MULTI Anthem

This account of Anthem’s development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem’s development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It’s a story of technical failings, as EA’s Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team’s needs. It’s a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It’s a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.

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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.”

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We’d like to take a moment to address an article published this morning about BioWare, and Anthem’s development. First and foremost, we wholeheartedly stand behind every current and former member of our team that worked on the game, including leadership. It takes a massive amount of effort, energy and dedication to make any game, and making Anthem would not have been possible without every single one of their efforts. We chose not to comment or participate in this story because we felt there was an unfair focus on specific team members and leaders, who did their absolute best to bring this totally new idea to fans. We didn’t want to be part of something that was attempting to bring them down as individuals. We respect them all, and we built this game as a team.

We put a great emphasis on our workplace culture in our studios. The health and well-being of our team members is something we take very seriously. We have built a new leadership team over the last couple of years, starting with Casey Hudson as our GM in 2017, which has helped us make big steps to improve studio culture and our creative focus. We hear the criticisms that were raised by the people in the piece today, and we’re looking at that alongside feedback that we receive in our internal team surveys. We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid “crunch time,” and it was not a major topic of feedback in our internal postmortems. Making games, especially new IP, will always be one of the hardest entertainment challenges. We do everything we can to try and make it healthy and stress-free, but we also know there is always room to improve.

As a studio and a team, we accept all criticisms that will come our way for the games we make, especially from our players. The creative process is often difficult. The struggles and challenges of making video games are very real. But the reward of putting something we created into the hands of our players is amazing. People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.

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Cycron schrieb:

Das juckt die Chefetage jetzt nur, weil beide Spiele scheiße wurden. Wenn beide Spiele ein Erfolg gewesen wären, wären EA und die Chefetage die Quality of Life Situation der Mitarbeiter weiterhin am Arsch vorbei gegangen. Solange am Ende ein erfolgreiches Produkt raus kommt.

Jetzt werden sie kalkuliert sich überlegen wie sie die Arbeitsatmosphäre verbessern können, aber nicht wegen der Sorge um die Mitarbeiter sondern um die Sorge des Geschäfts.

Das ist die ekelige Story am Ende.

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okst666 schrieb:

Aber nur weil wie bei destiny 1 Milliarde bezahlte Inder darauf warten die Session aufzufüllen, damit du deinen Strike spielen kannst.

Bei destiny spielen die wenigstens noch mit. Bei Anthem fliegen sie meistens nur in den nächsten See um da zu chillen.

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  [*]Dieses Update soll sich vor allem um das Problem mit den Komponenten für die „falschen“ Javelin kümmern.
  [*]Zudem sollen Belohnungen aus den Elysischen Laden nun direkt nach dem Ende der Festungen angezeigt werden.
  [*]Dazu sollen die Neuigkeiten im Spiel gefixt werden: Den Spielern werden seit Patch 1.04 keine News mehr beim Start des Spiels angezeigt.

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Eventer schrieb:

Hab die das Spiel leichter gemacht? Grandmaster1 ist ja nur noch Durchrennen. Selbst der Festungsboss war in 5sek down

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Was machten die Spieler? Im Anthem-Subreddit hat ein Spieler ein Video von der Festung „Herz des Zorns“ hochgeladen. In der Beschreibung heißt es, wenn man in der ersten Phase des Bosskampfs gegen den Monitor genug Schaden macht, um ihn zu besiegen, erhält das Spiel einen Softlock.

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Softlock bedeutet, dass Anthem in der Situation zwar weiterläuft, die Spieler aber keine Möglichkeit haben, weiter fortzuschreiten.

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