Core gameplay was fun, everything else about it — EVERYTHING – sucked.
Oh hey! CEO Andrew Wilson has something to say about Anthem.
“We brought together these two groups of players who were making this emotional value calculation on two different vectors,” Wilson explained. “One was traditional BioWare story driven content, and the other was this action-adventure type content. About the 30 or 40 hour mark they really had to come together and start working in on the elder game. At that point everyone kind of went, ‘Oh, hang a minute.’ Now the calculation is off. It’s off because I’ve got a friend who sits in this other category of player. They want to play the game a certain way. I want to play the game a certain way. The promise was we can play together, and that’s not working very well. Oh, by the way I’m used to 100 hours of BioWare story, and that’s not what I got.’ Or, ‘I expected that this game would have meaningfully advanced the action component that we’d seen in games like Destiny before, and I don’t feel like it has.’”
“If we believed that at the very core the world wasn’t compelling people, if we believed at the very core that the characters weren’t compelling for people, or the Javelin suits weren’t compelling, or traversing the world and participating in the world wasn’t compelling then provided we hadn’t made promises to our players… we might not invest further," Wilson said. “IP lives for generations, and runs in these seven to ten year cycles. So, if I think about Anthem on a seven to ten year cycle, it may not have had the start that many of us wanted, including our players. I feel like that team is really going to get there with something special and something great, because they’ve demonstrated that they can.”
“What the BioWare teams are thinking about is that we’re going to build a lot of different types of games,” Wilson explained. “We’re going to have our core BioWare audience that’s been with us for a really long time. There are kids today who are 12 years old who weren’t around when BioWare started making games… and they have different expectations of what a BioWare game should be in the context of the world they’ve grown up in. As a result of that, BioWare has to evolve and has to expand and has to test the elasticity of that brand. The teams at BioWare will continue to come to work every day and listen to their players old and new and seek to deliver on the promises they’ve made to those players. That’s what you’re seeing with Anthem today.”
BioWare Edmonton is our only local studio in the city where I live and I had some friends who went through there and were chewed-up-and-spit-out. I continue to dance on their grave only because every single thing about it was done so badly.
Wow… “And even with two weekends of player testing, Anthem’s biggest flaws simply couldn’t be detected”… Two whole weekends of testing with players.
Flawless weekends at that.
Needs more Kinder Egg Surprise Mechanics.
This is the kind of drivel that really pisses me off. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of what you have, and how to use it to it’s best benefit. It’s like taking someone who is amazing at guitar, and telling them they have to sing now, even if they suck at it.
Bioware has shown over and over again, that they have a proclivity for making a certain type of game, that also happens to resonate with a lot of people. Obviously the best thing to do, is something completely different. Idiots.
/shrug. This is one of those things I saw coming a mile away, and that makes me sad. I love Bioware, and have many fond memories and many hours in their games. It pisses me off, that for whatever reason, they went astray in such an obvious and easily avoidable way.
Well, part of it is that Bioware is just the name of a company. A lot of the core people from back in the day are long gone, it’s just a branch of Electronic Arts at this point.
Games are weird like that. Fans don’t seem to have expectations of what a Universal movie is, it tends to be able who the director is, maybe the big star. We don’t see games in that way, for some reason. We expect Bioware games to still be the same thing they were a decade ago, despite many of the people having moved on.
I’d argue that fans expect more specific things out of smaller, subsidiary movie studios than the giant ones. While BioWare is a branch of EA now and much of the original talent is gone, EA is still using the BioWare name to sell an expectation of those games to its fans. If it didn’t expect that, then it would just release all of their games as EA only.
ELDER game. Lmao
I don’t know how Ben Irving still has the lead producer job after two strikes of just using RNG without any sort of forethought–SWTOR and now this. Or how he can lie so creatively on LinkedIn for Anthem listing so-called roles of progression system design. Design done so well the ELDER GAME still has NO progression systems whatsoever beyond praying RNG grants a boon of favorable legendary drops. No alternate (or primary!) crafting, non-combat, faction etc. etc.
He did his job so well they have to hire for those tasks well after launch at the 2 month period and we have yet to see the results in the production environment.
While on the topic of those whose jobs should be axed, why are even two CSRs needed to maintain radio silence? Zero will do the same thing for free.
Masters of Communication these folks, on their personal accounts no less:
Please note that this is not impotent gamer rage overreaction or attacks of personal nature. These are monumental professional failures that the (cough) elder gods demand appeasement for.
The best devs tend to instill a studio-wide culture that survives after people leave. You mentor and promote the right people, to keep the vision going. It doesn’t guarantee that your studio can survive losing key people, but it better equips them to try to.
EA basically murdered Bioware slowly. They bought the company, the founders cashed out, and then rather than trying to understand what they just bought, and how to nurture that for more great games - they just put them to work cranking out sequels, and then establishing another studio that was basically treated like a lesser son, mandating multiplayer modes, throwing in “surprise mechanics”, and rushing out games to meet business deadlines instead of because they were actually ready.
They did the same thing to Visceral. Make a neat little horror game. Okay good, make a sequel. Okay cool, now make another sequel and put in microtransactions, lighten the tone to try and appeal to a mass audience, and also you need to sell an absurd number of copies now or this will be considered a failure and you’re all out of a job.
Christ, even DICE haven’t been immune to this, going from a small studio making online Battlefield games, to being expected to make epic Call of Duty competitors, and all of the business clusterfuckery around the Battlefront games.
EA are the worst, and Andrew Wilson might be the worst CEO in the industry right now (which is really saying something, in an industry that also contains Bobby Kotick and Strauss Zelnick). If it weren’t for Ultimate Team taking off like a rocket, revenue-wise, they’d be in huge trouble.
That interview makes clear that he has absolutely no idea why Anthem failed, or even that there’s a problem with Bioware at all, beyond that they failed to be “elastic” enough to fulfill EA’s idiotic expectations of them.
Getting angry over a game to such a degree that you need to start calling out individuals based on pure speculation is going a bit too far.
So it is ok to lie to and dismiss customers, but to call them out on it is a big no-no?
If it is conjecture, yes.
Uh what conjecture?
How do you figure? When he took over in Sept. 2013, the stock price was around $27. It’s now $95. That’s an annualized ROI of over 24% during a time when the S&P returned just under 10%. Seems pretty good to me. My portfolio, in particular, thanks him (and Strauss Zelnick — TTWO was another great buy).
I would think that “finance” you is more grateful than “gaming” you, course, with the extra $ you can buy good games from non-EA entities.
Good.
Trying to put my finger on the unsatisfying mechanics: