• Bioware's Anthem is worse made than initially thought
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https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964 “I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.” “We’re trying to make this huge procedural world but we’re constantly fighting Frostbite because that’s not what it’s designed to do,” said one developer. “Things like baking the lighting can take 24 hours. If we’re making changes to a level, we have to go through another bake process. It’s a very complex process Because leadership didn’t want to discuss Destiny, that developer added, they found it hard to learn from what Bungie’s loot shooter did well. “We need to be looking at games like Destiny because they’re the market leaders,” the developer said. “They’re the guys who have been doing these things best. We should absolutely be looking at how they’re doing things.” As an example, the developer brought up the unique feel of Destiny’s large variety of guns, something that Anthem seemed to be lacking, in large part because it was being built by a bunch of people who had mostly made RPGs. “We really didn’t have the design skill to be able to do that,” they said. “There just wasn’t the knowledge base to be able to develop that kind of diversity.”
This is why I never want to go into triple A development. It just never seems worth the tons of potential stress you get from it. Plus you're usually super expendable, compared to a small developer where you have much more control and input on the project.
Who knew a studio left with only delusional idiots in the lead would be dysfunctional? This is exactly why Andromeda failed as well. Narcissists with their heads up their asses jerking the studio around from checkbox to checkbox, rather than adhering to an actual vision for the game itself. If you're making a destiny clone and you're not allowed to acknowledge that Destiny exists, the result will be exactly the same as if you make a game about diverse species and their micro and macro social relations in a shared galaxy, while pretending that one subset of humans can't be victims of bigotry. Like, how dense can you get?
Imagine having an engine more hard to develop for than Source
Halo 2.
The funny part is that publishers still won't learn. They'll keep on putting out defective products because of toxic environments and dumb deadlines, and then blame it on entitled gamers and fire a bunch of people, which would happen even if it was a fine product.
I imagine Frostbite can handle many things, it's just that the dev team don't have great experience with it. When they made the switch with Andromeda they screwed many things over which I'm sure DICE would have the expertise and know-how to solve, since it's their engine.
The game industry needs to unionize, this crunch culture shit is terrible for everyone.
It wasn't hard to work with from a artist's prospective. The engineering team made a big mistake in adding unrealistic features that the Xbox could handle.
The editing kit on Windows is right up there with Hammer for being the most useless crash happy program ever. Plus H2 Vista likes to crash to desktop for absolutely no reason without any crash logs. Now remember Halo 2 for the MCC is built off of that.
FYI, Bioware/EA had a blogpost at the ready for damage control. https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1113101944887934976
EA sound like heroes in this story because all the problems accumulated internally within Bioware and Frostbite, while EA rushed strike teams all over different companies to help Bioware reach their deadline, which they have spent 4+ YEARS in preproduction and still struggles with vision during their short 2 year production. If their crunch and leadership woes continue on they should just cull the company. For good. Move the talent to companies that manage people and resources better.
Them not even wanting to look at other looter shooters makes so much sense that... of coourse it's bad. I mean how the fuck do you release a game in which you're meant to be picking up tons of different weapons and... they all literally look identical to one another. No seriously how does that happen?
I dunno if this is rhetorical.. Because leadership didn’t want to discuss Destiny, that developer added, they found it hard to learn from what Bungie’s loot shooter did well. the developer brought up the unique feel of Destiny’s large variety of guns, something that Anthem seemed to be lacking, in large part because it was being built by a bunch of people who had mostly made RPGs. “We really didn’t have the design skill to be able to do that,” they said. “There just wasn’t the knowledge base to be able to develop that kind of diversity.”
Poor management, lack of a vision, constant revisions from scratch, difficult to use software, loss of talented workers, ignored feedback, internal strife, etc. This is a case study on poor management. Nearly all the good talent left Bioware due to this mismanagement. I expect Bioware to be the next EA casualty as all employees get moved to sports games and high profile releases.
I mean EA is the one who said all their studios should use frostbite
It seriously hurts me that BioWare has fallen this far.
Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware.” “I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.” Holy shit.
I don't know what you're talking about. The editing kit is pretty straightforward.
One mandate from Anthem’s directors had been to make the game “unmemeable,” a reaction to Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s jittery facial animations, which became an internet joke in the days leading up to that game’s release. I want to call attention to this, but I don't really have anything to add to the discussion.
Essentially man fighting against god
So they actually made an effort to rival Destiny's bland title with an even blander title but then panicked at the last minute and decided to go with a just a little less blander title? Wow.
and this didn't raise any concerns at step fucking one?
Actually I do have something to add now. This demo became the foundation for the seven-minute gameplay trailer that BioWare showed the public a few weeks later. In June of 2017, just a few days after that last-minute name change fromBeyond to Anthem, BioWare boss Aaryn Flynn took the stage of EA’s E3 press conference and announced the game. The next day, at Microsoft’s press conference, they showed a demo that helped everyone, including BioWare’s own developers, finally see how Anthem would play. While not a new quip, glad to see confirmation that any "gameplay trailers" shown at E3 are outright stinking lies.
They should’ve called it “Jetpack Knights”. and remove the sci-fi and rework the setting from early in the project to be about knights with jetpacks the classes are already mostly based on fantasy rpg class archetypes bam, increase interest in the setting by 500% and make it unique from destiny i would joke “hire me BioWare” but going by the article I don’t think I’d want to even as a joke
why is Frosbite still barebones why do developers keep their tech for themselves instead of integrating it to the main branch, or even make them available as solutions for the rest of EA developers WHY DID BIOWARE SCRAPPED THEIR CODEBASE TWICE i bet that if EA had other games in production they would have scrapped anthem before e3 2017
This does absolutely nothing to stop people from (imho rightfully) blaming EA for Bioware losing its soul but it does paint it as more of an assisted suicide than straight murder.
That's not just AAA development, game dev has awful work conditions across the board (save for a couple exceptions). Indie dev sucks in a different way, but you'll have huge working hours and a hugely stressful environment regardless of how big the company is.
Why did they try to do procedural shit again with Frostbite. They fucking knew the engine had problems, that's why Andromeda got so fucked up. They tried to make it into a game with procedural planet generation and clearly it didn't work then, why would it work now?
I mean even Dice themselves used that as a reason for no mod support when BF3 came out. Supposedly building the maps requires so much processing power that it would take ages to just build one map on regular hardware.
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