Anthem (Bioware's new property)

At this point? I'm not sure they can. Almost all the good talent has fled. All the good managers have fled. They've got a hostile work environment exacerbated by EA looming over them. At this point, the main thing they've got going for them is their remaining IPs, and they've basically declared failure on Mass Effect, so Dragon Age is all they've got.

They need some sort of outsider to come in and make major changes so the entire studio isn't killing itself every time they make games. EA could work, but as I understand it their work culture is only slightly better. Hire management consultants and actually listen to them, set reasonable work hours, all that. But most of the industry is having problems like this right now, so I'm not sure there's anyone who could help them.

We won't really know until we either see DA 4 or we get insider news regarding whether the studio has the direction it needs going forward and whether they've learned some painful lessons from the past three games they released.

Expanding on the engine thing - frostbite doesn't know how to do permanence in levels. Like, you can't have a npc give you a one-time quest, that spawns uniques ennemies, and that prompt a special interaction once you kill them, and then they stay dead instead of respawning when redoing the level. Frostbite literally doesn't know how to make a rpg world.

How do they work around this? By coding the engine to do it. Which takes time and is probably going to be hacking around the engine with workarounds rather than actually coding the feature because modifying an engine is a hell of a task to do.

Now imagine having to develop a game to stumble on themat type of issue every two days. This is frostbite when doing anything that isn't an fps.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 3rd 2019 at 5:26:20 PM

Their response seems to indicate they're more interested in being upset at being "accused" than actually taking some lessons learned.

Looking at the crunch element, I can imagine there's also a hardened edge of "Well we've all had to suffer through it, man up and just push on through." Which is hideous to work with - no sympathy from managers despite public declarations around mental health... always horrible.

I don't know whether to take that response at face value as their actual stance or to just assume it's the PR dept saving face and that they're taking it more seriously behind closed doors.

Your post reminds me of a target in persona 5, an abusive manager that goes along the lines of "my previous boss abused me, so I thought it would be fine to do the same...

-it's a vicious circle.

-Right. And I could have been the one to end it..."

I'm not sure the higher ups are taking it seriously. A good chunk of the grunt labor, OTOH, must be going" I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO" right now.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 3rd 2019 at 5:25:39 PM

I'm not hopeful, they'll just continue the downward spiral until EA liquidates them.

A 55 metacritic score might make them sit up and pay attention though. And they weren't deaf to the absolute torrent of criticism towards Andromeda.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the top were in complete denial.

According to the article it looks like this time is Bioware is learning.

Which is about time as much of what the Article describes are issues that date back to the Mass Effect Trilogy.

That they called what is basically last minute panic "Bioware Magic" says it all really.

Woolie (formerly of Super Best Friends) said that this was also the case at Ubisoft (where he worked in QA) during the Castle Super Beast Podcast last night (Ep 12). Anthem coverage starts around 2:50:00 in the podcast, and Woolie said that the last minute crunch depended on incredibly talented and experienced developers essentially using up their life force to finish the game on time. And most of Bioware's most experienced and talented devs had already jumped ship by that point. And usually, the games coalescing in the last few months in this manner usually only had to fix one big U-turn or deviation from earlier in preproduction. Not half a dozen.

I would link it, but I can't at the moment. And no doubt, that segment will be cut out as a Youtube video before long.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Apr 3rd 2019 at 5:14:38 PM

It might've been covered earlier and I missed it because I'm a goober, but it just hit me:

Why DO they spend years of development and only give themselves a year and a half for actual production?

Were they seriously believing they can pull off a decent product if they give themselves a tight schedule? Because that formula sounds incredibly reckless and it seems they've been doing it more than once and it's only now being acknowledged.

(Oh man, BioWare is in a really dark place...)

EDIT: Oh wait, forget my question. Looks like already answered it. The crunching was because they had super talented guys giving it their all, but now that they're gone, the crunching isn't nearly as effective.

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Apr 3rd 2019 at 12:13:37 PM

Well, that's due to mismanagement to be honest. But the last minute crunch was also embedded in the company culture at that point, and senior staff were actually rather flippantly using 'Bioware Magic' as a crutch. An overly optimistic and devil-may-care "it'll all come together" attitude that was used to dismiss concerns.

And it was EA who only gave them a year and a half of actual production. This was EA descending upon them, demanding their tribute of a product they can ship, and mandating that it comes out before March 2019 for financial reasons. So they had to change gears from their kinda meandering aimless pre-production and go straight into a rush to the finish line because EA kicked them up the butt. I don't think Bioware would have chosen only a year and a half of actual production if it was up to them, but they had no elevator pitch, no clear vision for the game even when they were entering production.

They basically had to use the announcement trailer as their reference point for what the game was going to be. Because that was how they found out too.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Apr 3rd 2019 at 5:23:24 PM

This is one of the few times Angry Joe actually sympathizes with EA's decision. After waiting five years for a game with almost no actual progress, it's not difficult to see why EA would give Bioware an ultimatum like that.

On side note, am I crazy for still wanting to go to game development even if only knowledge I learned is stuff like "One of main reasons why game production deadlines slip up is that programmers thought the important thing they needed to do was too much of pain to do so they instead created new assets they thought were cool even though they weren't in the plan for the game" and I didn't learn to program or make graphics? :p And in general that "You are probably going to work for publisher eventually because you need that money for development"

Anyway, yeah, game development in bigger companies is kind of a mess a lot of time.

is " One of main reasons why game production deadlines slip up is that programmers thought the important thing they needed to do was too much of pain to do so they instead created new assets they thought were cool " the lesson you take away from the frostbite disaster ?

Because that's honestly kind of the worst possible lesson to get out of it, not gonna lie.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 3rd 2019 at 7:44:12 PM

No, that was from game development courses as actual example given by the same teacher who told to squeeze as much money out of publisher as possible

(Note: I'mma gonna be fair and give context for latter, basically advice was that whenever you ask publisher for resources, you should ask for more than what you think you need because publishers probably are gonna give less and by later parts of development they are less likely to give more of them at all, so better ask it early)

Actually, something hit me again:

All those guys who made BioWare the great place it once was, exactly where did they go? (Or at the very least, where did the 3 most important ones go?)

One is working at a tech company that wants to break into game development. Can't remember which one or which company. Think it was mentioned in one of these threads.

I think Gaider is doing non-video game work these days.

Which three are you talking about?

Drew Karpyshyn, certainly, as his departure from Bioware early in Anthem's devcycle made a shitload of waves.

Not sure about Casey Hudson, since he's back and he's largely responsible for getting Anthem off the ground at last.

As for the Frostbite thing, I've also seen some stuff claiming that EA didn't actually force Bioware to use Frostbite. Rather, this was something Bioware's own leadership forced on their developers.

Something that's a lot easier to believe after this article revealed just how out of touch Bioware's leadership is with their own developers.

Edited by M84 on Apr 5th 2019 at 3:23:40 AM

A lot of old Baldur's Gate era Bioware staff are over at Obsidian.

Casey Hudson came back as Bioware's general manager in 2017 - so around the 'kicking development up the butt to get something out' point.

The Doctors, Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, are in the craft beer and tech startup industries, respectively.

I was under the impression that EA wanted all their studios to be using the same engine. Were they merely pressuring studios into using Frostbite rather than mandating them, then? And it was actually up to the individual studios?

Edited by GoldenKaos on Apr 4th 2019 at 9:50:34 AM

It also could just be a toxic air that everyone isn't recognizing and causing miscommunication. Similar nonsense is what came about when Rockstar advertised "Our employees are happy to be working 120+ hour work weeks to make RDR 2 perfect" only for the employees to snipe back that the only reason they did was because the requests didn't feel like they could be refused in the first place.

So EA might not be forcing anyone to use Frostbite, but it might be strongly suggested ("We got this fancy new engine that can do a lot of amazing things and look at our internal infrastructure that's supposed to help you with getting it working!") to use it, with any leadership feeling like they can't turn the offer down, even if the execs don't see it that way.

Its a power imbalance. And considering it sounds like things have been tense between EA and Bioware for awhile, that can't have contributed to what the company felt they can and cannot do.

So can Anthem even be fixed at this point?

Cause it’s looking fucking unsalvageable.

Like a building built without a stable infrastructure, should you build in the infrastructure or just abandon it?