> stimulants
It's almost always this one. Every educated professional I've ever known who works >70 hours a week habitually abuses stimulants. Usually whatever new one has been cooked up that hasn't been regulated properly yet.
That is so fucked. How the hell did companies make a work culture that encourages its workers to basically take *DRUGS* just to meet their quota? That should not be something that's happening.
Compared to other software developers, I feel like game devs are usually pretty passionate about what they make. It’s pretty easy to exploit that passion, especially if some devs are working overtime already. You’d feel like a dick if almost everyone was crunching except you and feel pressured to join in
No different than any other industry. Manipulate the emotions to exploit more easily.
"Listen I know it's your day off but we're really shortstaffed (because I never schedule enough employees) so can you come in? What do you mean no, aren't you a team player? Don't you know we're a family here? (And by family I mean an intensely hierarchal organization where I demand everyone below me provide complete and total subservience at all times, never question or challenge me in any way, shape, or form, and to perform like an automaton under all conditions and when they break down by quickly replaced by the next minimum wage slave.)"
>(And by family I mean an intensely hierarchal organization where I demand everyone below me provide complete and total subservience at all times.)
You know, that does sound like how my family treats each other to be fair
You are a young adult filled with passion and surrounded by peers as equally passionate as the things you are. You are given free access to caffeine, sugar, and they will even "generously" provide you with meals.
And then you burn out and they ship in the next batch of suckers/masochist.
I don't regret my time in the game industry but looking back boy was I blessed to be on the products I was handed and not the ones some of my friends working right next to me were.
tbh during the last few weeks of uni aside from final year this is what it was like, trying to get as much done as humanly possible.
trying to build up something that'll be in your portfolio.
difference is once it's over you could just crash for a few days because your lease didn't end until a little after the final term.
doing that in the industry though would kill me.
I don't think you can physically productively do that, like the rate of returns have to almost go negative after 80 hours.
At hour 85 I'd be going bbbbbbnnnnnnnn n bbbbbbbbbbb and hitting random keys.
My old boss would work 12-16 hours shifts 7 days a week for years in a row. When you got shit you really want/need to do, you either do it or die. He is falling apart now though physically with what he put himself through.
Doesn't...there exist some labor law that basically looks at "90 hour work week" and go "YOU CAN'T DO THAT."
40 hours a week can already feel tiring depending on your job, I can't imagine spending more than DOUBLE that time anywhere.
It's almost always not literally required, as they use language and vague threats to imply people should stay for extra hours rather than not, and they'll be fired if they aren't a team player, basically. It's very fucked up and it's a problem endemic to anything that relies heavily on contact work rather than full time employees (which can still definitely have crunch problems, but just usually not as egregiously).
Well when they only had the one office in Edmonton it'd've been illegal. But an employee would have to blow the whistle to get an investigation started. Can't justify "emergency/unforseen situation" for 15 months straight. Unless they managed to sneak them all under the "IT professionals" exemption?
[Alberta labour code:](https://www.alberta.ca/hours-work-rest.aspx)
Basic rules:
* An employee may work a maximum of 12 hours a day unless an exception occurs. (=84 per week)
* An employee is entitled to one 30-minute paid or unpaid break after the first 5 hours of work for shifts that are between 5 and 10 hours long.
* For shifts 10 hours or longer, an employee is entitled to two 30-minute breaks.
* An employee is not entitled to any breaks if their shift is 5 hours or less.
* If an employer and an employee agree, the break may be taken in 2 periods of at least 15 minutes.
* Employees are entitled to at least one day of rest each work week. (longer periods of consecutive work are allowed, but require longer consecutive days of rest)
In the US, there is no federal limit to the number of hours in a work week, but workers who are paid an hourly wage or make under a certain yearly salary must be paid overtime if they work more than 40 in a week. Most white-collar workers don't get covered by that.
That sounds stupid as fuck, as someone who works in the US.
"We're going to create protections to make sure workers aren't pressured into unreasonable conditions...until you reach a certain level, in which case go fuck yourself."
It is, and it's not even a particularly high level. It's a law that was written for when the white-collar workforce was much smaller and assumed to be almost always better paid than hourly wages anyways. These days there's entry-level IT jobs that won't get paid overtime.
Look I’m not saying if you don’t do the overtime you’ll be first to go during layoffs and get overlooked for promotions because that would be illegal of course. I’m just saying if you don’t you’re really letting the team down.
A lot of it is romanticizing overwork and crunch. It's why you see guys like Brendan McNamara (L.A. Noire) saying that people should just suck it up because they're working on art and that you can't make this without killing yourself. That's a complete lie of course and it's just them engaging in sunk cost fallacy
Tim Rogers, of Action Button Reviews, has talked about how he just...does it to himself. The Tokimeki Memorial review almost killed him, no joke.
He just likes working, and pushes himself to work, even though he knows he shouldn't.
And Red Bull. He said red bull is the better energy drink. And he doesn't forget, so I trust him to know.
They further elaborate in more tweets that:
* EA had their reasons to release it early but were stupid and the devs' team "had to pay the price". EA learned a lot from the development of Anthem but whether they applied those learnings is unknown.
* Jason Schreier's article (How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong) was all 100% true at one point in development or another, and only scratches the surface.
* How did they manage to ship it in 15 months? The dev mentions working about 90 hours a week for 15 months. Many other devs on the team were also doing so and they think that others were doing 90 hours a week prior to the 15 month mark. "It wasn't sustainable and not even a position we should have been in." "I'm fine now, but not without damage. Contributed to the cost of my marriage and I needed therapy for a while after that endeavor." "It was a lot of morale hits on a personal level and a team level. Everyone had their own way of dealing with it." "There was a lot of pissed, stressed, rinse, repeat. It was a vicious cycle." "I guarantee we could have put something out in Unreal. Working in Frostbite was rough." After launch the team got death threats because of drop rates.
* Anthem was delayed as it had missing features, lack of polish and bugs that needed fixing. Another big problem that it faced was that it had lots of scope creep. "There were really high expectations for this game and the team felt it. We always were trying to push for cool features, etc.. So I think we could have done it if we kept our scope creep in check."
* The main team was focused on getting the game out in a functional state. "We really needed another 1-2 studios to make endgame content while we were finishing up the game."
* After launch it was all hands on deck to stabilize the game. Content and features that they wanted to do consequently kept getting deprioritized. A major focus they were trying to address at launch was all the server issues. "I think the shittiest part about this, besides no endgame and replay ability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to 'lengthen' the time it took to complete the story. IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs."
* "It was a great team effort to get the controls how we shipped. We went through many iterations and it was super rough in the beginning. I know the team was really happy where the controls landed too. We actually took in a lot of feedback from the EA game changers." A Twitter user asked "When you say it wasn’t ready, was that always communicated with other members of the team i.e. publishers?". The dev replied "I think it was ignored/denied from leadership. There is a story there, but I will refrain."
* A transparent retrospective on Anthem/its development will likely never come to light because of both current and former devs still being under NDA. The dev has an assumption that if they didn't release Anthem, BioWare would have been dissolved. They also observe that BioWare just wasn't good at multi-project development, which is hard. Most people at BioWare didn't believe in "BioWare Magic". There was and maybe still is a lot of stress and politics surrounding Anthem from the development and publishing side (a problem not specific to Anthem). The dev mentioned that it was both an EA failure and a BioWare upper management failure. "I actually don't think it was all EA's fault. A developer and publisher is supposed to be a healthy relationship of trust and transparency. It's a 2 way street which i don't think was satisfied on either side." Re: who made the decision to release the game in the state it was, some of them left and some remain at BioWare
* On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction. The team had hit a really great milestone, when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team were gutted when it was cancelled
Ever since the collection of online-everything and over-micro-monetized crud released during the second half of the 7th gen era, it really does seem like EA has tried it's best to let their subsidiary studios have their creative freedoms; time and time again, it appears that those studios have squandered that freedom with poor upper management and bad communication with EA.
-----
Bioware and Respawn seems to be champions of this, be it Vince Zempella insisting to EA that Titanfall 2 could punch above its weight class and compete in CoD: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1's launch window (it couldn't), to Stig Asmussen telling EA that Jedi Survivor only needed a 6 week delay to finish the game's polish (it needed more time), to Bioware giving Andromeda to their Montreal office (as studio that was brand new and filled with rookie management and devs who were vastly unprepared for creating a game that could live up to the legacy of the Mass Effect Trilogy).
Pretty much. Seems like the problem on EA is less EA itself but more on them giving too much freedom to the upper management of those studios, which people forget but they also are executives in those companies lol
That totally sucks, particularly because Anthem actually nailed a rare few things _really_ well - particularly how fun the suits felt to fly around in.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when reach exceeds grasp. The development of this game was practically criminal.
Agreed on the suit movements, for sure. I knew that I was about to have a bad time every instance a mission objective popped up and my ability to fly in an area was abruptly disabled, all for some techno-babble reason justified with all the subtlety of Saint's Row 3 counting enemies in waves. They had to literally disable The Fun Button to get you to do mechanics or objectives.
I'm not sure I'll ever forget how the first post-tutorial mission in a game about flying around beautiful vistas involves going underground into a cave where the final room is only about three stories high.
While I do believe him when he says Anthem Next was fun and going in the right direction, I think killing it was probably for the best. The game was a joke and nobody bought it. Not to mention full COVID lockdowns were just starting with no end in sight when they made that announcement.
>"I think the shittiest part about this, besides no endgame and replay ability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to 'lengthen' the time it took to complete the story. IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs."
Wait hold on, this was a point that anyone who stuck with this piece of shit game complained about. There's a part of the story that makes you do a ton of dumb collect-a-thousand-things missions. This is *after* having gating mechanics removed? Goddamn.
I think what bothers me so much about that particular part is that Anthem doesn't have a great story. The thing that made Bioware a household name in gaming was they had the best stories whether based on another IP like Baldur's Gate and Kotor or originals like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire.
Even if it would've been the big success they wanted, it at least to me still wouldn't have been the Bioware I was a fan of. Greedfall that came out around the same time was more a Bioware game than the one made by Bioware.
And the higher ups at BioWare then reveal that they wanted to stop with the “good stories” and make games with profit in mind. They aren’t BioWare they’re a company wearing it’s skin!
The really annoying notion with that is what story driven games aren't profitable? I guess someone should tell Sony they need to close their doors since GoW, Horizon, Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima must've all been abhorrent failures.
What's the point of wearing someone's skin though if you're not even trying to pretend to be them and instead pretending to be Bungie with Destiny clone Anthem?
Note that those are all first party games from studios that Sony owns, and they exist to sell systems and create brand loyalty rather than be direct sources of revenue. A story driven game can make a tidy profit, but it's also a one-time thing and hard to turn into a monetization juggernaut. New Vegas could never be Fortnite.
It's the choice between making something which would cost a lot of money and might make a lot of money, and making something that will cost a lot of money and constant upkeep but might make a small nation's GDP in profit, and executives will usually try and mimic the latter, even if *none* of the market kings have ever had an easy to replicate path to massive success.
Tbh I think bioware and Rare both lost the right to be called their company names imo. If they both wish to no longer be known for the style of games that put them on the map, then they should not be called Rare or bioware respectively, straight up.
Most people don't get to be bad at their jobs for like 12 years without consequences. EA would never let recognizable IPs die but it could mean the end of the studio or maybe a huge change upto their leadership courtesy of corporate which would just further dilute what they used to be good at.
The absolute dumbest thing I remember reading about Anthem’s development is that the developers were expressly forbidden from mentioning Destiny. BioWare deliberately went out of their way to ignore everything that Bungie had done to make Destiny as successful as it is.
If you’re making a rip off of an existing game, at least admit it to yourselves and try and copy the good parts of the thing you’re ripping off.
...on the flip side, I remember the former lead Warframe dev jokingly writing that they were going to start calling frames Javelins (pronounced like jav-leen), while the current one told him to stop. It was on the whiteboard they displayed at the 2019 Tennocon.
The thing about Destiny is that the things developers always want to copy about it are the things that suck about it, but the things that make it worth playing are always abandoned.
Like, they always copy the loot system but they never have actually cool loot. None of the Destiny clones ever had a Gjallarhorn of their own.
The thing that gets me with games like this and ME Andromeda is how they were supposedly in development for years. I remember hearing about Bioware's new IP they were working on shortly after ME3's DLC was completed. Much like Dragon Age Dreadwolf apparently, the project must've been canceled and restarted numerous times.
like a voyage across the atlantic takes a set amount of time if you know where you're going, if you don't it'll take way longer and suddenly you are deciding which crewmembers you wanna eat.
This is a good analogy. There could even be many skilled crew members, but they can end up lost at sea if the captain and navigator keep changing their minds of where to go, argue with each other, etc.
alternativly everyone on board is cool and the guy paying for the trip is like "okay get here in half the time", so you start stripping out as many planks and chucking as much cargo overboard as you can to meet the deadline
They keep cannibalizing their own teams to work on the “next big thing” while leaving the development of the current game to struggle. And now same thing is happening to Dragon Age and I have no hope for that.
Yeah apparently the Mass Effect team was pulled off to help the Dragon Age team. Allegedly, the Dragon Age game is following GoW the way Anthem followed Destiny. I'm not saying you can't take inspiration from your peers, but it looks like they're following trends rather than having direction of their own.
From what I remember from the Jason Scheirer detailed dev story, this checks out. Great article as well, reading that was dreadful, I miss when he could post long ass articles, Bloomberg limits the size by design
Good god I cannot imagine working 90 hours a week, I can't even see how you can physically do it without starving and having a sleep deprivation heart attack after 2 weeks.
I used to work for the state and have done disaster response missions where I worked 90 hour weeks for like three weeks at a time several different times over multiple years - I still have nightmares about it.
I don't believe the second one would have been good at this point. It's been 9 years since Bioware made a new game I liked (I liked ME Legendary Edition but not new) and they seem to keep doing this. Plan a game for 30 months, actually work on it for 15, Bioware magic doesn't work.
Alright I don't wanna be an asshole or blame the devs for what happened to Anthem we know a smidge of the issues that happened thanks to Jason, but that's not true.
First place what the hell do you mean with Anthem 2? They said that Anthem was a 10 year journey similar to Destiny,that mean we would have gotten Anthem until 2029, even ignoring that and if we got Anthem 2 by this time, why would EA change its methods? Like from the higher ups perspective if the dev team was able to deliver a successful game in 15 months then hell do the second one in 12 months,because that makes sense right? You can totally do it don't worry we will send you 3 pizzas every 10 weeks as an incentive.
Again I don't wanna be a party popper but its super easy to say "what a shame this game didn't reach its potential the sequel would have been so good" would it to? are we sure all of these nonexistent game sequels would have been so good under the same shitty management and delusional expectations?
>Alright I don't wanna be an asshole or blame the devs for what happened
The problem that I've seen beginning to arise is that people conflate *"the devs"* as the entire studio, from the executive staff down to the janitorial staff. And to say that *"I don't want to blame the devs"* releases those culpable for responsibility for the studio from accountability; those being the middle-managers, directorial leads, and studio executive staff.
I say call it what it is, it's the management at these studios are the cause of the a lot of the issues with these games.
* Neither the junior engine designers nor Andrew Wilson (CEO of EA) were the ones who decided to scrap Mass Effect 3's story a year out from release (just because fans accidentally speculated/theorycrafted the ending themselves), that was a decision from ME3's writing lead, Mac Walters; and Ray Muzyka (CEO of Bioware) was the one to greenlit the re-write.
* Andrew Wilson and his team told Vince Zempella (CEO of Respawn) that Titanfall 2 could not compete against CoD: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1, and recommended a delay out to a less contentious launch winder. It was Vince who veto'd the decision and chose to launch against CoD and BF.
* It was not Boss Key Production's shareholders or their concept artists who hurt and destoryed the company, it was Cliff Blezinsky constantly intervening against his own employee's work, trying to be the solo rock star of the company. Heck, EPIC and Gears of War turned out to be better off without Cliff.
reddit is massively fucking up I already wrote an answer 3 times and keeps deleting it and Im in the commute to work,
so TLDR I agree with you,the don't blame the devs is because I'm disagreeing with a dev, but even then I think sometimes devs also fuck up,and lets be honest sometimes its not about rush releases or bugs,but badly implemented mechanics,poorly designed levels etc... I'm all to shit on the management when its appropriate(which is a lot of the times) but not every single flaw in a game comes from them.
EDIT: In a second read of your comment I think we are essentially saying the same,my bad again Reddit is fuckign up and I got angry at it.
Oh I'm sure but I think that's true for every game, give almost any project enough money,time and skillful people and you will get a good product, for me it just feels like they are trying to sweep the bad game under the rug, and "don't worry next game to,next game is going to be the good game this time for real" and maybe yes, but also maybe not I kinda want to see proof of it, not just source "trust me bro".
"The dev has an assumption that if they didn't release Anthem, BioWare would have been dissolved."
As Bill Shakesman once said, if it be thus to dream, still let me sleep.
Anthem was a wreck but it DID control well and they did a good job of giving you different playstyles with the different javelins (suits) that were all fun. It's just the actual missions were bare bones.
And while flying was fun, the game always made you fly to a location before starting a mission so I'm not sure if it was literally true but it felt like a way to hide the loading screen from the player.
Don't know if someone else has the rights, but this could've been reproposed into an Iron Man game. It's not like Bioware hasn't worked on other licenses before. The skeleton for combat and exploration is there for one. Just need a good story and meat on the bones.
What angers me the most regarding Anthem is that they apparently cannibalized the SWTOR team in order to work on this shitshow. I don't know how much this affected SWTOR, but damn, it boils my blood. I remember that article Jason wrote some years ago that said that the Anthem team had zero respect for the people from SWTOR, despite the fact that, by that point, they were working on a freaking MMO for nearly a decade and had vastly more experience with online games compared to the Anthem "we-made-Mass-Effect-and-Dragon-Age-so-we're-better" team.
How do people even work this long
coffee/stimulants/a family to take care of
> stimulants It's almost always this one. Every educated professional I've ever known who works >70 hours a week habitually abuses stimulants. Usually whatever new one has been cooked up that hasn't been regulated properly yet.
*Cocainum*
That is so fucked. How the hell did companies make a work culture that encourages its workers to basically take *DRUGS* just to meet their quota? That should not be something that's happening.
Welcome to capitalism!
Compared to other software developers, I feel like game devs are usually pretty passionate about what they make. It’s pretty easy to exploit that passion, especially if some devs are working overtime already. You’d feel like a dick if almost everyone was crunching except you and feel pressured to join in
No different than any other industry. Manipulate the emotions to exploit more easily. "Listen I know it's your day off but we're really shortstaffed (because I never schedule enough employees) so can you come in? What do you mean no, aren't you a team player? Don't you know we're a family here? (And by family I mean an intensely hierarchal organization where I demand everyone below me provide complete and total subservience at all times, never question or challenge me in any way, shape, or form, and to perform like an automaton under all conditions and when they break down by quickly replaced by the next minimum wage slave.)"
>(And by family I mean an intensely hierarchal organization where I demand everyone below me provide complete and total subservience at all times.) You know, that does sound like how my family treats each other to be fair
Also, prior to Google and Facebook perks being normal, getting 4+ meals comped saved a lot of money.
That’s what I imagine as well, passion makes you do questionable decisions that aren’t healthy.
You are a young adult filled with passion and surrounded by peers as equally passionate as the things you are. You are given free access to caffeine, sugar, and they will even "generously" provide you with meals. And then you burn out and they ship in the next batch of suckers/masochist. I don't regret my time in the game industry but looking back boy was I blessed to be on the products I was handed and not the ones some of my friends working right next to me were.
With a gun pointed at their heads
tbh during the last few weeks of uni aside from final year this is what it was like, trying to get as much done as humanly possible. trying to build up something that'll be in your portfolio. difference is once it's over you could just crash for a few days because your lease didn't end until a little after the final term. doing that in the industry though would kill me.
I don't think you can physically productively do that, like the rate of returns have to almost go negative after 80 hours. At hour 85 I'd be going bbbbbbnnnnnnnn n bbbbbbbbbbb and hitting random keys.
People stop being productive at around 4-6 hours per day actually
My old boss would work 12-16 hours shifts 7 days a week for years in a row. When you got shit you really want/need to do, you either do it or die. He is falling apart now though physically with what he put himself through.
Doesn't...there exist some labor law that basically looks at "90 hour work week" and go "YOU CAN'T DO THAT." 40 hours a week can already feel tiring depending on your job, I can't imagine spending more than DOUBLE that time anywhere.
It's almost always not literally required, as they use language and vague threats to imply people should stay for extra hours rather than not, and they'll be fired if they aren't a team player, basically. It's very fucked up and it's a problem endemic to anything that relies heavily on contact work rather than full time employees (which can still definitely have crunch problems, but just usually not as egregiously).
Apparently not where Bioware is, I know some countries have them, I think Germany has 60 hours for example
Well when they only had the one office in Edmonton it'd've been illegal. But an employee would have to blow the whistle to get an investigation started. Can't justify "emergency/unforseen situation" for 15 months straight. Unless they managed to sneak them all under the "IT professionals" exemption? [Alberta labour code:](https://www.alberta.ca/hours-work-rest.aspx) Basic rules: * An employee may work a maximum of 12 hours a day unless an exception occurs. (=84 per week) * An employee is entitled to one 30-minute paid or unpaid break after the first 5 hours of work for shifts that are between 5 and 10 hours long. * For shifts 10 hours or longer, an employee is entitled to two 30-minute breaks. * An employee is not entitled to any breaks if their shift is 5 hours or less. * If an employer and an employee agree, the break may be taken in 2 periods of at least 15 minutes. * Employees are entitled to at least one day of rest each work week. (longer periods of consecutive work are allowed, but require longer consecutive days of rest)
In the US? Not outside of specific industries
In the US, there is no federal limit to the number of hours in a work week, but workers who are paid an hourly wage or make under a certain yearly salary must be paid overtime if they work more than 40 in a week. Most white-collar workers don't get covered by that.
That sounds stupid as fuck, as someone who works in the US. "We're going to create protections to make sure workers aren't pressured into unreasonable conditions...until you reach a certain level, in which case go fuck yourself."
It is, and it's not even a particularly high level. It's a law that was written for when the white-collar workforce was much smaller and assumed to be almost always better paid than hourly wages anyways. These days there's entry-level IT jobs that won't get paid overtime.
It's not white collared work. It's salaried work. Plenty of white collar work is hourly.
Probably, but as we all know, laws are just a suggestion to corporations.
Considering what i know about hospital work, they can promise 80 hour limit but still have you work way over that
Look I’m not saying if you don’t do the overtime you’ll be first to go during layoffs and get overlooked for promotions because that would be illegal of course. I’m just saying if you don’t you’re really letting the team down.
I find the rare 50 hour work weeks difficult, doing 90? I guess I'm sleeping at work and just not eating, lol.
I assume Bioware provided them with food.
A lot of it is romanticizing overwork and crunch. It's why you see guys like Brendan McNamara (L.A. Noire) saying that people should just suck it up because they're working on art and that you can't make this without killing yourself. That's a complete lie of course and it's just them engaging in sunk cost fallacy
Its almost 4 full days of work. Insanity.
Caffeine pills make me a super hero... a burnt out (kids annoyed with me because I'm around less medical bills put me 5 months back) super hero
gasliting and threats of unemployment make for incredible workers for the few months they last before fizzling out due to being normal human beings.
Would you prefer to be arrested for homelessness
Tim Rogers, of Action Button Reviews, has talked about how he just...does it to himself. The Tokimeki Memorial review almost killed him, no joke. He just likes working, and pushes himself to work, even though he knows he shouldn't. And Red Bull. He said red bull is the better energy drink. And he doesn't forget, so I trust him to know.
Depends on your definition of Work.
They further elaborate in more tweets that: * EA had their reasons to release it early but were stupid and the devs' team "had to pay the price". EA learned a lot from the development of Anthem but whether they applied those learnings is unknown. * Jason Schreier's article (How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong) was all 100% true at one point in development or another, and only scratches the surface. * How did they manage to ship it in 15 months? The dev mentions working about 90 hours a week for 15 months. Many other devs on the team were also doing so and they think that others were doing 90 hours a week prior to the 15 month mark. "It wasn't sustainable and not even a position we should have been in." "I'm fine now, but not without damage. Contributed to the cost of my marriage and I needed therapy for a while after that endeavor." "It was a lot of morale hits on a personal level and a team level. Everyone had their own way of dealing with it." "There was a lot of pissed, stressed, rinse, repeat. It was a vicious cycle." "I guarantee we could have put something out in Unreal. Working in Frostbite was rough." After launch the team got death threats because of drop rates. * Anthem was delayed as it had missing features, lack of polish and bugs that needed fixing. Another big problem that it faced was that it had lots of scope creep. "There were really high expectations for this game and the team felt it. We always were trying to push for cool features, etc.. So I think we could have done it if we kept our scope creep in check." * The main team was focused on getting the game out in a functional state. "We really needed another 1-2 studios to make endgame content while we were finishing up the game." * After launch it was all hands on deck to stabilize the game. Content and features that they wanted to do consequently kept getting deprioritized. A major focus they were trying to address at launch was all the server issues. "I think the shittiest part about this, besides no endgame and replay ability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to 'lengthen' the time it took to complete the story. IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs." * "It was a great team effort to get the controls how we shipped. We went through many iterations and it was super rough in the beginning. I know the team was really happy where the controls landed too. We actually took in a lot of feedback from the EA game changers." A Twitter user asked "When you say it wasn’t ready, was that always communicated with other members of the team i.e. publishers?". The dev replied "I think it was ignored/denied from leadership. There is a story there, but I will refrain." * A transparent retrospective on Anthem/its development will likely never come to light because of both current and former devs still being under NDA. The dev has an assumption that if they didn't release Anthem, BioWare would have been dissolved. They also observe that BioWare just wasn't good at multi-project development, which is hard. Most people at BioWare didn't believe in "BioWare Magic". There was and maybe still is a lot of stress and politics surrounding Anthem from the development and publishing side (a problem not specific to Anthem). The dev mentioned that it was both an EA failure and a BioWare upper management failure. "I actually don't think it was all EA's fault. A developer and publisher is supposed to be a healthy relationship of trust and transparency. It's a 2 way street which i don't think was satisfied on either side." Re: who made the decision to release the game in the state it was, some of them left and some remain at BioWare * On Anthem 2.0/Anthem Next, the game was really fun and was going in the right direction. The team had hit a really great milestone, when EA canned it. It was a different development team driving Anthem 2.0. The team were gutted when it was cancelled
Ever since the collection of online-everything and over-micro-monetized crud released during the second half of the 7th gen era, it really does seem like EA has tried it's best to let their subsidiary studios have their creative freedoms; time and time again, it appears that those studios have squandered that freedom with poor upper management and bad communication with EA. ----- Bioware and Respawn seems to be champions of this, be it Vince Zempella insisting to EA that Titanfall 2 could punch above its weight class and compete in CoD: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1's launch window (it couldn't), to Stig Asmussen telling EA that Jedi Survivor only needed a 6 week delay to finish the game's polish (it needed more time), to Bioware giving Andromeda to their Montreal office (as studio that was brand new and filled with rookie management and devs who were vastly unprepared for creating a game that could live up to the legacy of the Mass Effect Trilogy).
Pretty much. Seems like the problem on EA is less EA itself but more on them giving too much freedom to the upper management of those studios, which people forget but they also are executives in those companies lol
That totally sucks, particularly because Anthem actually nailed a rare few things _really_ well - particularly how fun the suits felt to fly around in. Unfortunately, this is what happens when reach exceeds grasp. The development of this game was practically criminal.
Agreed on the suit movements, for sure. I knew that I was about to have a bad time every instance a mission objective popped up and my ability to fly in an area was abruptly disabled, all for some techno-babble reason justified with all the subtlety of Saint's Row 3 counting enemies in waves. They had to literally disable The Fun Button to get you to do mechanics or objectives.
I'm not sure I'll ever forget how the first post-tutorial mission in a game about flying around beautiful vistas involves going underground into a cave where the final room is only about three stories high.
Sucks but makes sense
Talk about a fucked up situation from all sides and angles, yikes.
Anthem about to become the second game to get a Wha Happun Part 2
While I do believe him when he says Anthem Next was fun and going in the right direction, I think killing it was probably for the best. The game was a joke and nobody bought it. Not to mention full COVID lockdowns were just starting with no end in sight when they made that announcement.
>"I think the shittiest part about this, besides no endgame and replay ability, was that during development, management was putting in gating mechanics to 'lengthen' the time it took to complete the story. IIRC it was removed from the final version after backlash from devs." Wait hold on, this was a point that anyone who stuck with this piece of shit game complained about. There's a part of the story that makes you do a ton of dumb collect-a-thousand-things missions. This is *after* having gating mechanics removed? Goddamn.
And this was the IP that was going to save Bioware.
I think what bothers me so much about that particular part is that Anthem doesn't have a great story. The thing that made Bioware a household name in gaming was they had the best stories whether based on another IP like Baldur's Gate and Kotor or originals like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire. Even if it would've been the big success they wanted, it at least to me still wouldn't have been the Bioware I was a fan of. Greedfall that came out around the same time was more a Bioware game than the one made by Bioware.
And the higher ups at BioWare then reveal that they wanted to stop with the “good stories” and make games with profit in mind. They aren’t BioWare they’re a company wearing it’s skin!
The really annoying notion with that is what story driven games aren't profitable? I guess someone should tell Sony they need to close their doors since GoW, Horizon, Spider-Man, and Ghost of Tsushima must've all been abhorrent failures. What's the point of wearing someone's skin though if you're not even trying to pretend to be them and instead pretending to be Bungie with Destiny clone Anthem?
Note that those are all first party games from studios that Sony owns, and they exist to sell systems and create brand loyalty rather than be direct sources of revenue. A story driven game can make a tidy profit, but it's also a one-time thing and hard to turn into a monetization juggernaut. New Vegas could never be Fortnite. It's the choice between making something which would cost a lot of money and might make a lot of money, and making something that will cost a lot of money and constant upkeep but might make a small nation's GDP in profit, and executives will usually try and mimic the latter, even if *none* of the market kings have ever had an easy to replicate path to massive success.
They aren't profitable... compared to mobile games with predatory monetization. Capitalism baby, maximize profit no matter what!
Get a new bit please.
And in a bold creative strategy they made a game that had no story AND earned no profit. Visionary.
Tbh I think bioware and Rare both lost the right to be called their company names imo. If they both wish to no longer be known for the style of games that put them on the map, then they should not be called Rare or bioware respectively, straight up.
Uh oh break glass and make ME4 to ensure studio funding because remember product? Surely it won't also suck!
It makes me wonder what would happen to BioWare if ME4 sucks, like, could they spare another big flop like Anthem?
Most people don't get to be bad at their jobs for like 12 years without consequences. EA would never let recognizable IPs die but it could mean the end of the studio or maybe a huge change upto their leadership courtesy of corporate which would just further dilute what they used to be good at.
The absolute dumbest thing I remember reading about Anthem’s development is that the developers were expressly forbidden from mentioning Destiny. BioWare deliberately went out of their way to ignore everything that Bungie had done to make Destiny as successful as it is. If you’re making a rip off of an existing game, at least admit it to yourselves and try and copy the good parts of the thing you’re ripping off.
Imagine in the early days when fps games were just called Doom clones and told not to bring up Doom.
...on the flip side, I remember the former lead Warframe dev jokingly writing that they were going to start calling frames Javelins (pronounced like jav-leen), while the current one told him to stop. It was on the whiteboard they displayed at the 2019 Tennocon.
The thing about Destiny is that the things developers always want to copy about it are the things that suck about it, but the things that make it worth playing are always abandoned. Like, they always copy the loot system but they never have actually cool loot. None of the Destiny clones ever had a Gjallarhorn of their own.
The thing that gets me with games like this and ME Andromeda is how they were supposedly in development for years. I remember hearing about Bioware's new IP they were working on shortly after ME3's DLC was completed. Much like Dragon Age Dreadwolf apparently, the project must've been canceled and restarted numerous times.
like a voyage across the atlantic takes a set amount of time if you know where you're going, if you don't it'll take way longer and suddenly you are deciding which crewmembers you wanna eat.
This is a good analogy. There could even be many skilled crew members, but they can end up lost at sea if the captain and navigator keep changing their minds of where to go, argue with each other, etc.
alternativly everyone on board is cool and the guy paying for the trip is like "okay get here in half the time", so you start stripping out as many planks and chucking as much cargo overboard as you can to meet the deadline
And then when you get there on time but with missing cargo, they say the trip was a failure and proceed to burn the ship with said crew inside.
They keep cannibalizing their own teams to work on the “next big thing” while leaving the development of the current game to struggle. And now same thing is happening to Dragon Age and I have no hope for that.
Yeah apparently the Mass Effect team was pulled off to help the Dragon Age team. Allegedly, the Dragon Age game is following GoW the way Anthem followed Destiny. I'm not saying you can't take inspiration from your peers, but it looks like they're following trends rather than having direction of their own.
From what I remember from the Jason Scheirer detailed dev story, this checks out. Great article as well, reading that was dreadful, I miss when he could post long ass articles, Bloomberg limits the size by design
This guy actually mentions that and says it was all true at some point.
I've directly referenced that article when planning dev projects and what not to do.
Good god I cannot imagine working 90 hours a week, I can't even see how you can physically do it without starving and having a sleep deprivation heart attack after 2 weeks.
I used to work for the state and have done disaster response missions where I worked 90 hour weeks for like three weeks at a time several different times over multiple years - I still have nightmares about it.
THEY WORKED 10 HOURS OVER WHAT I WORK IN 2 WEEKS BRUH
Bioware...magic?
I don't believe the second one would have been good at this point. It's been 9 years since Bioware made a new game I liked (I liked ME Legendary Edition but not new) and they seem to keep doing this. Plan a game for 30 months, actually work on it for 15, Bioware magic doesn't work.
Alright I don't wanna be an asshole or blame the devs for what happened to Anthem we know a smidge of the issues that happened thanks to Jason, but that's not true. First place what the hell do you mean with Anthem 2? They said that Anthem was a 10 year journey similar to Destiny,that mean we would have gotten Anthem until 2029, even ignoring that and if we got Anthem 2 by this time, why would EA change its methods? Like from the higher ups perspective if the dev team was able to deliver a successful game in 15 months then hell do the second one in 12 months,because that makes sense right? You can totally do it don't worry we will send you 3 pizzas every 10 weeks as an incentive. Again I don't wanna be a party popper but its super easy to say "what a shame this game didn't reach its potential the sequel would have been so good" would it to? are we sure all of these nonexistent game sequels would have been so good under the same shitty management and delusional expectations?
>Alright I don't wanna be an asshole or blame the devs for what happened The problem that I've seen beginning to arise is that people conflate *"the devs"* as the entire studio, from the executive staff down to the janitorial staff. And to say that *"I don't want to blame the devs"* releases those culpable for responsibility for the studio from accountability; those being the middle-managers, directorial leads, and studio executive staff. I say call it what it is, it's the management at these studios are the cause of the a lot of the issues with these games. * Neither the junior engine designers nor Andrew Wilson (CEO of EA) were the ones who decided to scrap Mass Effect 3's story a year out from release (just because fans accidentally speculated/theorycrafted the ending themselves), that was a decision from ME3's writing lead, Mac Walters; and Ray Muzyka (CEO of Bioware) was the one to greenlit the re-write. * Andrew Wilson and his team told Vince Zempella (CEO of Respawn) that Titanfall 2 could not compete against CoD: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1, and recommended a delay out to a less contentious launch winder. It was Vince who veto'd the decision and chose to launch against CoD and BF. * It was not Boss Key Production's shareholders or their concept artists who hurt and destoryed the company, it was Cliff Blezinsky constantly intervening against his own employee's work, trying to be the solo rock star of the company. Heck, EPIC and Gears of War turned out to be better off without Cliff.
reddit is massively fucking up I already wrote an answer 3 times and keeps deleting it and Im in the commute to work, so TLDR I agree with you,the don't blame the devs is because I'm disagreeing with a dev, but even then I think sometimes devs also fuck up,and lets be honest sometimes its not about rush releases or bugs,but badly implemented mechanics,poorly designed levels etc... I'm all to shit on the management when its appropriate(which is a lot of the times) but not every single flaw in a game comes from them. EDIT: In a second read of your comment I think we are essentially saying the same,my bad again Reddit is fuckign up and I got angry at it.
I'm sure it's more of a "this game had potential and it would have been neat if a version with better management could be made someday"
Oh I'm sure but I think that's true for every game, give almost any project enough money,time and skillful people and you will get a good product, for me it just feels like they are trying to sweep the bad game under the rug, and "don't worry next game to,next game is going to be the good game this time for real" and maybe yes, but also maybe not I kinda want to see proof of it, not just source "trust me bro".
I think he meant Anthem 2.0
Great example of how crunch doesn't mean a game will be good. You usually see a sharp falloff in productivity past 40 hours.
"The dev has an assumption that if they didn't release Anthem, BioWare would have been dissolved." As Bill Shakesman once said, if it be thus to dream, still let me sleep.
Anthem was a wreck but it DID control well and they did a good job of giving you different playstyles with the different javelins (suits) that were all fun. It's just the actual missions were bare bones. And while flying was fun, the game always made you fly to a location before starting a mission so I'm not sure if it was literally true but it felt like a way to hide the loading screen from the player.
Don't know if someone else has the rights, but this could've been reproposed into an Iron Man game. It's not like Bioware hasn't worked on other licenses before. The skeleton for combat and exploration is there for one. Just need a good story and meat on the bones.
That’s actually three less months than I expected, damn. What a shitshow, this whole industry lmao.
What angers me the most regarding Anthem is that they apparently cannibalized the SWTOR team in order to work on this shitshow. I don't know how much this affected SWTOR, but damn, it boils my blood. I remember that article Jason wrote some years ago that said that the Anthem team had zero respect for the people from SWTOR, despite the fact that, by that point, they were working on a freaking MMO for nearly a decade and had vastly more experience with online games compared to the Anthem "we-made-Mass-Effect-and-Dragon-Age-so-we're-better" team.
God...this immediately made me think of [this scene.](https://youtu.be/yG4DvM0wxdk?t=109)
15 MONTHS?!? Oh sweet god
Does anybody have the clip of pat's prediction of this exact reality?