Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[Greyvax]

There is an actual problem with attracting and retaining talent in the games industry, specificially for (but not exclusively): programmers/engineers/architects, (non-grunt) QA, technical managers, project managers. This is one of the reasons that standardizing engine usage is becoming so common. The industry used to be able to get extremely talent programmers for very low wages. Many are still crunching away at sub-market rates due to passion and the inherent technical challenges of game development - however the poaching from various tech companies, finance and even companies in non-technical sectors, has increased vastly.

A senior programmer can switch to another industry, get paid more than double and work much more sane hours. That's an actual issue for the games industry. If they have to retain these people, they need to cut deeply into profit margins or get the creative/artistic/design staff working at even lower rates and crazy hours.

Issues with retaining talent is a nearly universal problem right now. Gone are the days of spending 20-30 years at a company. Changing jobs every 3-4 years is the only way to get decent compensation these days ever since the 2009 mentality of "just be happy you have a job" seems to have lasted well beyond end of the recession.

[Ungeir]

Issues with retaining talent is a nearly universal problem right now. Gone are the days of spending 20-30 years at a company. Changing jobs every 3-4 years is the only way to get decent compensation these days ever since the 2009 mentality of "just be happy you have a job" seems to have lasted well beyond end of the recession.

Very true. The shortage of skilled engineers and project managers is also endemic.

But I do think the games industry is harder than most other sectors, because a lot of the talent isn't just rotating within the industry, but leaving it entirely. This was always a thing, as the crunch culture has been with the industry since always, but my anecdotal experience is that the exodus has accelerated. It's also compounded by game development getting a lot of contenders as the *cool* thing to work with - artificial intelligence and web development is seemingly drawing in a lot of the talent that would have gone into game development 10 or 20 years ago.

I don't think it's fair to label the people who stay as "B" class developers and project managers, because in my experience they are usually insanely talented individuals a fair bit above the average talent in other sectors. Rather I'd say the issue manifests itself as chronic understaffing and shortages in key roles. This makes studios shuffle people around constantly (as described by Schreier in his article, and equally common at Activision et al) to cover shortfalls, wrecking the "natural" pacing of projects, and leaving some lower-profile projects staffed by skeleton crews for extended periods.

[kaelleria]

Internal leaked email -
https://kotaku.com/bioware-boss-addr...nue-1833802608

Hey BioWare,

I wanted to get a note out to you to share my thoughts on the Kotaku article and the online discussion it has raised.

The article mentions many of the problems in the development of Anthem and some of our previous projects. And it draws a link between those issues and the quality of our workplace and the well-being of our staff. These problems are real and it’s our top priority to continue working to solve them.

What we found out-of-bounds was the naming of specific developers as targets for public criticism. It’s unfair and extremely traumatizing to single out people in this way, and we can’t accept that treatment towards any of our staff. That’s why we did not participate in the article and made a statement to that effect.

When I was offered the opportunity to return to BioWare as GM, I came into the role knowing the studio was experiencing significant challenges in team health, creative vision, and organizational focus. I was - and continue to be - excited to help drive improvements in those areas because I love this studio, and above all I want to create a place where all of you are happy and successful.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve done a good job at that, and on a day like today I certainly feel like I haven’t. But some of the steps we’ve taken towards this include a more focused studio mission and values, so that we have clarity on what we are here to do and how we define a high standard for our studio culture. We updated our studio structure around a matrix so that department directors can be fully focused on individual career support and well-being. We are defining better role clarity so that people can succeed better against clear expectations. And we are putting in place production changes that will provide for clearer project vision as well as a significant post-production period that will further relieve pressure and anxiety on teams during development.

But I know there’s much more to do, and we will talk in more detail about other actions we have been planning in response to internal feedback and postmortems at next week’s All-Hands. As always please continue to provide feedback on further steps we can take to make BioWare the best possible place to work.

I’m committed to getting us to a place where we are delivering on the highest expectations for BioWare games, through a work environment that’s among the very best in the world. With your help, we will get there.

Please let me know if you’d like to talk in person and I will be happy to set up time to hear your thoughts.

Casey

This is a good step.

[Edge-]

A much, much, much better response. This should have been their public response, not the soulless garbage they put out. The only bit that bothers me is this -

It’s unfair and extremely traumatizing to single out people in this way, and we can’t accept that treatment towards any of our staff.

So the leads spend years jerking staff around and causing them to cry in empty rooms, take stress leave, or flat-out quit and you're still trying to protect them from criticism? No, you protect your on the ground staff, leads are more public faces and should absolutely be held responsible/accountable. This is how reporting works, and if people were never named because "it's traumatizing" nobody would ever be held accountable for their actions.

I get where he's coming from at a certain level, this opens these folks up to a lot of harassment from the community which is unacceptable. But given that their first response was purely about protecting leadership and blaming Kotaku for the mess that BW created (simply for reporting on it) this still rubs me the wrong way.

Hopefully they make good on these promises and can show us that they're making meaningful internal changes in response to the article. Kotaku called out Riot for their workplace practices as well, including naming a number of executives and leads, and we've seen them take meaningful steps to improve since then. BW needs to do the same.

[kaelleria]

A much, much, much better response. This should have been their public response, not the soulless garbage they put out. The only bit that bothers me is this -



So the leads spend years jerking staff around and causing them to cry in empty rooms, take stress leave, or flat-out quit and you're still trying to protect them from criticism? No, you protect your on the ground staff, leads are more public faces and should absolutely be held responsible/accountable. This is how reporting works, and if people were never named because "it's traumatizing" nobody would ever be held accountable for their actions.

I get where he's coming from at a certain level, this opens these folks up to a lot of harassment from the community which is unacceptable. But given that their first response was purely about protecting leadership and blaming Kotaku for the mess that BW created (simply for reporting on it) this still rubs me the wrong way.

Hopefully they make good on these promises and can show us that they're making meaningful internal changes in response to the article. Kotaku called out Riot for their workplace practices as well, including naming a number of executives and leads, and we've seen them take meaningful steps to improve since then. BW needs to do the same.

http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/1...-about-bioware

Some people in the industry think the article is overblown. But that's just one account...
Bioware legitimately sounded like an awful place to work for a few years, it does seem like it's gotten better since Casey got back.

In regards to Riot... That story did not surprise me in the least from my interactions with them as an event organizer.

[Collegeguy]

I have faith that andromeda would have been decent if Casey was sailing the ship. Their leadership has just been dog shit. Hopefully, they can make some people sit down that were in those roles.

[Yunru]

Internal leaked email -
https://kotaku.com/bioware-boss-addr...nue-1833802608



This is a good step.

To me it sounds like they hit some developers ego. And this is their responese. Maybe this guy got very pissed off on kotaku for showing his name (or his friend).
And this person is now bombed by emails, death treats and so on.

Kinda suprised they didnt mention lawsuit. Also i have a felling that some bioware leakers will be on street soon as this is a very bad RP for a company.

[Edge-]

Maybe this guy got very pissed off on kotaku for showing his name (or his friend).

So did you even read his email? Because that's now what was included in it at all.

Kinda suprised they didnt mention lawsuit.

Why would they? If they want to pursue legal action against any employees violating an NDA they wouldn't openly talk about that.

[Donatello Trumpi]

Bioware's greatest problem is the use of unsuitable engines.

The old republic: Used the hero engine in alpha stage. Heavy modification and engineering on it cost them many tens of millions, if not a hundred or more.
The engine caused the devs a lot of grief and hurt the quality of the game.

Inquisition: Frostbite had to be heavily modified to be suitable for rpg/3rd person games. The end result seemed solid at first, but suffered massively on mmo-esque quests and lifeless terrain. The engine caused the devs a lot of grief and hurt the quality of the game.

Andromeda: Using a semi-experienced team, which only worked with the unreal engine 3 on ME3's mp, development was a desaster.

Dice also underperformed after BF4:

Battlefield 1: Felt like a reskin of Battlefront in the beta.
Battlefield 5: At least 1 year too early, too buggy and the lightening (either midnight shadows or sahara sun) and visibility (enemies get "swallowed" by the environment. Too little contrast between enemies and environment) are catastrophic.

All in all very disappointed in the latest EA games. If Dragon Age 4 doesnt deliver, Bioware might disappear in the next 5 years.

[Ophenia]

Awesome, just got 3 legendaries in Heart of Rage after the second chest, flying toward the Monitor and boom, disconnected, "The Server has stopped", no loots.

I can't defend them with that kind of shit, I'll take a few days off, need time to digest this shit.

[Razamith]

Awesome, just got 3 legendaries in Heart of Rage after the second chest, flying toward the Monitor and boom, disconnected, "The Server has stopped", no loots.

I can't defend them with that kind of shit, I'll take a few days off, need time to digest this shit.

Nearly 100% of the time loot is saved to server the moment you pick it up, and will be available/received next time you come back from any outing including freeplay.

[Unholyground]

A lot of businesses treat their people like shit. I have worked for a few, one of which was WestJet and they are fucking horrible and I had to go on stress leave.

I believe all of this stuff because I have lived it a few times, and in dev companies it can be even worse.

[Ophenia]

Nearly 100% of the time loot is saved to server the moment you pick it up, and will be available/received next time you come back from any outing including freeplay.

No, that's the second time this is happening to me. The loots are saved when you have a physical crash, but not when the server is suddenly lost because the instance server died. I checked the Vault upon reconnecting, nothing new. Done another HoR to see if I'd have the loots in the end, no legendary.

Simply lost. I guess the loots are saved on the Instance Server and that's what allows you to get them back when you crash, but when the server dies, there is no way to retrieve them.

[americandavey]

Bioware's greatest problem is the use of unsuitable engines.

The old republic: Used the hero engine in alpha stage. Heavy modification and engineering on it cost them many tens of millions, if not a hundred or more.
The engine caused the devs a lot of grief and hurt the quality of the game.

Inquisition: Frostbite had to be heavily modified to be suitable for rpg/3rd person games. The end result seemed solid at first, but suffered massively on mmo-esque quests and lifeless terrain. The engine caused the devs a lot of grief and hurt the quality of the game.

Andromeda: Using a semi-experienced team, which only worked with the unreal engine 3 on ME3's mp, development was a desaster.

Dice also underperformed after BF4:

Battlefield 1: Felt like a reskin of Battlefront in the beta.
Battlefield 5: At least 1 year too early, too buggy and the lightening (either midnight shadows or sahara sun) and visibility (enemies get "swallowed" by the environment. Too little contrast between enemies and environment) are catastrophic.

All in all very disappointed in the latest EA games. If Dragon Age 4 doesnt deliver, Bioware might disappear in the next 5 years.

Its not about Game Engines, its about people in leadership positions that make terrible decisions.

Yes TOR using a heavy modified Alpha Hero engine is bad. So bad that current engineers can not even dream to fix that problem without breaking the game. Engine that will never go beyond DX9, never use hyper-threads and so forth. That burden should be put on the Founders of Bioware because they were in charge of Bioware studios at that time.

Reason why companies like EA, Bethesda and so forth use the same internal engine is because they can not compete with other Tech companies for engineers. That is the reason why EA is making their studios use Frostbite. Casey understands this, hence why DA4 is starting out with Anthem Frostbite created tools to lift that burden (in the article) and not start from scratch.

[Edge-]

Reason why companies like EA, Bethesda and so forth use the same internal engine is because they can not compete with other Tech companies for engineers. That is the reason why EA is making their studios use Frostbite. Casey understands this, hence why DA4 is starting out with Anthem Frostbite created tools to lift that burden (in the article) and not start from scratch.

It's the reverse. It's that they can compete with third party companies solely focused on building engines. They don't need to license external engines anymore, they can build their own in-house and maintain them more cheaply since they can build them for their own specific needs.

Ubisoft has what, 3 or more engines (1 for games like AC, 1 for The Crew, 1 for The Division and I think a few others) that they maintain internally. These are all specialized engines designed for specific purposes rather than something they licensed and need to adapt to their needs. There's utility to this in that it lets teams really focus on tailoring their engines to their own needs without worrying too much about how it may affect wildly different types of titles.

EA took the other approach, centralized technology shared between studios build on the same foundation. There's utility to this as well, as learnings and advances from various teams can be folded into the tech and used by other studios. It comes with its own challenges as well, as we've seen studios like BW struggle with the engine, but it's a similarly fine approach.

The DA4 change is BW finally realizing that they didn't need to throw out ALL their work and start from scratch every time. It's them finally realizing/remembering that they can use a lot of the under the hood work they've done, adapt it without burning it all down, and save time and money. Why they haven't been doing this so far is truly beyond me.

[Donatello Trumpi]

The DA4 change is BW finally realizing that they didn't need to throw out ALL their work and start from scratch every time. It's them finally realizing/remembering that they can use a lot of the under the hood work they've done, adapt it without burning it all down, and save time and money. Why they haven't been doing this so far is truly beyond me.

They have used some of inquisitions system for Andromeda...

https://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-...-dragon-age-3/

https://twitter.com/YanickRRoy/statu...54938738135040

[kaelleria]

Kinda meaningless when this is an internal email that was leaked. It should have been the public response (maybe altered a bit to reflect it's now public nature) to that article. Not the garbage they actually put out lol I'll believe the changes these words speak of when I see the results, honestly.

A lot of fuck ups from BioWare, really. I don't really put any of this on EA themselves.

Agree with Edge-'s post below yours, too.

I disagree... You need to shore up your internal affairs before talking with the press.

[zealo]

They have used some of inquisitions system for Andromeda...

https://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-...-dragon-age-3/

https://twitter.com/YanickRRoy/statu...54938738135040

That may have been the intention in 2013 where that PC gamer article + tweet are both dated, but I don't think things went in quite that direction for much of Andromeda's production.

E.g compare the character creation process between the two. Inquisition had a relatively powerful face sculpting system, and instead of iterating on that further they went back to face sliders for Andromeda, along with features such as being able to change the shapes of eyes, mouths, noses, ears, complexions etc independent of the preset completely missing.

Regression like that happening suggests Bioware management took kind of a "reinvent the wheel" approach to things.

[RuneDK]

Internal leaked email -
https://kotaku.com/bioware-boss-addr...nue-1833802608



This is a good step.

Well it's great that Casey came back...but this may be too much for them to bounce back from...they've had two poor releases in a row so people will be skeptical about BW games now. I'm hoping they can become BW of old, but they've lost a lot of trust in the gamer community now.

[Baconeggcheese]

That's common practice in all industries to ask people to not talk to the press at all. Even when there isn't any problem, even if everything goes well, employees are asked not to talk to the press without prior agreement of their hierarchy.

I know I wouldn't be allowed to talk to any media about the project I'm working on without approval, even though I firmly believe we're on great tracks (and I'm not working in the gaming industry, where the press is ... inquisitive and wants to burn everyone alive every time there is a 20-minutes delay).

I was referencing this part:

I've gotten a number of messages from developers who work or worked at beloved AAA studios saying, "Replace BioWare with [my studio] and it's the same story." Which is heartbreaking. But I can't imagine anything changing unless we keep reporting and talking about these stories.

- - - Updated - - -

Well it's great that Casey came back...but this may be too much for them to bounce back from...they've had two poor releases in a row so people will be skeptical about BW games now. I'm hoping they can become BW of old, but they've lost a lot of trust in the gamer community now.

People are too hungry for this + they aren't charging for DLC + there's nothing on the market that directly replaces Anthem's gameplay.

They can easily turn this around if they can manage to clean up the product. Imagine its going to be the same story for the next dragon age, people want it too bad so they'll deal with nonsense to some degree. Though hopefully they get their act together for the most part so they don't have to.