Anthem: Bioware's next Mass Effect-like IP

[Dhrizzle]

Bolded for clarity. Doesn't the article make the point that being forced to use Frost Bite was one of the biggest reasons for all of the development fuckery? If so, then you're really arguing some semantics by saying EA wasn't involved.

Jtbrig is wrong on that one though, Frostbite was the BioWare's choice to use. EA make it very tempting because it is a free engine and can significantly boost the budget.

[Jtbrig7390]

if you love EA this much, just buy their stock, along with their other games

Really this is your argument now.

I don't love EA, I have no love for them at all. But there is facts and then there is your opinion. Jason Schreier is one of the few actual real games journalist out their and his story's have more weight then your opinion. But I get it anyone who disagree's with you even when they got the fact's to prove you wrong is just a fanboy or some shit.

But ya we are done here since this is all your argument is now.

- - - Updated - - -

Jtbrig is wrong on that one though, Frostbite was the BioWare's choice to use. EA make it very tempting because it is a free engine and can significantly boost the budget.

Developers of Anthem in the story I linked actually prove me right and you wrong. Frostbite was forced on them by EA and was one of the handful of things EA actually had control over.

Feel free to post something showing different.

[Dhrizzle]

Every EA studio is 100% responsible for their respective products. Bioware is 100% responsible for the state Anthem was released in. EA just gave them money and tools to create it, Bioware AGREED to the terms and failed to deliver. EA's fault was to trust Bioware to do a good job and they paid dearly for that mistake.

EA is not 100% blameless but people seldom bother to look in to where the publisher goes wrong and just tries to label them as evil dictators. They allow their studios quite a bit of creative freedom but they don't allow for the flexibility in scheduling that allows the creativity to pay off, hence the more ambitious EA titles tend to be buggy and have some underbaked or un-fun features (SimCity 2013 is another good example of this.) Basically they want their studios to be Blizzard on Activision's timetable.

Specifically to Anthem they also made problems by shifting team members and Frostbite support to the more profitable FIFA title, though this was mitigated somewhat by them transferring staff to Anthem closer to the release date.

Finally there's the incident where an EA exec told them what they had produced was crap, prompting BioWare to make flying a definite feature (something they had flip-flopped on) although that's less "evil dictator" and more valid criticism that made the game what it is.

- - - Updated - - -

Developers of Anthem in the story I linked actually prove me right and you wrong. Frostbite was forced on them by EA and was one of the handful of things EA actually had control over.

Feel free to post something showing different.

https://gamingbolt.com/biowares-fros...t-forced-by-ea

Not sure about how good an outlet that is (one of the first Google results) but it links to a podcast with Kotaku's Jason Schrier and former BioWare chief Aaryn Flynn;

"No, not at all. It was our decision. We had been wrapping up Mass Effect 3 and we just shipped Dragon Age II and we knew that our Eclipse engine, that we shipped DAII on, wasn’t going to cut it for the future iterations of Dragon Age.

It couldn’t do open world, the renderer wasn’t strong enough, those were the two big ones. We thought about multiplayer as well, as Eclipse was single-player only.

We talked internally about three options. We could have burned down Eclipse and started something new internally, we could have gone with Unreal Engine, or we could have picked Frostbite which had shown some really promising results on the rendering side of things and it was multiplayer enabled.

When it came down to it, we talked to folks and they really liked the Frostbite option and again, back to this idea of being part of a community, there were more and more teams [at EA] that were considering Frostbite. It was a decision that I made after all of the technical deep dives in probably late 2011."

[Jtbrig7390]

Not sure about how good an outlet that is (one of the first Google results) but it links to a podcast with Kotaku's Jason Schrier and former BioWare chief Aaryn Flynn;
"

That's about Mass Effect Andromeda from over a year ago.

Posted By Ravi Sinha | On 09th, Apr. 2018

Not about Anthem.

[Dhrizzle]

From the article you linked I couldn't find anyone saying Frostbite was forced on the studio, what I got was this;

"the Frostbite engine became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a whole lot of money in licensing fees.)"

That seems more like they were persuasive due to the financial benefits of using Frostbite, but that's not the same as the execs handing down an order that the studios have to use the engine.

- - - Updated - - -

That's about Mass Effect Andromeda from over a year ago.


Not about Anthem.

It's from after the time the decision was made to use Frostbite for Anthem, coming from the guy who made the decision to use Frostbite for Anthem.

[Yriel]

It sounds like the devs hated Frostbite but someone in the higher levels of Bioware decided to use it because it's cheaper.

Aside from that i'm still amazed from the ongoing media blackout around bioware. The official anthem twitter hasn't posted anything for like 2 weeks, the only way i heard that they hotfixed the missing loot bug is from some private twitter of some guy from bioware that was linked on reddit.
I wonder how long they will continue to put their heads in the sand...

[Makabreska]

It sounds like the devs hated Frostbite but someone in the higher levels of Bioware decided to use it because it's cheaper.

Aside from that i'm still amazed from the ongoing media blackout around bioware. The official anthem twitter hasn't posted anything for like 2 weeks, the only way i heard that they hotfixed the missing loot bug is from some private twitter of some guy from bioware that was linked on reddit.
I wonder how long they will continue to put their heads in the sand...

Till the end. Anthem will be quietly, more and more abandoned over the next months.

[Coldkil]

Till the end. Anthem will be quietly, more and more abandoned over the next months.

Given the investment, i don't see EA/Bioware just dropping it. I expect some kind of re-launch to try to monetize at least the current stuff with some cheap improvised event randomizer or so. I can see the F2P model to be a route too.

Anyway, the game is in a bad situation and i don't see a successful future for it.

[Makabreska]

Given the investment, i don't see EA/Bioware just dropping it. I expect some kind of re-launch to try to monetize at least the current stuff with some cheap improvised event randomizer or so. I can see the F2P model to be a route too.

Anyway, the game is in a bad situation and i don't see a successful future for it.

I'm not talking about just dropping it. I'm thinking about slow but steady reduction of resources pumped into it and allowing Anthem to fade into obscurity. I mean, it makes sense from cold, business view. Better focus on upcoming titles, than trying to resurrect a game marked as a fail and meme.

[Gaidax]

Given the investment, i don't see EA/Bioware just dropping it. I expect some kind of re-launch to try to monetize at least the current stuff with some cheap improvised event randomizer or so. I can see the F2P model to be a route too.

Anyway, the game is in a bad situation and i don't see a successful future for it.

Since when EA is relaunching games. This game is a failed concept and execution and it will get its token support EA is committed to and that's it. EA is pretty ruthless when it comes to failed games, they are given the support period and join the Origin Premier graveyard as some half-dead zombies.

EA has more than enough promising games in pipeline or its core IPs to release new games for to not waste time and effort on something that has outright failed.

They will just dissect it and use parts for whatever they will do next. It will basically go the same way as Andromeda, especially considering Andromeda is three times the game Anthem is and with a strong IP and still got killed off.

[Coldkil]

I'm not talking about just dropping it. I'm thinking about slow but steady reduction of resources pumped into it and allowing Anthem to fade into obscurity. I mean, it makes sense from cold, business view. Better focus on upcoming titles, than trying to resurrect a game marked as a fail and meme.

Since when EA is relaunching games. This game is a failed concept and execution and it will get its token support EA is committed to and that's it. EA is pretty ruthless when it comes to failed games, they are given the support period and join the Origin Premier graveyard as some half-dead zombies.

EA has more than enough promising games in pipeline or its core IPs to release new games for to not waste time and effort on something that has outright failed.

They will just dissect it and use parts for whatever they will do next. It will basically go the same way as Andromeda, especially considering Andromeda is three times the game Anthem is and with a strong IP and still got killed off.

Makes sense. Though since it's a new IP it may be worth exploring a different delivery to make it worth living due to not much established content and/or playerbase.

Though for the same reason it's extremely easy to kill it off.

[D3athsting]

Given how huge the world map is they could turn it into a BR (with stronger limitations to flying)

[Edge-]

Given how huge the world map is they could turn it into a BR (with stronger limitations to flying)

Oh please lord no, there's enough BR nonsense.

Also, given that there's no PvP in the game, that would likely be a huge undertaking to integrate it into the exclusively PvP setting.

[Gaidax]

Oh please lord no, there's enough BR nonsense.

Also, given that there's no PvP in the game, that would likely be a huge undertaking to integrate it into the exclusively PvP setting.

Well, it's a dead game anyway, so whatever really.

After all that's exactly what happened to Fortnite, weak PvE game that was seemingly dying and then they went on and plopped BR there.

[Onikaroshi]

I'm still salty over them killing Save the World... that's the game I wanted to play, not fucking BR.

[minteK917]

EA is not 100% blameless but people seldom bother to look in to where the publisher goes wrong and just tries to label them as evil dictators. They allow their studios quite a bit of creative freedom but they don't allow for the flexibility in scheduling that allows the creativity to pay off, hence the more ambitious

But we know for a fact this is not the case for bioware and this game. It was given 7 years. What did you expect EA to pull a square enix and give them a full decade while they rewrote a game like they did FF15. Square is just an oddity, EA did what any other publisher would have done at some point time, stop bleeding cash and release it. Hell the only reason EA got a playable fake demo for E3 is that they said, ok this is releasing at THIS DATE. Imagine if EA had not forced it, Anthem might still not even be released lol. They still had their fingers up their asses.

[chazus]

So I finally cleared all the feats for all MW weapons/blueprints, and all of the Ranger MW blueprints.
I farmed Elysian Caches till those went away.

I sort of ran out of things to do otherwise, outside of grinding legendaries, but other games are starting to become more entertaining. I haven't uninstalled Anthem, but after the Elysian Caches stopped, I haven't logged in since.

[KrayZ33]

Jtbrig is wrong on that one though, Frostbite was the BioWare's choice to use. EA make it very tempting because it is a free engine and can significantly boost the budget.

Is that even important though, it's not like the engine failed the game.
If they want to use the engine, I'm pretty sure an AAA studio can easily whip it up to work. They have dedicated staff for that. Just look at what Apex/Titanfall did to the Source engine. And on top of that, Bioware has had experience with the engine.



Certainly, at some points there are limitations to what an engine can do.
I doubt Frostbite has these issues with a game that was supposed to be Anthem.
After all, even if the time was limited due to technical issues such as this. The game has several design *decisisons* that are plain horrible and stupid that are under no circumstances related to the engine or any time-related issues it might've caused

To give it a comparison.

It's as if you'd blame Blizzard for using it's own engine and it's the reason why Diablo 3 was such a mess in the beginning.

Bioware had more than enough time to optimize the engine to their needs, it's their fault that they didn't know what do, and what to do with the game. Wasn't it basically remade in the last year or something as seen by certain aspects in the game design? Can't quite remember the video that tried to analyze the history of the game and how it turned out.

[LazarusLong]

Really this is your argument now.

Pretty solid advice actually https://www.google.ru/search?q=ea+st...hrome&ie=UTF-8

[Baconeggcheese]

Oh please lord no, there's enough BR nonsense.

Also, given that there's no PvP in the game, that would likely be a huge undertaking to integrate it into the exclusively PvP setting.

Risk of rain 2 is basically a PvE BR, and its a lot of fun / pretty much what the devs sounded like they were setting out to make in the first place. It could be the "horde mode" people have been asking for since launch.

PvP definitely has no place in the game, at least not traditional PvP. Maybe PvEvP typa thing? Like you could make the horde / BR survival mode thing and put teams / players up against each other to see who survives longer while getting the most points for doing objectives or something?

I dunno, its easy enough to come up with ideas of things that could be fun... but we're a long way from any of that.

Is that even important though, it's not like the engine failed the game.

Its not the engines fault that it is what it is and that they ended up using it, but according to thee article the engine is a huge reason for a lot of their issues. The article pretty much explains why the game was so riddled with bugs and why it keeps having bugs crop up every time they try to fix others... which sounds a lot like its on the engine and how they handled trying to develop with it.

The engine is also why its going to take them an eternity to fix everything and make progress from the sounds of things. So yeah, the engine is a big deal, but that ship has already sailed.

The problem is that people read the article with devs supposedly saying that it could take a week to fix a simple bug with frostbite, and somehow still rationalize that its a reasonable position to expect the game to be completely turned around in a couple months. Its just not gonna happen.