Bioware's Anthem is worse made than initially thought
99 replies, posted
dumb leadership and demands far beyond what they should be making
I feel like scaling down on project scope would help a lot of these AAA games from releasing in such sad states but I feel like the leadership won't ever let that happen.
Making something "unmemeable" basically amounts to making it forgettable, which I'd argue they succeeded at.
the very initial concept of the game as a super difficult, hard-sci-fi survival shooter sounded really interesting, and also like the kind of thing an indie developer could have bashed out in a couple years and topped the steam charts with. like Subnautica or The Forest or Astroneer or Deep Rock Galactic.
Isnt a lack of weapon uniqueness largely an art/modelling problem? How is that a problem they couldnt address due to a lack of prior experience? Mass Effect 1 had that problem, but they largely fixed it in 2&3. How did they run into the same problem? It just sounds like an excuse for managing what their modellers worked on poorly
I... how???? What the fuck...
HOW
HOW????
Who in the fuck decided that the best way to beat an established competition is to NOT LOOK AT WHAT THE COMPETITION DID RIGHT AND IMPROVING ON IT??
I don't give a shit about Anthem or Destiny in particular yet this single line has me screaming inside my own head from just how braindead this is.
I still would say that a determined community can overcome insane limitations.
I can see why the idea of standardising Frostbite across the whole company was appealing, but this is the second AAA title that seems to have been majorly damaged by the decision
It makes sense that they'd want to get out in front of bad word of mouth, but in this case it's just trying to paper over structural problems rather than addressing the root problems.
What good EA games have used Frostbite which aren't from DICE?
Considering that Bioware devs mention it takes around a day just to bake the lighting into a map, combined with other stuff we know from the Bad Company 2 era of Frostbite. Yeah...it's not really an excuse. The engine just isn't built to be distributed at all.
If I recall, early on in the talks about mod support someone from DICE or a studio that was working with Frostbite mentioned it required essentially a small server farm to handle the asset pipeline effectively. Every single step is quite compute intensive in order to actually generate the visuals it does. It's not an efficient pipeline at all, more contemporary engines can probably do what Frostbite does with less hassle now. Engines have come a long way since Frostbite 1.5/ 2 after all. Studios needed a DICE dev on hand at all times to help troubleshoot earlier iterations of the pipeline too it seems.
If Raycevicks video on Andromeda is accurate (I see no reason for him to lie). Whist making Dragon Age: Inquisition Bioware weren't even provided a proper skeletal animation system for Frostbite. The engine just didn't have a generic enough one in place at the time and everyone was implementing almost all of this stuff from near scratch.
Frostbite as an end user experience is quite good. It's got great visual effects, the scale of levels it can handle can be quite impressive, built in destruction physics and all that is neat. But it sounds like a fucking cursed platform for developers. DICE genuinely seemed to struggle to use it for a while, and they made the fucking thing.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/110359/72e172f3-1e17-4800-9470-5645689c4806/image.png
Here's a list of every game to use Frostbite period - nothing stands out to me other than the Battlefield series.
I honestly would argue otherwise seeing how this game managed to reach F76's levels of broken in a fraction of the time, surpass it and doesn't look to be slowing down. This is just lighting another fire in the furnace that will likely burn whatever's left of Bioware. The game mechanics and execution themselves might be forgettable and bland, but everything attached to it is going to go down in infamy ala Lawbreakers, Radical Heights and Battlebourne.
No, no Anthem is just as shit as I always expected it to be, we are talking about Nu-Bioware and not Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age: Origins Bioware here.
Standardising Frostbite accross all of EA's subsidiaries only makes sense if they put the time and money into making it a generalised engine. It's clear they didn't.
I remember hearing a second-hand story from a developer of one of the latest Need for Speed having issues with Frostbite, as the game kept crashing because it kept expecting the player to have a gun.
...literally everything in that article is EXACTLY the shit I'm hearing about the development of Inquisition and Andromeda, basically actually making the game in the last year.
So if we ignore the games that were mentioned in the article, then all we really have of note is Need for Speed and even those really didn't sit in my memory as being particularly interesting.
This is one of the reasons I dropped out of my 3D Modelling for Games course at University. A year in, all this news about how truly garbage the Games Development industry actually is to work in, and how bad it is for your health etc started to crop up. Then my actual tutors started to chime in after a while and talk about how "Hard" and "Difficult" it was in that industry. I think the thing that pushed me over the edge was when my animation and rigging tutor came out and said he quit the industry to come teach instead because it became too much for him.
I may be in debt as a result of leaving the course, but I genuinely feel like I dodged a goddamn bullet by not continuing,
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/113321/39b1ffa4-5d71-41a6-bd69-77381a19b0a3/image.png
I don't want this game is so fucked up
Pro-tip: if you still want to get into an industry that has almost the exact same skillset as game development, but is significantly more stable, go into the simulations industry.
Could you do a reconversion to 3D movie animation given your skills?
The consistent theme across these games seems to be the creation and development of some grandiose plans and designs, some really impressive ideas, followed by a creeping period of several years where these ideas are hacked off one-by-one as the development team comes to realize that their plans are completely unworkable with the tools provided - namely the Frostbite engine.
Something that immediately springs to mind regarding these games is that they all entered their pre-production phase (as far as I can tell) prior to Frostbite becoming the required engine for EA studios. It's like building a computer and buying the parts while letting somebody else buy the case and decide the form-factor. All the planning in the world ain't worth shit if you don't have the tools at hand to move those plans forward.
I sense that part of the problem at the core of all this is that Bioware has struggled and chafed under corporate oversight. We can bang on and on about how evil EA is, and I certainly don't agree with them mandating what engine their developers should be using, but in reading this it seems that Bioware is still acting as though they're in full control and that they have full direction over the development of their games. They're planning without foresight, and then suddenly being forced to tack backwards when EA pokes it's head in and says "Hey, you're gonna be using Frostbite Engine now" or "That flying thing looks really neat, put that in your game."
Inquisition, Andromeda and Anthem all started when the company was still riding the (relative) high coming off the Mass Effect trilogy, and all three became bogged down in the exact same ways. They seriously need to take a step back, lay everything on the table and say "what can we do with the tools we have in front of us?" rather than shooting for the moon before realizing they can't even break orbit. Hopefully, with DA4 in the pipeline, they've got a handle now on things and know where they stand in terms of matching their ambition to their capability. Hopefully it isn't too late to save this ship from sinking.
This is the "White tears" mug dude that was the head of ME:A
https://twitter.com/KingCurryThundr/status/1113104438657519616
https://twitter.com/KingCurryThundr/status/1113105240692285444
https://twitter.com/KingCurryThundr/status/1113122261182152704
https://twitter.com/KingCurryThundr/status/1113123016173674497
i guess dragon age 4 isn't happening
What I find interesting is that despite Frostbite being an issue across all three games, it seems overall quality of the end product has decreased from Inquisition to Andromeda to Anthem.
According to the article, None of those games actually shared tools they made for the engine. So simple problems with the engine that needed new tools developed were all developed individually for each game instead of shared like you imagine it would with them all using the same engine. And with the reports of tons of experienced developers leaving from game to game, it makes sense that the tools they made reflected that.
Crunch and overwork can still be a problem there but at least all the big studios have unions
roflfuckingmaozedong If EA hadn't rushed Mass Effect 2 and 3, we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with, and they would have more money and a better extant opinion of their company.
I really wish this game turned out well because the concept(a coop shooter where you play as iron man with a group of other iron mans) is something I always wanted and the flight feels really nice at least on console, but I think the choice of developer and choice of engine were just wrong.
they should've just used the Infinity Engine
imagine Anthem but you can't do a mission cause you just keep hearing "You must gather your party before venturing forth." it'd probably be a lot more fun tbh
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