check in on them until 2016 and that the only real motivator for BW to come up with a prototype was... E3? They scrambled to make a recorded demo trailer that became Anthem.

Maybe because of my personal experience of being funded for a project and having to constantly submit some form of progress report, it is wild that EA was so hands off. That is also a form of poor management. Keeping in touch is also a good way to critique work so it could be better.

this whole thing blows my mind.

So I finally grabbed this game now that it had a pretty nice sale, even the dawn edition. So I figured to grab it physical, in case I regret it and want to sell it later.

Impressions so far though is good? I mean I have to put aside all the rpg bioware I know of, and mostly here for the combat, cuz I do like it a lot. But the story and characters are pretty okay so far too. Though is a little convoluted at first as the game tries to introduce a lot of elements of the world all at once. The concept of the anthem though and its relics is a little too Andromedaish with vaults and the remnants, which honestly bugged me but alas. There’s definitely elements put together in a rush and trying to make them sound fancy.

That said, the personality of the characters you meet in fort tarsis is great, they still show some heart of bioware in there, you do surprisingly spent a fair amount of time with them if you do visit them regularly. I’m surprised they opted for no romance, as a few characters seem well set up for it. But its probably because of their refusal to show our character on the fort. Which is a big shame and a silly omission, as it would have been yet another opportunity for them to have microtransactions on clothes.

But at its core, the best thing is still its combat, its an absolute blast and probably the best action shooting combat I have played in a while. Its like Andromeda but with a smoother fast pace framerate. So I guess on that end, im satisfied. I guess will have to see how I feel on e I end the main quest.

Not much at the moment I'm afraid (because I got sucked into FFXIV again), but I will probably try to start playing more when the Cataclysm pre-event and Cataclysm itself go live.

I don't think any official release date has been given, they are doing testing and tweaking on Public Test Servers at the moment.

I just finished the campaign for the game. I must say it was good enough, I liked the characters well enough, they had the bioware charm and developed writing in there even if at times it was rushed. But the main lore of the game still makes no sense to me lol. The anthem speaks but no one says what the anthem is saying, everything is taken for granted when characters talk about fancy names like the anthem, the cataclysm, the heart of rage, the other thingies that react to the anthem. 

But after this last update game has been running better overall, I had a night before that was just crashing after every mission lol. 


Are you on pc? im on ps4 so maybe we can't

Interesting the fate of Anthem apparently will be decided very soon: