Actually, if open letters are to believed, ea might be the only reason anthem was as good as it managed to be. . . And that the entire clusterfuck around it was mostly biowares fault, or rather managements fault. Over reliance on "bioware magic" or last minute crunch to literally anybody else. Its said that half the staff didnt even know what they were making till the e3 "real gameplay footage" came out then had to scramble to make what was in the trailer.
The whole thing was a hot mess and a crystalized example of corpo beauracracy and too many managers
My contention is that Bioware had no business making a live-service title in the first place. A decision to pivot an RPG developer into that style of game out of nowhere reeks of corporate meddling from the very beginning. If EA salvaged it, it's because they wanted the live service gamble to desperately succeed.
SWTOR was made by BioWare Austin, a completely separate team that got spun up specifically to make that. BioWare Edmonton (the RPG-focused studio) tried to pivot into live service themselves with Anthem. That was the real misstep.
Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons.
The whole development process was insanely sloppy... the live service part of it really doesn't carry most the blame when they struggled to even choose a name for the game
the studio leadership just sucked... they would've failed even at making a single player game.
We keep seeing it too, Suicide Squad, everything Sony keeps forcing out, studio heads are so blinded by dollar signs, jealousy watching Pubg, Fortnite, GTA online, print money, they keep forcing stupid out the door..
Dragon Age: Inquisition turning out okay was the worst thing to happen to Bioware. Their development process was already awful by then, but the result did well enough they didn't see a need to change. That led to the Andromeda and Anthem train wrecks.
And it wasn’t even that good. It had its moments but it was a weak year for games and Witcher 3 really outclassed it the year after. Gotta say the Trespasser dlc saved it a bit but the main game story was poor.
The EA execs forced Bioware to shove out mindless moneymakers in a competitive market instead of true sequels to ME and DA. They should've all been fired when BG3 became a smashing success within the traditional WRPG genre, which is what DA3 should've been. If they wanted to make a live-service, f2p style game, they could've spun off the already successful ME3 co-op mode. I see the same thing happening with Blizzard, where SC3 has been deprioritized despite all indications that it would sell extremely well in the current environment. The RTS market has been completely desaturated and internet speeds are great while GPUs prices have gone through the roof.
Anthem suffered much the same way No Man's Sky did: Rushed by the publisher to make a quick buck, launched amidst bigger AAA games, then the publisher got mad when the game flopped due to over-hyping a game they rushed.
What sucks is Bioware saw working on fixing Anthem when EA shut it down. They had completely redone a lot of the systems, but EA would rather pull the plug than actually try letting devs make a good game.
No Man's Sky came back from this scenario and is one of the best space exploration games today, so I think Anthem could have become something amazing if EA wasn't a bunch of cowards.
It's not about faith of cowardice. Those things don't even enter the equation. EA is an entity of pure greed. There isn't a single consideration in their hearts except immediate profit. I imagine an oil company that decided to pump money out of people's pockets instead of viscous liquids from the ground.
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u/Mundane-Opinion-4903 7h ago
Actually, if open letters are to believed, ea might be the only reason anthem was as good as it managed to be. . . And that the entire clusterfuck around it was mostly biowares fault, or rather managements fault. Over reliance on "bioware magic" or last minute crunch to literally anybody else. Its said that half the staff didnt even know what they were making till the e3 "real gameplay footage" came out then had to scramble to make what was in the trailer.
The whole thing was a hot mess and a crystalized example of corpo beauracracy and too many managers