2927

Oh yes. Forgot about their standalones. TThey seem to be doing it right for the most part

Game as Service(s)

2928

Oh gotcha. I thought you were editorializing with Games As a Shitty Service.

2929

I prefer Games as a disService.

I definitely read the Triple Aaaaaa part in his mock condescending voice. :-)

2930

I think people tend to be more critical when a couple of circumstances are in place. 1. It’s blatantly over-promised and under-delivered, especially if there is some hubris at play. 2. It’s from a company that people are emotionally invested in already.

Anger tends to be much more powerful when it’s directed at someone you care about, and I think Bioware is getting a lot of that. Companies that people have loved for a long time, run a greater risk of getting really buried if they make a mistepp.

2931

I don’t know, Nintendo has made a lot of mistakes but the fans stick with them because they aren’t trying to screw them. EA has a stink on them from all the loot box bullshit they pull in their games, so I think fans will judge them more harshly.

BioWare got a pass with Andromeda and people picked up Anthem despite how disappointing Andromeda was.

2932

I personally don’t think that BioWare got a pass for Andromeda, but I do think a lot of fans were hoping the misstep was the exception instead of the start of a trend. This is BioWare’s second strike and the departure from their usual schtick already had fans a little nervous before Anthem was revealed to be a turd. I think there’s been a lot of angst building up ever since Andromeda and it’s all coming to a head now.

2933

I didn’t involve myself in the online communities (or subreddits) or drama when I played the Mass Effect games and Dragon Age games but I did hear of the toxicity of the GamerGate crowd who were offended and upset at BioWare being more inclusive. The addition of the transsexual Khem character in Inquisition and later non-hetero NPCs in it and Andromeda got them all angry and led to stalking and harassment campaigns against female BioWare writers. There are a few of those same bad seeds who mention “BioWare had Anita Sarkeesian visit” and “that’s why all the female models in this game are frumpy and not hot enough for me to masturbate to” but they are much smaller. It’s a shame since the DA and ME properties have a large and loyal female and LGBT fanbase that make lots of creative works. I only occasionally visited the BioWare-run BioWare Social Network forums. It’s a shame they were shut down in favour of the lame EA Answers self-help forum. BSN lives on sort of in https://bsn.boards.net

Combining the eSports-like fandom of the looter-shooter fandom with attempts at “olde BioWare” storytelling as you hear Darrah, Irving and Hudson claim in their stilted awkward interviews (“we’re not just bolting on a single player RPG” …no they did much less than that) before the game launched would be a recipe for disaster. Male gamer toxicity for sure.

The anger over Anthem is different I feel.

It strikes me looking back how many of those early EA/developer comments were just completely made up. Like, they aren’t even “lies” in the traditional sense; they weren’t covering up some other truth. There just was no game to begin with, so they were just saying whatever they could come up with that they thought sounded good. It would be like having to give a book report on a book you’ve never read, so you just completely wing it and say whatever you can think of from looking at the cover.

Experienced FPS esports looter shooter bros I guess is who I want to put most of the blame on along with disappointed BioWare loyalists?

2934

I really don’t think bioware lost fans over diverse characters. For every gamer gate troll they lost I’m sure they got 2 more fans, because their games were top quality.

The alt right crowd has zero financial impact on pop culture. This has been proven time and again. What kills your game is making it shitty, not queer NPCs.

2935

I think the hate against Andromeda is overexaggerated. I enjoyed my time with the game for the most part. All of the frontier stuff was interesting - founding new colonies, and the problems of those worlds. I’d have been interested to see a sequel where you revisited those places like 50 or 100 years in the future. I also thought the missions where you investigated what happened to the other arks were interesting.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s absolutely the “worst” game in the Mass Effect series. The main story is utterly generic, as are the protagonist and antagonist (I can’t even remember his name). Some of the supporting characters are also pretty “meh”, compared to previous games.

But it still has a bunch of enjoyably written characters too, as well as (I think) the best actual combat in the series. The different planets are all mostly interesting (I especially liked the Krogan one). But all people meme’d about after launch, was the shiny eyes, and GIFs of the inverse kinematics bugging out, and some unnatural animations that were all pretty much fixed a month after launch.

Not a great game, and a bit of a letdown to fans of the first three games, but thoroughly “fine”. I don’t regret my time with it.

And Bioware’s game before that, DA Inquisition, I actually really liked, and played through three times. Not as good as Origins, but miles better than the trainwreck that was DA2.

Bioware have the capacity to make good games still. They just need to clean up the managerial mess there, and EA need to give them to the time and resources to do what they are good at.

2936

Oh I know. I’m just saying that toxic niche tends to be vocal and they did have a silencing effect by harassment. I’m just glad that they are not the reason this time for Anthem.

2937

But wasn’t Anthem designed specifically for NO-MEMES, how can this be?

Andromeda was a mediocre Mass Effect game, but the MP part was nice, despite them microing the hell out of it after ME3 MP turned out to be a hit.

2938

I think Andromeda actually was a fine game. If it would’ve come out from anyone else, it’d be treated differently. And sure, I do understand that context matters, but the hostility of the community still feels unwarranted.

My worry is that the AAA RPG genre is going to suffer because of this, since it was already hard and expensive to pull it off.

2939

32gwu2

2940

This may be a casualty of Anthem, but like @Wallapuctus I hope this visible failure at least puts the brakes on consumer-hostile trend of live games as a service.

2941

Hee hee. That’s exactly what I was thinking in my head.

2942

Prolific Reddit reblogger contributor to Forbes.com weighs in

2943

Dear Anthem fans:

Like the bartender in that New Pornographers video put it:

“What you have already lost, consider as totally lost.”

2944

I like the part where he’s comparing it to Destiny, cause that was one of the thing Anthem wasn’t allowed to do during development (according to the “leaks”) - but hey, Magic happened instead.

2945

The cataclysm is a catastrophe:

2946

If I were EA/Bioware, and I was determined to “save” Anthem at all costs (which I doubt EA really are), I would go almost completely silent for the next YEAR, at minimum. People will think the game is 100% dead. Some people might even be more mad than they already are.

Take that time to “fix” the game - make drastic alterations to it’s structure, build out the content, expand the story if you can, squash bugs, learn from what people have said these past four months, based on honest introspection that doesn’t blather about “magic” and so on.

E3 2020 rolls around, and Casey Hudson takes the stage at EA’s conference. Speaks honestly about the failures of Anthem when it launched over a year ago, the challenges the studio has had overall, and that they needed to take time to re-assess.

Then unveil Anthem v2.0 as the game Anthem should have been, and the vision they originally saw in their heads. Show off how improved it all is - seamless loads between indoor and outdoor areas, Fort Tarsis is now an actual social space on the open map, those giant walker things are actually moving around on the map. You can encounter other AI freelancers out in the world in random events, doing contracts of their own.

Lay out a basic-but-exciting roadmap for what is coming well into 2021, and make it clear that you’re committed to delivering on all of it. Announce some sort of “make good” for all of the people who bought in on Anthem in 2019, when it was a mess - unique cosmetics, whatever.

Something big and loud like that, would garner a lot of media attention and interest. Just incrementally making the game a little better every couple of months or whatever, will not

Will they do that? No. But if you are willing to do anything to save the game, that’s how you do it.